Framed as a revival of Ronald Reagan’s failed 1983 “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, the Trump administration’s Golden Dome defensive missile project will involve universities, research labs, private companies, and government agencies in developing a “layered architecture” of defense systems that form a protective dome over the United States, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. This “layered architecture” is IT-speak for a conceptual blueprint of a literal, physical architecture of detection radars, control centers, and missile launchers in space, on land, and at sea.
That this military project is packaged as an architectural element—a dome—isn’t surprising. From border walls to federal building renovations, gilded White House ballroom additions, and mandates for neoclassical design, President Trump, with his background in real estate, mobilizes building projects to achieve his goals. With his Golden Dome poised to become the largest defense envelope in the world, this latest spectacle draws comparison to military architecture built under the Third Reich: Albert Speer’s unbuilt Volkshalle comes to mind.
Critics have questioned the Golden Dome’s feasibility: Trump promises a $175 billion budget and a projected completion under three years, while the Congressional Budget Office estimates $542 billion to $1 trillion over 20 years. In July, the House of Representatives passed a Defense Appropriations Act that added $13 billion to the sum, just days after passing $24.4 billion in funding for it as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Beyond logistical concerns, the project stands to exacerbate serious social problems. As an architectural educator, I worry that the Golden Dome will normalize militarism in our everyday spaces and condition our society to view militancy as a common aspect of daily civilian routines.
Precedent Projects
So far, the project is swathed in secrecy, but we can look to comparable infrastructure projects to understand its precedents. One that comes to mind is Israel’s Iron Dome, a mobile constellation of radars, launchers, control centers, and military personnel, all designed to be geographically adaptable to shifting operational needs. Their visibility, ubiquity, and embeddedness in everyday spaces has transformed component sites into hubs of social activity where Israeli civilians socialize with and support the military. Israel’s Iron Dome has exacerbated the anxiety that the country is under constant threat from Palestine and surrounding Arab nations—a logic weaponized to justify so-called preemptive attacks.
Trump’s Golden Dome will cover a landscape more than 450 times the size of this precedent. With land-based layers of missile interceptors, surveillance radars, lasers, and military personnel poised for propagation across the American landscape, Golden Dome’s visual register in our everyday spaces could breed a society that accepts militant presence as a pre-condition to everyday routines. Worse, it could embolden the U.S.—and desensitize its population—to initiate more wars. Such normalization is already underway, with Trump’s ongoing deployment of the National Guard in various U.S. cities.
South of the Border
Closer to home, on the U.S.-Mexico border, surveillance towers create a virtual wall that monitors both immigrant and non-immigrant populations, even deep into public U.S. land. Architecture has played a troubling role here. In 2016, the AIA published a controversial letter offering its services to the Trump administration’s infrastructural agendas. Around that time, an anonymous group of architects launched an infamous competition to solicit border wall proposals. Eventually, Trump commissioned eight border wall prototypes that were built primarily by U.S. construction companies and an Israeli defense technology company. Today, most of the physical wall doesn’t even run precisely along the U.S-Mexico international boundary, but has rather transformed acres of public and private U.S. land into liminal spaces disconnected from the rest of the country.
The role of architecture in normalizing militarism in everyday spaces is not a far-fetched concern. Historian Adam Longenbach investigates the invention of “mock villages”—highly accurate simulations of existing cities, towns, and villages around the world, built on U.S. soil for military and police training purposes. The simulations blur the distinction between civilian spaces and targets. One result, as Longenbach argues, is the normalization of violence in civilian areas.
Details about Trump’s Golden Dome will likely remain hidden, and fear-based rhetoric may be used to justify its eventual construction. As the project infiltrates our built environment, our discipline and profession must take preemptive action. The AIA should issue statements demanding public disclosure of Golden Dome’s spatial footprint and warn of its societal impact. The AIA Code of Ethics should advocate for demilitarization as a design principle; this would entail explicitly discouraging participation in projects that embed military infrastructure in public and private civilian spaces. Such advocacy is also needed in public education, a forum through which architects, architectural educators, and professional organizations can educate the public—and the next generation of architects—on the dangers of militarization in everyday spaces.
Architecture is inherently political. If Trump’s Golden Dome is left unchecked, we risk building not just an all-encompassing fortress, but a society that conflates militarism with security in our daily routines.
Leen Katrib is a PD Soros Fellow and Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
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