Justin Shubow

About Justin Shubow

Justin Shubow is president of the National Civic Art Society, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that promotes classical and traditional design for America’s public buildings, monuments and spaces. His work puts the question of beauty back at the center of the national conversation about architecture.

He served as chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal body that reviews the design of monuments, memorials and public buildings in the nation’s capital, and was named the first chairman of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council. Trained in philosophy and law, he brings a philosopher’s rigor to a debate that is too often settled by fashion.

The case for classical architecture

Under his leadership the National Civic Art Society has led public campaigns on the National Eisenhower Memorial, on the design of federal buildings, and on the future of New York’s Penn Station. His argument is simple and demanding: the buildings a republic builds for itself should be beautiful, dignified and legible to ordinary citizens, and the classical tradition is the most proven language for saying so in stone.

At Meriwether Academy

In September 2026 Shubow spoke for Meriwether Academy in the grand salon of Nashville’s Belmont Mansion, an evening of civic beauty and American identity in one of the city’s great antebellum houses. The full lecture, The Case for Classical Architecture, is free in our lecture archive, and he continued the conversation on episode 6 of the Meriwether Academy Podcast. Nashville, which calls itself the Athens of the South and keeps a full-scale Parthenon in Centennial Park, was a fitting room for the argument.