DC’s brutalist buildings tell a half-hidden history

Caught in the center of an interstate and inter-bureau dispute over its successor site, the FBI headquarters at the aging J. Edgar Hoover Building remains occupied. Many Washington area residents have long soured on the building for its daunting presence; it has been described as everything between “Orwellian” and “just plain ugly.” Though criticism of the city’s federal buildings has been a popular cause of self-schooled DC architecture wonks, few would debate that the structures themselves convey an apparent sense of the unexceptional.

This lack of “exceptionalism” is partly by design. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), L’Enfant Plaza, and even the Hoover Building were all envisioned as primarily public spaces. So these and other efforts in urban reconstruction throughout DC posed a question of whether the nation’s capital could articulate a modern urban policy within an architectural “language of governance.” Adoption of the Brutalist style that came to define these modernist projects would peak in the 1960s, between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, embodying the spirited contradictions and conflicts of that political era.

In 1962, President Kennedy appointed the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space. As early as his inauguration the year before, the president was said to have been dismayed by the disrepair of then-current federal offices. From the committee emerged a report summarizing recommendations for the offices of the federal bureaucracy. To use the words of committee member and then-Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, the report called for “…the avoidance of an official style, [and] the flow of design, not from the government to the architectural profession, but from the architectural profession to the government.”

Building for American bureaucracy

In practice, design logistics would flow in both directions, resulting in a style that appeared distinctly official. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation establishing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), appropriating funds for its offices. After a competitive selection process, the General Services Administration (GSA) tapped Hungarian American architect Marcel Breuer to head the building project’s development.

A graduate of the Bauhaus—the Weimar German art school founded by Walter Gropius—Breuer brought his interest and expertise in Brutalism’s novel design vocabulary comprising a focus on exposed industrial building materials, namely steel and concrete—béton brut being the French term-of-art for the latter. (So synonymous with the radical currents of architecture by mid-century, it became the fitting namesake of the Brutalist style itself.) With its bold rejection of convention, Brutalism typified modernism at its height as the mid-century’s architectural vogue.

Brutalism’s popularity among architects of Breuer’s generation the world over was furthermore self-evident, coinciding with a renewed appreciation for functionalism in design theory. But Breuer alone wasn’t responsible for shaping the look of DC’s federal apparatus–as if making it in his own ideological image, like a South Capitol Street inverse of New York City’s infamous Robert Moses or (perhaps a better analogy) fellow modernist Oscar Niemeyer and his path-breaking city plan of Brasília.

In all, the federal building projects of the Kennedy-Johnson years were an effort in policymaking to the same extent they remain applications of “mere” design. They are a reminder that urban planning is not just as contested a field as politics, it is politics. Despite this history, it is easy to imagine that, for contemporary critics, none of the political intrigue makes the structures themselves any more pleasing to look at. Some, the former President of the United States among them, seem to see the buildings as nothing more than abstract totems of federal excess and overreach.

For others, DC’s blocks of federal office buildings appear to be just that: building blocks without clear chronology or easy explanation; they’re just here. That perception is enough for some to critique Brutalism’s supposed lack of “American” identity or pedigree. The aesthetics of the buildings are shaped by ideas no more imported than the other styles that make up the District’s unique architectural DNA Contrasting conventions of architectural design–-Neoclassicism, for example—are also adopted from European aesthetic, and historical ideas.

This points to a wider issue. For decades, tensions have flared in US cities to differing degrees: between those who argue for stricter adherence to established urban policymaking methods and opposing voices who favor bolder, more potentially radical community-shaping actions.

The political contours of these debates have morphed over the years, differing within and among cities and neighborhoods. (In the DC area, urban policy debates have surrounded the building and expansion of Metro, the history of which is covered in historian Zachary M. Schragg’s brilliant and concise chronicle, The Great Society Subway.)

Political spaces

The latest community conflagrations—both in DC, and elsewhere—are inclusive of the economic and cultural debates around so-called NIMBY-ism and YIMBY-ism, though they do not begin or stop there. Conflicts and conversations such as these matter because policy outcomes shape where people work, in turn providing meaning and making space for how people live. It is a vacuous truth that “all politics is local.” In the DC area, it is a mere fact of life. Where else in the country are national and federal policy simultaneously municipal concerns, and vice versa?

Some DC buildings, like the Hoover, have arguably never been popular. Others, while not quite as maligned or well-known, have still seen better years. All of them, though, have borne witness to a sea change in the relationship between public space and private actors, the role of the consultant class in executing urban policy change, and, overall, the connection occupational urban policy shares with local and labor communities.

Disdain for DC’s modernist federal spaces is maybe more apparent than it is real. Much of it has to do with plain indifference to the city’s architectural, historical, and political contexts as it does with subjective matters of formal taste. These spaces are not vacant, except in the most literal sense, when federal office workers, and many others whose lives intersect with the city’s commute back to their households. But even then, the buildings remain occupied by intention and a sense of memory.