Philip Kennicott writes:

Most of the buildings in the Depression-era Federal Triangle development have an irregular geometry. The Federal Trade Commission office, known as the Apex Building, is a right-angled triangle with its sharpest point rounded off. The Ronald Reagan Building, added in 1998, looks a bit like a stumpy meat cleaver.

And the Justice Department building, named for the slain senator, former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, is a four-sided polygon with corners beveled flat. It is on one of these short, angled planes of the building’s Pennsylvania Avenue facade, that the Justice Department has hung a long, blue-gray banner featuring a gigantic portrait of President Donald Trump. The department, which by long-standing precedent has functioned independently of direct political or presidential control, now joins the Agriculture Department and the Labor Department buildings as a venue for grandly scaled images of the 47th president.

The banner, installed Thursday, hangs between two Ionic columns that define a large porch-like space over a ceremonial entrance to the building. The angle of the building makes this narrow facade unusually visible along Pennsylvania Avenue, the most important symbolic axis in the nation’s capital, connecting the U.S. Capitol to the White House. This is the route followed by inaugural parades and major marches, protests and displays of state power, including the 1865 Grand Review of the Armies after victory in the Civil War.

A movie director looking to shoot a dystopian vision of American authoritarian fascism could hardly find a better spot to stage a speech or rally led by the great leader. This looks like Evita’s balcony, an elevated porch beneath an enclosed space with long, vertical lines that create a tight focus on the banner and the president’s face. The proportions of the building, the color of the stone and the stripped-down classicism of the architecture would make a good substitute for the setting of a famous 1989 speech given by Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceausescu, who lied shamelessly to his people one last time before being booed offstage, overthrown and summarily executed a few days later by an ad hoc tribunal. [Continue reading…]