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design-politics:
how buildings mean

lawrence J. vale

         19th century Prussian general Carl von 
Clausewitz famously stated that “War is the 
continuation of politics by other means.”1 The 
same might be said about the architecture of public 
buildings. But if public architecture is also an 
extension of politics by other means, what—more 
precisely—are those means?
       Philosopher Nelson Goodman is among the 
few to pose this question directly. In his essay “How 
Buildings Mean,”2 Goodman rightly points out 
that we must consider the prior question of how 
a particular work of architecture conveys meaning 
before we are able to address the issue of what the 
building may mean. Goodman, writing in the late 
1980s while based at Harvard during the latter part 
of his career, thereby inserted himself in a debate 
starting to percolate in the more rarified precincts 
of architectural education—such as the Harvard 
Graduate School of Design—about the extent that 
architecture constituted an autonomous practice. In 
his essay, Goodman aims to identify the categories 
of meaning that the built environment may convey 
as well as to elucidate the mechanisms by which 
these meanings are transmitted. This sort of analysis 
is crucial for understanding the boundary between 
properties that are intrinsic to works of architecture 
and those properties ascribed to architecture that 
are central to its reception in a politically-driven 
world.



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      In this paper, I consider both the strengths of Goodman’s formulation and 
its limitations–as viewed three decades later in an era when digital media 
have dramatically reoriented the ways that architecture is both presented 
and represented. The enhanced attention to the role of media makes it 
increasingly difficult to sustain much practical sense of architecture as an 
autonomous or even quasi-autonomous practice. Rather—in an era of 
programmable facades, highly-charged urban contexts, and countervailing 
artistic interventions and augmentations—it seems increasingly impossible 
to isolate Goodman’s ideas about “denotation,” “exemplification,” 
“metaphorical expression,” and “mediated reference” from a building’s 
political reception. The result, I argue, is a kind of conjoined design-
politics. In what follows, I explore the power of that design-politics 
hyphen through a set of examples that range from the Lincoln Memorial3 
to Donald Trump’s hotels.

Goodman’s Ideas about Architectural Meaning: An Example

Denotation
     The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Figure 1) provides an 
especially good example of Goodman’s first type of meaning—denotation—
because it is, literally, full of texts. In this sense, its meanings are intended 
to be read directly, at least for those who can read English and Roman 
numerals. The entablature and upper setback of the building contain 
carved names of the forty-eight contiguous states that comprised the 
United States at the time construction of the Memorial finished in 1922. 
(Awkwardly, but understandably, a separate plaque in front of the structure 
discontiguously adds Alaska and Hawai’i, which were added as states only 
in 1959.) Continuing the denotative content, the building façades feature 
a total of thirty-six columns—one pillar for each of the states in the union 
in 1865 at the close of the Civil War. Through the deployment of these 
columns, the states of the union that Lincoln saved directly structure the 
proportions of the building—twelve on the long sides, eight on the short 
sides (That adds up to forty but the corner columns are seen from two 
sides, so that is why it totals thirty-six.)
     The denotation continues on the inner walls of the building, with 
parts of two Lincoln speeches literally carved into stone. Importantly, the 
two speeches chosen—the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural 
Address—are both centered on the role of Lincoln as preserver of the 
union of states. By contrast, architect Henry Bacon (and, presumably, 
his clients) chose not to highlight other famous texts that may well have 
carried far greater political or policy significance, such as the Emancipation 



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Proclamation. The Civil War may well have been 
fought over the future of a southern slave economy, 
but the Lincoln Memorial—at least in its denotative 
sense—was centered on reminders of union, not on 
freeing slaves.

Metaphorical Expression
The Lincoln Memorial also nicely conveys 
Goodman’s second type of meaning—the notion of 
metaphorical expression. The building is not just a 
rectangular object with columns, but a metaphorical 
temple, with Lincoln as a seated deity. Here, a 
public building conveys meaning because of widely 
shared cultural notions (at least in Western culture) 
about Greco-Roman practices of deification and 
worship. And just in case the metaphor might be 
lost on some visitors, architect Bacon and his team 
also made use of Goodman’s first type of meaning—
denotation—by carving a more literal reminder 
just above Lincoln’s head: “In this temple, as in the 
hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, 
the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined 
forever.” We are thereby shown a metaphorical 
shrine and temple, and also reminded about what 
we are seeing.

Exemplification
     The Lincoln Memorial is also a prime site for 

the building 
is not just a 

rectangular 
object with 

columns, but a 
metaphorical 

temple

“

”

figure 1: 

lincoln memorial



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observing Goodman’s third mechanism of meaning: exemplification. 
Goodman observes that every work of architecture exemplifies certain of 
its properties in ways that draw particular attention. In the case of this 
Memorial, it is clear that the building serves as the termination of an axis, 
and emphasizes bilateral symmetry, both as a building and as a work of 
urban design. As a composition, the building itself exemplifies a clear 
pattern of solid-void-solid, as a way to draw attention to the statue of 
Lincoln at the center. And, at the same time, the form of the building 
emphasizes the gleaming white materiality of its marble, in contrast with 
the darker interior.

Mediated Reference
      Finally, the Lincoln Memorial helps us understand Goodman’s fourth 
type of architectural meaning—what he terms a mediated reference. 
Here, beyond the notion of metaphor, the building asks those who view 
it to associate it with broader conceptual references—notions that could 
be about such things as worship, democracy, freedom, or unification. 
Construction of the building had been controversial—from lingering 
sectional disputes about the role of Lincoln to the idea of constructing 
this temple on a former swamp— so project proponents needed to do 
everything possible to remind visitors about the ideals of unification and 
unity. They did so in 1923 by having the American Institute of Architects 
use the building to stage a pageant honoring Henry Bacon, keeping the 
focus on neoclassical design and worshipful display.
      A decade and a half later, however, the mediated reference of this 
monument began to shift. In 1939, famed African-American contralto 
Marian Anderson was denied the opportunity to perform at Washington 
DC’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, 
due to her race.4 At the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, secretary of the 
interior Harold Ickes arranged for Anderson to sing instead from the steps 
of the Lincoln Memorial. A mixed-race audience of 75,000 people showed 
up. The mediated reference altered again on August 28, 1963, when the 
building served as the terminal focal point of the March on Washington, 
(Figure 2)one hundred years after Lincoln had signed the emancipation 
proclamation. Marian Anderson began the program by leading the singing 
of the National Anthem. Memorializing the events of the day and adding 
to the mediated reference of the building itself, the federal government 
authorized placement of a carved stone added on the platform from which 
King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” Speech. In this way, the mediated 
reference had shifted from Saving the Union to Securing Civil Rights. In 



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its late-20th-century 
messaging, the 
building was less 
about political union 
than about the 
pursuit of racial and 
economic equality. 
The metaphor was 
still that of a temple 
and its god, but 
now Lincoln was to 
be deified for other 
reasons. 
      In 1968, the Lincoln Memorial consolidated 
its relationship with Martin Luther King, when 
King’s Poor People’s Campaign was granted a 
permit to construct Resurrection City adjacent to 
the memorial. In this way, the mediated reference 
of the building as a representation of both civil 
rights and economic rights reached full fruition. 
It was thus no surprise that Barack Obama chose 
to celebrate part of his inauguration in 2009 at the 
Lincoln Memorial.

Beyond Goodman’s Quartet of Meaning Types

Clearly, the notion of a mediated reference starts 
to take the meaning of a building into a larger 
realm of applied ideas, more so than do notions 
of denotation, metaphor, or exemplification. 
Yet Goodman is still content to view mediated 
references as part of the way that buildings mean 
as works of architecture. That said, he also readily 
acknowledges that buildings may also have non-
architectural meanings—things that he considers to 
be more arbitrary, with no intrinsic connection to 
design. Goodman writes:

A building of any design may come to stand 
for some of its causes or effects, or for some 

 
the building 
asks those 
who view it 

to associate 
with broader 

conceptual 
references

“

”

figure 2: 

Lincoln memorial, 1963



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historical event that occurred in it or on its site, or for its designated 
use; any abattoir may symbolize slaughter, and any mausoleum, 
death; and a costly county courthouse may symbolize extravagance. 
To mean in such a way is not thereby to function as an architectural 
work.5

      Applied to my example of the Lincoln Memorial, there still seems 
good reason to attach the mediated reference label—whether “Union” or 
“Civil Rights”—to the building itself, since the associations are clearly 
not arbitrary. Still, it is possible to imagine other events happening on 
the site—a plane crash, say, or a murder—that would, indeed, bear no 
relation to the Memorial’s meaning as a work of architecture. Goodman—
presumably prodded by his nearby colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate 
School of Design—wanted to cling to the possibility of an autonomous 
realm for architecture, or at least to lay claim to what MIT architectural 
historian Stanford Anderson first called “semiautonomy” and later “quasi-
autonomy.”6 But, increasingly, quasi-autonomy just leaves me queasy.
      We now seem clearly in a world of queasy autonomy, one where 
the public and the media insist that public buildings be seen as inhabited 
places and as parts of cities. This may understandably threaten the 
professional self-esteem of some designers, especially if they expect their 
work to communicate their own design intentions. Yet we are long past 
any era where architects can hope to control the received meaning of their 
designs. We are in a world where public buildings are experienced not 
just as objects but as productive processes engaged with human labor, 
material supply chains, financial tradeoffs, and community impacts. It 
seems increasingly harder to preserve a separate realm of meanings that are 
intrinsic to architecture qua architecture, separate from some presumed 
set of overlaid meanings that are somehow non-architectural. Especially if 
one looks at buildings at the scale of urban design, this implicates them in 
their surroundings and, accordingly, asks us to consider ways to account 
for their associated meanings.
       Increasingly, I argue, the power of what Goodman would consider 
“non-architectural meanings” has become so predominant that there is 
little practical value in declaring them to be non-architectural. In short, just 
as the boundaries between architectural and non-architectural meaning are 
harder to maintain, so too it is harder to maintain a separation between 
the world of design and the world of politics. Instead, especially with the 
burgeoning of digital media in the three decades since Goodman tried to set 
categories and boundaries for ”how buildings mean,” all public buildings 
have become what I have previously termed “mediated monuments.”7 Such 



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public buildings are inseparable from the media 
campaigns conducted to construct (and constrict) 
their interpretation.
       In what follows, I will take Nelson Goodman on 
something of a world tour in search of what he may 
have missed. I will stick with his four terms, but 
probe how they may be altered by externally imposed 
agendas. Building from Goodman’s nomenclature, 
this means that denotative meaning can now be 
temporarily—or permanently—annotated with 
additional texts, and thereby altered. It means that 
the expression of metaphors may stray far from 
the positive associations predicted by architects. 
It means that buildings may exemplify certain 
properties, but that the aesthetics of these properties 
are increasingly inextricable from political economy. 
Finally, taking Goodman forward means that, 
with burgeoning forms of new media, mediated 
references proliferate and shift. We can see this even 
in the Lincoln Memorial, depending on how we 
view it. Seen obliquely from above on a summer’s 
day, the monument may seem a forested object 
rather than a temple at the end of an axis reminding 
us about civil rights. Or, if one looks beyond the 
Memorial to the northwest, we see yet a different 
context. Instead of locating Memorial within the 
artifice of Washington D.C. with its Mall and its 
height limitations, we are confronted with broader 
realm of capitalist investment that has jumped 
the Potomac to build high-rises in less restrictive 
northern Virginia, Amazon’s future new hub. The 
meaning of buildings clearly varies depending on 
the viewpoint of the observer, and the scale of 
environment being observed.

Beyond Goodman, Toward Design-Politics

       Taken together, I am arguing for a convergence 
of design and politics, and propose that they be 
conjoined by a hyphen. Seen this way, how buildings 

Goodman [...] 
wanted to cling 

to  cling to the 
possibility of 

an autonomous 
realm for 

architecture 
[...]  but, 

increasingly, 
quasi-

autonomous 
architecture 

just leaves me 
queasy

“

”



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mean is inextricably linked to what, why, and where buildings mean. We 
can begin by taking on Goodman’s notion of meaning by denotation. 
Once denotation gets tied in with marketing, toponymic alteration (aka 
name-changing), and annotation, the denotation gets engulfed by its 
design-politics.

Denotation Gets Trumped
      One prominent place to start is with Chicago’s Trump International 
Hotel and Tower, the city’s second tallest building—even if this is a place 
that would initially seem to have little to offer students of Goodmanian 
denotation. When first opened, in 2008, the building appeared as a vast 
composition of soaring blue glass, with minimal signage. But in 2014, 6 
years after completion, the Trump Organization added five 20’ tall letters 
spelling out T-R-U-M-P 141-feet wide, lit at night with LED fixtures 
(Figure 3). The designers located this lettering 200 feet above street level 
for maximum urban visibility at a distance. Initially proposed to cover 
3,600 sq. ft., Chicago’s planning and development department insisted 
that it be down-sized by 20 percent, still leaving it at 2,891 sq. ft. A pre-
presidential Donald Trump assured Chicago Tribune architecture critic 
Blair Kamin that the backlit LED lighting “will be more subtle”–to which 
Kamin responded: “as subtle as Godzilla.”8 At night, the signage stands 
out not just as the terminus of north-south streets, but as the dominant 
presence of the east-west view along the Chicago River. Trump, apparently 
a scholar of architecture and of philosophy, is clearly into deal-making 
dialogue with Nelson Goodman when he commented that the sign is “part 
of the architecture of the building.” He also knowingly enters into the 
realm of semiotics when he adds that “the people in the building” (who 
of course are the only ones who don’t actually have to look at the signage) 
“love it as an identifier.”9 Trump told an interviewer that he expected the 
sign to become an important part of the cultural landscape of Chicago 
in the manner of the Hollywood sign.10 Importantly for Trump, the sign 
covers part of the building occupied by air conditioning vents and other 
mechanicals, so it doesn’t restrict views or revenues from interior space.  
That, too, is part of the building’s design-politics.
       In gaining its new signage, Trump’s eponymous Chicago tower is, 
arguably, now not the same building. Its new denotative layer, though, 
adds more than mere explanatory lettering; it also adds a new kind of 
exemplified property, and it shifts the mediated reference of the work, 
linking it to a global brand associated with ostentation. And, in both the 
run-up to the 2016 presidential election and its presidential aftermath, 



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the billboard-bold presence of the Trump name on 
the city’s most storied skyline could not help but 
be polarizing. Any effort to analyze this edifice as 
merely a tall structure of glass and steel, devoid 
of other associations, now seems fruitless—and 
certainly bears little relationship to how the 
building is received on the ground. It is also another 
reminder that buildings exist as urban artifacts not 
just as isolated structures. In urban design terms, 
this one does more than terminate an axial vista; it 
trumps it.
       Chicago’s Zoning Committee belatedly realized 
what it had inadvertently 
permitted, and duly 
established a “Chicago 
River Corridor Special Sign 
District.”11 Still, this did 
nothing to undo the design-
politics of denotation that 
had already been allowed to 
occur. The new ordinance 
just meant that TRUMP will 
have no future competition 
for visual attention.
       The chief recourse has 
come via the work of artists. One such interpretive 
designer simply de-pixilated the first letter--
removing the ‘T’ to alter the meaning. Another 
artist sought a permit to float a series of gilded 
pig-shaped balloons, strategically aligned, as new 
form of editorial erasure.12 Other editing (and 
editorializing) photoshoppers proposed a quick 
demise for the structure as a whole.13
      Following Trump’s election as president, the 
denotative meaning of his eponymous structures 
underwent pointed alteration in some locales. In 
2018, the majority owner of the Trump Ocean Club 
in Panama City had the TRUMP part of the name 
removed, and then grandly performed an anti-
fascist song in the lobby to mark the occasion.14 In 

figure 3: 

Trump  International 
Hotel and Tower 



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terms of shifting the scope of Goodman’s notion of “denotation,” perhaps 
the most sustained commentary has come from video projection artist 
Robin Bell, who has been annotating Trump properties in both New York 
and Washington, DC.
       On the evening of August 7, 2017—one week after reports surfaced 
that special counsel Robert Mueller had impaneled a grand jury as part 
of his investigation into Russian interference with the election and any 
possible collusion with Trump campaign staffers—Bell projected a huge 
Russian flag onto the street-facing front of the TRUMP SOHO property. 
In turn, the middle blue stripe of the flag was annotated with a sequence 
of matter-of-fact advertisements in English and Russian: “Follow the 
Money”—“Laundering Services Available”—“Happy to help, Bro!,” along 
with an image of Vladimir Putin. Accompanying this, a retinue of five 
uniformed militarized marchers in red hats and mock Russian Army garb 
strode toward the building to the strains of the Russian national anthem. 
A projection project that lasted less than 15 minutes in real time quickly 
went viral on social media posted by onlookers, leading to widespread 
coverage on everything from the New York Daily News to Huffington Post 
to Business Insider to Artnet.com.15 The Trump Soho hotel would never be 
the same. By December, the hotel was renamed The Dominick.16
     Bell’s most publicized work has happened in Washington, DC. At 
the Trump International Hotel, a building with a long history of shifting 
denotation and meanings. Taller than either the Washington Cathedral or 
the U.S. Capitol, the Old Post Office and Clock Tower along Pennsylvania 
Avenue—originally completed in 1899—clearly appealed to the Trump 
Organization. Shortly before Trump entered the presidential race, his 
company won the right to redevelop the Old Post Office site as a luxury 
hotel. In 2016, they put up a massive construction sign in front of the 
building that echoed the coloration of the campaign bumper sticker and 
read “Trump: Coming 2016.”17 The Trump International Hotel opened 
shortly after Trump was elected president in 2016, and Robin Bell was 
quickly on the scene to annotate its façade using video projections from a 
truck parked just across the street, generating substantial press coverage in 
such outlets as CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles 
Times.18
       As legal challenges arose regarding the issue of whether profits from 
the hotel violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution,19 Bell’s 
annotation elided Goodman’s notion of denotation with other modes 
of meaning, especially mediated references. The post-election backlash 
entered the realm of design-politics though efforts to turn the building 



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into a meme about corruption: “Pay Trump Bribes 
Here” and “Emoluments Welcome” featured an 
arrow pointing to the hotel’s arched entrance. At 
the same time, through a new form of denotation, 
the installation sought to remind the public about 
the actual text of the emoluments clause.
       Bell also flashed façade dialogues that engaged 
other emergent news items, including proposed bans 
on certain terms at the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention such as “diversity” “entitlement,” 
“fetus” “transgender” and “science-based.”20 On 
another occasion, he annotated the headquarters 
of the nearby Environmental Protection Agency 
with a warning: “Don’t let a climate denier take 
over the EPA.” In addition, Bell annotated the 
Department of Justice building with an image of 
Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a Klansman, with 
an illuminated “#SESSIONSMUSTGO.”21

The Politics of Metaphors
       Next, it is worth examining how Goodman’s 
ideas about metaphorical expression are also 
inextricable from the politics embedded in such 
metaphors. The messages may not be as angry or 
partisan as the Trumpian annotations, 
but metaphors, too, intertwine design 
with politics. Metaphors are not neutral; 
classic phrases such as “A Man’s Home 
Is His Castle,” are famously gendered. 
Since at least the early 17th century, 
this notion has been part of English 
Common Law, later transmitted to the 
United States, where it conveyed the 
right to forbid entry. This has been used 
as a way to assert individualism and 
anti-government views. Another image, 
from a promotional booklet produced 
by the National Association of Real 
Estate Boards in 1922, (Figure 4) underscores 
the ways that home-as-castle is a deeply gendered 

Bell’s 
annotation 

elided 
Goodman’s 

notion of 
denotation with 

other modes 
of meaning, 
especially 

mediated 
references.

“

Figure 4: Home Owning 
Breeds Real Men



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notion, rooted in differentials in power and access to resources.22
      This is not “man” as in “mankind”—rather, as explained here, 
“Home owning breeds REAL men”—"It is what puts the MAN back in 
MANHOOD”. Such metaphors mean not just as works of architecture 
but as acts of politics.
      Sometimes the metaphor has less serious overtones, as in the notion 
of Hotel as Palace. There are places named Palace Hotel across the world, 
often in cities long past ties to any actual royal rule. The opportunity to 
be temporary royalty may be little more than a frivolity of the wealthy, 
yet it may reveal deep-seated anxieties or jealousies or, alternatively, just 
an exaggerated sense of self-worth. More prosaically, in suburban Boston 
during the 1980s the architect Robert A.M. Stern fancified a postmodern 
speculative office building into a faux-Renaissance palace. It is really no 
more than a mini office park in an auto-dominated zone of malls, multi-
lane highways, and vast parking lots; inside is no palace. Still, Stern and the 
developers correctly deduced that it would be possible to market the palace 
metaphor more than the reality.

The Politics of Exemplification

       Turning next to the design-politics of exemplification it is also clear 
that architectural properties—even basic constitutive issues such as height, 
color, materials, and symmetry that very much seem to be confinable to 
the realm of aesthetics—are nonetheless more complex socio-cultural 
products and, therefore, are embedded in politics. Consider the long-
standing aim to construct tall buildings as an index of power. It is certainly 
possible to isolate the aesthetics of a building as a tall shape from any 
other of its properties, and to see such buildings, in Goodman’s terms, as 
exemplifying the property of height. It is also true that some buildings are 
made taller in order to convey that property. But height-mongering has an 
agenda; the ‘how’ of its meaning seems increasingly inseparable from the 
‘why’ and ‘where’ of its meaning.

The Design-Politics of Height
       The height of buildings, throughout the history of architecture, 
has been inseparable from its institutional presence, whether as funerary 
pyramids or as church spires, mosque minarets, victory arches and columns 
or capitol domes. Especially since the late 19th century, with enhanced 
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and competitive phenomenon.
       Even so, the competitive design-politics of 
tall buildings began much earlier. Bruges boasted 
an early non-religious tall building as early as 1240, 
an observation tower constructed on top of the 
market building, which included spaces serving 
the city’s major cloth industry 
and the municipal archives. An 
octagonal part added was added 
in the 1480s, bringing the tower 
to 83m (272 feet), and, with its 
former wooden spire, it used to 
be even taller—354 feet (Figure 
5).
       The height was clearly about 
conveying the economic power 
of Bruges. In other words, the 
exemplification was not just 
about the physical properties of its tower and spire, 
but about the city leadership seeking to exemplify 
(and thereby market) its financial prowess. At the 
same time, it means through metaphor, by serving 
as a prototypical “cathedral of commerce.”
       Sometimes, such marketing served primarily 
internal domestic purposes but sometimes the 
visual statement was intended to be understood 
internationally. Spiro Kostof notes that drawings 
from Gustave Eiffel’s office showed height of his 
famous tower as, quite consciously, larger than 
adding together Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, 
and the Statue of Liberty. It also mattered that it 
eclipsed the Washington Monument as tallest 
manmade structure in the world (and almost 
doubled it).23
Until 1889, New York’s the spire of Trinity Church 
was that city’s highest structure, though it faced 
competition throughout the 1870s and 1880s as 
the Empire State’s media struck back. An irrational 
obsession over building height along New York’s 
Newspaper Row (with towers all eclipsing the 

figure  5:

bruges market 
square tower



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adjacent City Hall) led to protracted battle among the New York Times, the 
Tribune, the Sun and Pulitzer’s World. By 1909, however, the Metropolitan 
Life Insurance Tower outdid both church and press and, at 700 feet, 
became the tallest occupied building in the world. With a 50-story tower 
on top of 11-story base it resembled the campanile of St. Mark's in Venice. 
The tower also featured a clock that was visible a mile away and was topped 
by a beacon: “the light that never fails.” As a company pamphlet put it, 
“High and lofty, like a great sentinel keeping watch over the millions of 
policy holders and marking the fast-fleeting minutes of life, stands the 
Tower.” Geographer Mona Domosh explains that the tower conveyed 
“a civic as well as a commercial message,” revealing the new economic 
power and prestige of insurance companies. Life insurance, the product of 
19th-century prosperity and the availability of a new immigrant market, 
helped calm a family’s fears that its breadwinner might die young.24 The 
multivalence of meanings for tall buildings continued to develop with 
completion of New York’s Woolworth Building in 1913. Not just content 
to express the fact that it was the world’s tallest building, it needed the 
additional “Cathedral of Commerce” moniker to stake a metaphorical 
claim as well. Church and state stood recombined in a spire that conveyed 
capitalist triumph.
       Sometimes, though, the use of exemplification and metaphor in tall 
building has taken more traditional forms. The Chicago Temple, designed 
by Holabird and Roche in 1924, is a United Methodist church on top of 
skyscraper. It was the tallest building in Chicago from 1924-1930. And, 
at 29 stories and 568 feet, it remains the tallest church building in the 
world (still outdoing the Côte d’Ivoire’s Yamoussoukro basilica, which 
soars a mere 489 feet).25 Two U.S. states—Nebraska and Louisiana—have 
skyscrapers as their capitols, but these were exceptions to the growing 
subjugation of government to private corporate towers.
       Other planned towers participated into geo-political competition. The 
Russian communists proposed a mammoth Palace of the Soviets in the 
1930s, intended to overshadow both the past achievements of the adjacent 
Kremlin and to handily out-do America’s Empire State Building. The project 
remained unbuilt. Elsewhere, the use of building height as an extension of 
international political tension reached a particularly memorable moment 
in the urban staging of the national pavilions of rival powers at the 1937 
Paris World’s Fair. Here, arrayed across a grand court constructed adjacent 
to the Eiffel Tower, the German pavilion was allocated a site immediately 
opposite the spot offered to the Soviet Union. In his rather self-serving 
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revealed the true 
d e s i g n - p o l i t i c s 
impulse behind 
his design for the 
German side of 
the urbanistic 
c o n f r o n t a t i o n . 
“While looking 
over the site in 
Paris,” Speer writes 
with a degree of 
implausibility, “I by 
chance stumbled into a room containing the secret 
sketch of the Soviet pavilion;” sculpted figures 
33’ tall striding toward the German pavilion. “I 
therefore designed a cubic mass, also elevated on 
stout pillars, which seemed to be checking this 
onslaught, while from the cornice of my tower an 
eagle with the swastika in its claws looked down on 
the Russian sculptures.”26  (Figure 6)
     During the early years of the Cold War, Stalin 
proposed a series of large towers intended to house 
(and thereby highlight) a series of non-capitalist 
achievements, such as universities. Clearly, 
building heights had become not just a matter of 
an exemplified architectural property but a tool 
for geopolitical competition—a way for Russians 
to contend with the Americans at their own game. 
In that context, the specter of a much-discussed 
Trump Tower in Moscow, whether constructed 
from partnership or collusion, would have carried 
an additional layer of import.
      Overall, though, the design-politics of 
skyscrapers has long since shifted away from either 
an intra-American or Cold War enterprise, and 
long since become an international phenomenon. 
Cities in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia have 
put national, and often nationalist, stakes into the 
ground through aspirations to build tallest. Then, 
before “peak oil” might come to pass, Middle 

   Clearly, 
building heights 

had become 
not just a 

matter of an 
exemplified 

architectural 
property but 

a tool for 
geopolitical 
competition

“

”

figure 6: postcard, 
1937 Paris Exposition



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Easterners joined the game with peaks of their own. Dubai’s leadership 
willfully invented a high-rise corridor, culminating with the world’s 
tallest building in 2010, standing 828 meters (2716 feet). When under 
construction, it was known as Burj Dubai to highlight its location—even as 
Dubai faced considerable economic difficulties. But at the opening, which 
was timed to coincide with the 4th anniversary of Sheikh Mohammed bin 
Rashed al-Maktoum’s rule in Dubai, the name was announced as the Burj 
Khalifa, in honor of the emir of its neighbor and rival, Abu Dhabi, which 
had lent money to cover Dubai’s debts.27 So, in Goodman’s terms, the 
Burj does indeed exemplify height, but renaming Dubai’s apex for an Abu 
Dhabi emir also reveals the heights of chutzpah—though I doubt that was 
the word they used to describe it.
       By the early 2020s, the home of the world’s tallest building—intended 
to rise at least 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) will likely have migrated to Saudi 
Arabia, another place seeking the global recognition for its Kingdom in a 
manner that is more visible—and visualizable—than hidden oil reserves.

The Design-Politics of Color
       If the architectural property of height also exemplifies politics, so 
too does the property of color, especially if that color can be strategically 
manipulated. Increasingly, whether through interior lighting or through 
projections, architectural faÇades have become re-programmable. Buildings 
are often lit to commemorate particular holidays or sports facilities, but 
sometimes the use of color can deliberately carry a design-politics. As one 
example, following the tragic shooting of Coptic Christian pilgrims near 
Cairo in May 2017, the Mayor of Tel Aviv honored the victims by lighting 
the Tel Aviv municipal building in the colors of the Egyptian flag. This 
act of symbolic solidarity action was repeated in November, following 
an attack that killed more than two hundred worshippers at a crowded 
mosque on the Sinai Peninsula known to be frequented by Sufis.28

The Design-Politics of Materials
       Similarly, even the actual materials of buildings can sometimes be an 
expression of design-politics. Albert Speer, aided by some sketches provided 
by Hitler himself, planned and designed the gargantuan Germania to 
replace the center of Berlin with a grandiose North-South axis. Speer reports 
that Hitler insisted that the vast dome of the Great Hall be constructed 
of masonry without any steel reinforcement. Accordingly, Speer’s highly 
dubious “Theory of Ruin Value” promised that the resultant building, 



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once rendered into ruins after a thousand years, 
would have no aesthetically displeasing protrusions 
of rebar.29 Just as the city was to be an extension of 
the Nazi politics of global conquest—the word in 
stone—so, too, the materiality of the unreinforced 
stone itself was meant to convey power and control.
       But this is not the most striking way that the 
very materiality of stone exemplifies design-politics, 
and not just design. Martin Kitchen’s trenchant 
biography, Speer: Hitler’s Architect, notes that in 
Nov. 1938 some three thousand Jews were forced to 
leave Berlin every month; they were “evicted, forced 
into exile, terrorized or rounded up in concentration 
camps.” Speer wanted to do this not just to free up 
well located apartments for others but also to build 
up an ex-urban workforce that could be used for 
Germania. As Kitchen argues,

       In close collaboration with the SS, he 
ruthlessly exploited the labour of concentration 
camp inmates in quarries, brickyards and 
factories producing building materials, they 
worked under appalling conditions and the 
mortality rate was shockingly high. Speer made 
thousands of Jewish families homeless, most of 
whom were handed over to the Gestapo to be 
shipped to what was delicately described as ‘the 
East.’ 30

     The Mauthausen (Austria) and Flossenbürg 
(Bavaria) camps established in 1938 were explicitly 
sited to provide high quality stone for Berlin 
rebuilding. Sachenhausen (near Berlin) supplied 
labor for brickworks at Oranienburg, which was 
also built at Speer’s request in 1938. Specialized 
stone for other projects led to siting of Gross-
Rosen (in Polish Silesia) for bluish-grey granite, and 
Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace for reddish granite. 
In this way, the material needs of rebuilding Berlin 
and other monuments caused Speer and his team 
of planners and architects to be intimately involved 
in the ‘Final Solution.’ This chilling account 

   This chilling 
account 
provides 
further 

evidence that 
architectural 

properties 
such as stone 

may exemplify 
far more than 

their literal 
materiality.

“

”



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provides further evidence that architectural properties such as stone may 
exemplify far more than their literal materiality. Nazi architecture and 
Nazi urbanism were not just violations of scale and distortions of neo-
classicism in aesthetic terms; their material origins also inextricably linked 
them to violations and distortions of human rights. In short, the siting 
of concentration camps and the building of cities were part of the same 
nefarious complex of design-politics.

The Design-Politics of Symmetry
      So, if seemingly innocuous aspects such as height, color and materials 
are implicated in design-politics—and cannot be left to inhabit some 
wishful quasi-autonomy of architectural design—are there any exemplified 
architectural properties that might still remain apolitical acts of aesthetics? 
One possibility for this might be the notion of symmetry. Surely something 
as quintessentially aesthetic as this can occupy a place safely removed from 
politics? Well, perhaps not—or at least not always. Architectural symmetry 
is not just the solid-void-solid of the Lincoln Memorial. It can also convey 
implications of equivalency, with parallel weights given to each side of 
some central point. In turn, however, it also matters what (or who) is 
being weighted and aesthetically presented as parallel and equivalent. And 
symmetry also draws particular attention to whatever is signaled out as 
the center of the composition, be it a front door or an entire highlighted 
realm.
       Sometimes, as in the case of the almshouse developed in 1800 to house 
Boston’s poor, symmetry is about more than visual balance; it also can 
encode a sense of separated but equal that carries a social, or even political 
meaning. What we see here is symmetry used to accommodate and enforce 
the institution’s gender separation—indigent men on one side, indigent 
women on the other. And, importantly, the middle part is not just some 
attractively articulated A-B-A aesthetic rhythm, but is instead generated by 
the need to provide a chapel at center, as a source of moral judgment and 
redemption for the benighted denizens of the almshouse. (Figure 7)

The Design-Politics of Mediated References: Freedom, Security, Democratic Access, 
Exclusion

      If even the most intrinsically architectural elements can be bound up 
with politics—Goodman’s category of exemplification—it is even easier 
to return to the case for finding a design-politics in the other categories 

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of denotation, metaphor, and 
mediated reference. Denotation, 
especially when it can be altered 
or augmented through the actions 
of others, seems easily bound 
with politics. And, similarly, 
metaphors—simply because they 
are already rooted in culturally 
freighted language—also seem 
particularly malleable to political 
manipulation. This leaves mediated references, 
already the part of Goodman’s quartet that seems 
furthest from architectural purity. Using two final 
examples, I aim to show how designers deliberately 
shape the intended conceptual resonances of their 
work, while also demonstrating just how easy it is 
for such mediated references to shift—just as the 
Lincoln Memorial moved from “Union” to “Civil 
Rights” as its primary referent.
      Following the destruction of the twin towers 
in the 2001 9/11 attacks--themselves a deliberate 
targeting of exemplified architectural properties 
(height) and metaphorical expression (capitalism 
and world 
trade)—Daniel 
L i b e s k i n d ’ s 
c o m p e t i t i o n -
winning urban 
design plan for 
the ground zero 
site memorably 
entered the world 
of mediated 
references because 
he dubbed his 
central structure the Freedom Tower. Moreover, 
Libeskind gave it symbolically resonant height of 
1776 feet—a number that had culturally-encoded 
American meaning as a mediated reference for 
“independence” even if it could not be a palpable 
measurement of height. Underscoring the designer’s 

figure 8:

freedom tower and 
lower Manhattan

Figure 7: Almshouse



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intent—just in case the conceptual resonance of the building might be 
lost—Libeskind’s competition rendering showed the form of the seemingly 
abstract building to be anthromorphically mimicking the raised arm of the 
Statue of Liberty.
      The design-politics of the urban design scheme and the building 
were as much about the concept of American-style freedom as a direct 
counterpoint to the restrictive politics of terrorists as it was about the 
form of buildings. Sadly, the mediated reference to “independence” and 
“freedom” was not to last; instead, as built, the blockier One World Trade 
Center building designed by David Childs exhibits far greater attention to 
issues of security than freedom; its fortified base is designed to withstand 
the impact of a truck bomb (Figure 8).
       Turning now to Canberra, Australia, it is possible to explore other 
struggles over mediated reference in the contested terrain of this capital 
city designed by American Walter Burley Griffin. Griffin’s competition-
winning plan featured a “land axis” that included a triangular district 
of government buildings culminating in a “capital hill,” as well as a 
perpendicular water axis along an artificial lake. The Australian government, 
slowly but surely, executed many aspects of Griffin’s plan despite many 
alterations, yielding a long axis of power stretching from the Australian 
War Memorial at the base of Mount Ainslie southwest to Parliament 
House. (Figure 9) The result is both a dominant narrative about “garden 
cities” and democracy—but also a counter-narrative promulgated in the 
same central space by Aboriginal activists who regard the very site of the 
capital as an illegitimate usurpation of “sacred land.” Intermittently since 
1972, and consistently since 1992, these activists have maintained an 
“Aboriginal Embassy”—an informal settlement placed directly athwart the 
country’s most iconic political space.31 (Figure 10) In addition to tents 
and signage that conveys reminders about “stolen children,” “native title,” 
and “genocide,” a ceremonial flame has been kept alight since 1998. In 
other words, there is no shared mediated reference; one group’s strong 
association is the negation of the other.
       It took three-quarters of a century, but eventually Griffin’s plan for a 
capital hill with a capitol building yielded an unusual hybrid—a parliament 
building carved into the hill, seemingly there to symbolize the people’s 
freedom to walk over the top of the hill and look down upon the halls 
of the legislative representatives. Yet security concerns quickly ended the 
access to the summit, thereby shifting the mediated reference. Meanwhile, 
parliamentarians drive their cars directly into underground parking and, 
unlike the provisional parliament house that preceded this one, there is 



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no longer any intermediary 
outdoor space where 
lawmakers can be stopped 
to confer with journalists.32 
And for some aboriginals, 
the building still seems closed 
off.
       Politicians celebrated the 
role of the aboriginal artist 
who designed the mosaic 
forecourt but the official 
Royal Institute of Australian 
Architects booklet about 
the building treats the entry 
sequence as a calculated 
symbolic spatial sequence 
that narrates the “advent of 
European civilization.”33 
With entry through a 
detached trabeated portico, 
(Figure 11) it is as if indigenous 
culture has been trampled 
over and left outside. Clearly 
this Parliament House is a 
building, like all good public 
structures, that means in multiple and 
complex ways.

Conclusion: Building a Design-Politics

       As these examples from around the 
world have shown, there is increasing 
convergence between design and 
politics—enough, I think, to warrant a 
hyphen. The mechanisms of meaning—
the 'How?' sorts of questions about 
the meaning of buildings that Nelson 
Goodman asked us to try to isolate—are 
inextricably linked to what, why, and 
where buildings mean. Is the building on 

figure 9:  canberra

figure 10: Aboriginal Embassy

figure 11: parliament house



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sacred land? Does acquiring its materials depend on conscripted labor? 
Do its metaphors allude to oppressive rather than emancipatory practices? 
Will artists annotate the faÇades with contentious messages? Agendas for 
public buildings are set not just by architects, or even by their clients, 
but by a variety of contested actions and personal, subnational, national 
and international priorities. The architecture of buildings matters, but it is 
their larger design-politics that richly renders them as central to the human 
experience.

The author wishes to thank Dr. Suzanne Harris-Brandts for her excellent 
research assistance.

endnotes

1. This phrase, from On War, is sometimes translated with the word 
“policy” replacing “politics” and with the word “by” replaced by “with.”
2. Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean” In Goodman and Catherine 
Elgin, eds., Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 
31-48.
3. Earlier attempts to deploy Goodman to explain the Lincoln Memorial 
appear in  both editions of Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and 
National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 and New York: 
Routledge, 2008).
4. This exclusionary policy was dropped in 1943. At about this time, 
Maryland artist Mitchell Jamieson created a 12’ by 7’ mural, called 
“An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” which adorns a wall in 
basement of the Interior Department Building. On Feb. 1, 2018, to mark 
the beginning of Black History Month the Interior Department held a 
ceremony to mark the mural’s 75th anniversary. This resulted from the 
activism of a Massachusetts high school student who wrote an op-ed in the 
Washington Post, as well as letters to federal officials and Oprah Winfrey; 
Elise Takahama, “Westwood Student Wins Recognition for Forgotten Civil 
Rights Mural,” Boston Globe, 1 February 2018; https://www.bostonglobe.
com/metro/2018/02/01/westwood-student-wins-recognition-for-
forgotten-civil- rights-mural/RLb65wWYVbOLGuMr6WV4nK/story.
html
5. Goodman, 43-44.
6. Stanford Anderson, “Critical Conventionalism in Architecture,” 



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Assemblage 1 (October 1986), 6-23; Stanford 
Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The 
Search for an ‘In-between,'” Perspecta 33 (2002), 
30-37.
7. “Mediated Monuments and National Identity,” 
Journal of Architecture 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 
391-408.
8. Blair Kamin, “Donald Trump: Giant Sign on his 
Chicago Tower is Like Hollywood Sign,” Chicago 
Tribune, 5 June 2014; Blair Kamin, “Donald 
Trump’s Sycophantic, Vitriolic Treatment of 
Architecture Critics,” Chicago Tribune, 7 October 
2016.
9. Micah Maidenberg and Ryan Ori, “Trump to 
Sign Maker: You’re Hired,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 
21 February 2014.
10. Trump quoted in Kamin, “Donald Trump: 
Giant Sign...”
11. City of Chicago, Office of the Mayor, “Mayor 
Emanuel Announces Proposed Ordinance to 
Establish a Chicago River Corridor Special 
Sign District,” 17 September 2014; https://
www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/
press_releases/2014/sep/mayor-emanuel- announces-
proposed-ordinance-to-establish-a-chicag.html; “City 
Bans Big Signage Along River, But Trump’s Sign 
Stays,” Curbed, 14 November 2014.
12. Corey Mueller, “Will Trump Tower Sign Be 
Obscured by Flying Pigs?” Chicago Tribune, 4 May 
2017.
13. Kelly Bauer and David Matthews, “Throw 
Trump Tower Into the River? 7,000 Chicagoans 
to Join Symbolic Dumping,” The Block Club, 
13 January 2016; https://www.dnainfo.com/
chicago/20160113/downtown/want-toss- trump-
tower-into-river-theres-event-for-that/
14. Ana Cerrud and David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump’s 
Name is Stripped from Panama Hotel,” Washington 
Post, 5 March 2018; Kirk Semple, Steve Eder and 



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Ben Protess, “Panama Hotel Owner Declares Victory and Trump’s Name 
is Removed,” New York Times, 5 March 2018.
15. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protesters-project-
pictures-putin-trump-soho-hotel-article-1.3393395; https://news.
artnet.com/art-world/trump-soho-hotel-russia-ties-1045406; 
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artist-projects-trump-soho_
us_598a19f7e4b0449ed50622b1; https://www.businessinsider.com/
trump-putin-meme-russia-trump-soho-hotel-new-york-2017-8
16. Christopher Brennan, “Trump SoHo Signs Come Down at Newly 
Christened Dominick hotel, though Checkered Past Remains,” New York 
Daily News, 21 December 2017.
17. The “Trump – Coming 2016” sign received considerable press 
coverage during the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. D.C. city 
council members proposed investigating its removal, but ultimately, the 
Federal Election Commission said that the sign was not a violation. Aaron 
C. Davis, “Trump’s ‘Coming 2016’ Sign Stays on Federal Building Near 
White House,” Washington Post, 20 July 2015; Perry Stein, “That Huge 
‘TRUMP’ Sign Between the White House and Capitol is Being Removed,” 
Washington Post, 18 August 2016.
18. Nicole Chavez and Emily Smith, “’Pay Trump Bribes Here’ Sign 
Projected Onto Trump’s DC Hotel,”CNN.com, 16 May 2017; Christopher 
Mele and Daniel Victor, “”’Pay Trump Bribes Here’ Projected on Trump 
Hotel in Washington,” New York Times, 16 May 2017; Carolina Miranda, 
“Meet Robin Bell, the Artist Who Project Protest Messages Onto Trump’s 
D.C. Hotel Last Night,” Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2017; Maria Chu, “The 
Artist Projecting on to Trump Hotel,” BBC News, 7 June 2017; Associated 
Press, “Anti-Trump Images Become Big Business for DC Projectionist,” 21
August 2018, https://wtop.com/dc/2018/08/
anti-trump-images-become-big-business-for-dc-projectionist/slide/1/
19. Jessica Taylor and Peter Overby, “Federal Watchdog Finds Government 
Ignored Emoluments Clause With Trump Hotel,” National Public Radio, 
16 January 2019; https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/685977471/federal-
watchdog-finds-government-ignored-emoluments-clause-with-trump-
hotel
20. Curtis M. Wong, “LGBTQ Group Projects Word Trump Reportedly 
Tried to Ban from CDC Onto His Hotel,” Huffington Post 28 December 
2017; https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hrc-trump-hotel-cdc-
reportedly- banned-words_us_5a3aa7d2e4b0b0e5a79f16ae. The “banned 
words” terminology was likely overstated—follow- on reporting suggested 



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that, far from a ban, the list of words was merely 
a suggestion of terms to avoid if an organization 
wanted to get funding during a highly-politicized 
era. 
21. Robin Bell (@bellvisuals), “Projecting 
#BootPruitt on the EPA, it’s time for @
EPAScottPruitt to go!,” twitter post, 28. 
March 2018; https://twitter.com/bellvisuals/
status/979142626548109313?lang=en; “’Sessions 
Must go’ Projected on DOJ Headquarters,” USA 
Today, 19 May 2017.
22. M.W. Folsom, The Facts About Home Owning: 
An Authoritative Presentation (Chicago: National 
Association of Real Estate Boards, 1922).
23. Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped (Boston: Bulfinch 
Press, 1991), 320.
24. Mona Domosh, “The Symbolism of the 
Skyscraper: Case Studies of New York’s First Tall 
Buildings,” Journal of Urban History 14, 3 (May 
1988), 337, 339.
25. http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/building/
chicago-temple-building/2609; https://
www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/15/
yamoussoukro-notre-dame-de-la-paix-ivory-coast-
worlds- largest-basilica-history-of-cities-in-50-
buildings-day-37
26 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1970), 81.
27. Andy Hoffman, “Dubai’s Burj Khalifa: Built 
Out of Opulence; Named for Its Saviour,”
The Globe and Mail, 4 January 2010; 
https://www.theglobeandmail .com/report-
on-business/dubais-burj-khalifa- built-
ou t -o f - opu l enc e -named - fo r - i t s - s a v i ou r /
article1208413/
28. “Tel Aviv City Hall Lit with Egypt Flag 
in Solidarity with Copt Terror Victims,” 
Times of Israel, 28 May 2017; https://www.
timesofisrael.com/tel-aviv-city-hall-lit-with-



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egypt-flag-in-solidarity-with-cairo-terror-victims/; “Egyptian Flag 
Lights Up TA City Hall in Solidarity with Mosque Victims,” Times 
of Israel, 24 November 2017; https://www.timesofisrael.com/
egyptian-flag-lights-up-ta-city-hall-in-solidarity-with-mosque-victims/.
29 Martin Kitchen, Speer: Hitler’s Architect (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 2015), 34.
30. Kitchen, 72-73, 85.
31. National Museum of Australia, “Aboriginal Tent Embassy;” https://
www.nma.gov.au/defining- moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy; 
Tom McIlroy, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy Has Been Left off the 
ACT Heritage List,” Canberra Times, 19 April 2015; Monica Tan, “The 
Aboriginal Tent Embassy: ‘We Were All Young, Crazy, But We Believed in 
Justice,’” The Guardian, 10 May 2016.
32. James Weirick, “Don’t You Believe It: Critical Response to the New 
Parliament House,” Transition (Summer/Autumn 1989), 65.
33. The celebratory volume sponsored by the RAIA is Haig Beck, ed., 
Parliament House Canberra: A Building for the Nation (Sydney: Collins, 
1988), 20-25; Joint House Department (Canberra), Australia’s Parliament 
House: The Meeting Place of Our Nation (Canberra: Australian Government 
Publishing Service, 1989), 8.


