The Architecture
of Our Glory
A special event with Justin Shubow, Former Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and President of the National Civic Art Society, on architecture and cultural identity.
Beauty & the
Body Politic
Great leaders have always understood that architecture shapes a people. From the Parthenon to the Capitol, the buildings a nation raises are a statement about who it is and how it means to live. This evening we ask why civic beauty matters, and what is lost when we forget it.
Justin Shubow has spent his career on a simple idea: our public buildings should be beautiful, dignified, and beloved by ordinary citizens. As Churchill said, we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us. Beauty inspires; ugliness quietly demoralizes.
It was on this conviction that the Founders built, looking back to Greece and Rome for a civic architecture worthy of the republic. That classical tradition defined the American square for 150 years, until modernism pushed it aside.
In 2020, Shubow’s National Civic Art Society helped draft a landmark executive order returning federal design to classical styles. A Harris poll found that about 72 percent of Americans prefer traditional public buildings. How we build, he argues, is really about what kind of country we mean to be.
Justin Shubow
Justin Shubow is president of the National Civic Art Society, a Washington nonprofit that advances the classical tradition in public art and architecture. From 2018 to 2021 he served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal government’s aesthetic review board for the capital, and in 2021 he was elected its Chairman.
NPR and the New York Times have called him one of modern architecture’s biggest critics. He helped draft the 2020 executive order Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, which reoriented federal design toward classical and traditional styles and required public input on new buildings.
He is also Chairman of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council and executive director of Rebuild Penn Station, the campaign to restore New York’s original Pennsylvania Station. This evening he brings that case to Nashville.
The Belmont Mansion
We gather at one of the South’s grandest homes. Built in the 1850s as an Italianate villa on a hill above Nashville, the Belmont Mansion is a fitting hall in which to consider the power of beautiful architecture, surrounded by the very thing we have come to discuss.
Our Evening Schedule
2026
Nashville, TN
Suit & tie welcome
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