At the height of World War II, Adolf Hitler dreamed of developing rockets that could destroy American cities. It’s an irony of history that he not only failed to achieve this, but inadvertently helped shape the modern-day U.S. metropolis.

Like countless political leaders before him, Hitler considered the built environment a canvas for the projection of power. He recruited architects and urbanists who could reflect the Third Reich’s values, and punished innovators whose “degenerate” structures weren’t aligned with the regime.

Many of those persecuted visionaries eventually sought refuge in the U.S. There, they were instrumental in redefining the American city, creating the urban landscapes we know today.

Nearly a century later, President Donald Trump is poised to provoke a new exodus — this time, in reverse.

Urbanism in Trump’s headlights

The U.S. administration’s recent moves to cancel environmentally sensitive urban development projects, impose an official style for federal buildings and target free speech on college campuses are setting the stage for America’s best and brightest city-builders to seek their fortunes across the Atlantic.

Cruz García — founder of the WAI Architecture Think Tank and an associate professor at Columbia University — told POLITICO of the instability facing those working on publicly funded projects, and highlighted the administration’s decision to review 400 initiatives funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Concerned that environmental resilience projects serving historically marginalized communities may be delayed, significantly altered or canceled, he noted that many people who had received grants for projects had already received termination notices. Federal cut-backs “definitely could, or would, potentially lead scholars to seek to continue their work abroad,” he said.

According to Billy Fleming, an associate professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, the “focus on kidnapping and deporting” foreign students like Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri or Tufts University researcher Rümeysa Öztürk — who were both detained for attending pro-Palestinian campus protests — is also likely to undermine the U.S. as a destination for promising architects.

“American schools of architecture have long relied on international students,” he said. “Attacks on student visa holders could upend their financial models and force the closure of smaller programs or departments. In those with smaller endowments […] it could lead to the closure of entire schools of architecture.”

But the impact of Trump’s measures extends beyond academia. Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has ordered mass layoffs and budget cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also terminated a $1 billion program to repair and climate-proof aging or damaged affordable homes, while jeopardizing a plan to build housing for thousands of low-income families .

The Department of Transportation has similarly ordered a review of projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and is considering canceling federal funding for cycle lanes.

Ruth Schagemann, president of the Architects’ Council of Europe — which represents the interests of over 500,000 architects from 36 countries — believes all this may “lead some architecture and urbanism professionals to relocate in search of environments where innovation, sustainability and academic openness are better supported.”

“Political decisions can significantly influence the global flow of talent,” she said. “Europe’s foundation in these areas positions it well to attract talent.”

Targeted by totalitarianism

Historian Barbara Steiner, director of Bauhaus Dessau Foundation , which preserves the legacy of the revolutionary German art school, sees a clear parallel between the 1930s and the present “upheaval and uncertainty.”

“We are on the way to a system of totalitarian coordination over all aspects of society from economy to the media, culture and education, of appearances, spaces and thinking in order to gain control over heterogeneous societies and critical discourse,” she said.

The U.S. architectural community has been particularly jarred by Trump’s move to impose an official style on federal buildings, with an executive order requiring they “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage.” A revival of a widely condemned order he issued in 2020 , it has reminded many of mandates imposed by authoritarian leaders of the past.

Immediately after taking power, Hitler had targeted architects whose aesthetics weren’t aligned with his totalitarian regime. His particular bête noire was the Bauhaus school due to its promotion of minimalist and functional design. And though the Third Reich was yet to developed its signature style — the heavy, stripped classicism that survives in Berlin’s Olympiastadion or Nuremberg’s rally grounds — Bauhaus represented the distinctly internationalist outlook it detested.

Steiner said Nazi leaders attacked Bauhaus buildings for their rejection of “regional traditions,” for being “architectural sins that were cold, repellent and unattractive.” The school’s embrace of Jewish, foreign and progressive students and faculty also led them to denounce it as a hotbed for communists.

And when the “degenerate” institution was ultimately closed, with many of its members obliged to flee, America was waiting to receive them.

The exiles that built America

U.S. universities tripped over themselves to take in Europe’s displaced visionaries.

Harvard’s Graduate School of Design recruited Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who served as a “hub between displaced European modernists and American architects” and taught several generations of students to embed “the usefulness of sociology” into their designs, Steiner said. The sleek, modern “International Style” he promoted would come to define the aesthetics and layout of U.S. cities for decades to come.

Many of that movement’s most iconic U.S. buildings would eventually be designed by the last Bauhaus director, Mies van der Rohe, who joined the Illinois Institute of Technology after leaving Germany. His steel-and-glass residential towers on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive became an instant reference point for high-rise housing, while his Seagram Building in New York inspired countless knockoffs in business districts.

“Mies reimagined downtowns,” said Timothy Welch, director of the University of Auckland’s Urban Planning Program. “His tower-in-a-park model created a new urban typology — open plazas surrounding minimalist skyscrapers.”

But the impact wasn’t just on urban areas, it also seeped into America’s sprawl, cementing the aesthetic of the standardized suburban single-family home .

Many who made their way to the U.S. had been involved in the progressive city-building projects of 1920’s “ Red Vienna ,” and their socially minded outlook helped shape California’s postwar suburbs, explained architectural historian Volker M. Welter. Leopold Fischer ’s well-known Los Angeles neighborhood of detached houses, for example, were a “translation” of the social housing estates he built with Gropius in 1920’s Dessau — a reflection of the European vision of “architectural modernism as a social commitment.”

But the exiled European architect who perhaps had the most profound impact on U.S. cities was Austria’s relatively unknown Victor Gruen. Both Jewish and a committed socialist, he was forced to flee after the Anschluss and eventually settled in California, where he was repulsed by the period’s car-centric culture.

“Gruen internalized a vision of urbanism centered on human-scaled, socially integrated spaces,” Welch said. And in a bid to recreate “Vienna’s café culture and walkable streets,” he invented the shopping mall — a space meant to shield consumers from traffic by combining housing, civic facilities, public amenities and shops.

“The irony, of course, is that his solutions were ultimately coopted by the very forces of commercialization and automobility he fought against,” Welch commented. But while most malls became, in Gruen’s own words, “avenues of horror,” the faithful adaptation of his concept in Kalamazoo inspired the creation of pedestrian zones in dozens of cities.

Gruen introduced “ideas about pedestrian priority, mixed-use development and public space that would later become central to […] contemporary urban design.”

America’s brain drain

While the full impact of Trump’s ongoing MAGA measures remains to be seen, Europe already stands out as a potential haven for U.S. architects and urbanists.

Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, an architectural historian and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said the administration’s budget cuts meant it is no longer “far-fetched” to imagine researchers working on urban climate resilience or equity projects leaving the country.

“At what point does continuing this work abroad become the more viable — or ethical — choice?,” asked architect Cruz García.

The EU’s universities and governments are keen to welcome modern-day intellectual émigrés and have set up recruitment drives to compliment existing research schemes like Erasmus+, Horizon Europe and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

Schagemann emphasized that Europe offers forward-thinking émigré architects plenty of professional opportunities too.

The EU’s “robust investment in urban resilience, sustainable mobility, green infrastructure and affordable housing,” with legislative packages like the Green Deal and programs like the New European Bauhaus , means there’s a strong “demand for innovative, socially engaged, and environmentally conscious design,” she said.

“Europe’s commitment to these goals [show] that architecture and urban planning are not just technical challenges — they are acts of leadership,” Schagemann added. “They are about building the future we believe in — one that reflects European values and aspirations.”