From the FBI headquarters to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. has a love/hate relationship with Brutalism

In the 1960s, the expansion and creation of agencies and departments in Washington, D.C. required new headquarters and workspaces for the growing federal bureaucracy. In a bid to elevate these new national developments, a 1962 policy statement called the “ Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture ,” advocated for an approach that elevated the best of contemporary architecture. At the time, that contemporary style tended to be Brutalism, a style best known for its blocky, concrete-clad structures with repeating grids and recessed windows. 



[Photo: courtesy National Building Museum]



“Capital Brutalism,” a new exhibition at D.C.’s National Building Museum, explores how these buildings came to be during a trying time for trust in government. Today, many of these structures in D.C. have entered a middle age that requires new stewardship and thoughtful planning. They have come under attack from political figures, including former President Donald Trump, who during his term laid out a plan to dismantle D.C.’s brutalist buildings in favor of classical architecture (the plan was later rejected by President Biden ).



[Photo: courtesy National Building Museum]



Co-curators Dr. Angela Person, associate professor of architecture at the University of Oklahoma, and architectural photographer Ty Cole, are both longtime fans of the building style. Together they  combed through the historical record to collect the largest such display of Brutalism design in D.C., honing in on seven specific buildings to tell the larger story of this type of architecture. 



DC Metro [Photo: ©Ty Cole/courtesy National Building Museum]



Brutalism’s ascent 



D.C.’s embrace of brutalism—a term derived from “béton brut,” a reference to the style’s raw concrete forms and facades—followed its global emergence. Around the world, governments and institutions embraced the style, owing to its fast construction and affordability. When these buildings began opening in the 1960s, they received great acclaim, as Person and Cole document in a book accompanying the exhibit. 



But while there were Brutalism fans at the time, the brutalist buildings around D.C. quickly became targets of criticism, ire, and antipathy, due to both the public reception of their cold, abstract exteriors and the abstract nature of government functions that took place inside.



Weaver Building [Photo: ©Ty Cole/courtesy National Building Museum]



Marcel Breuer’s curvilinear Weaver Federal Building, home to 4,000 workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was considered one of his career highlights when he won the AIA’s Gold Medal in 1969, with famed critic Ada Louise Huxtable celebrating it for adding “quality design and genuine 20th century style in a town that needs both.” Decades later, Jack Kemp, a one-time HUD Secretary, would deride the building as “10 floors of basement.”



Hirshhorn Museum [Photo: ©Ty Cole/courtesy National Building Museum]



The Lauinger Library, a 1970 addition to the Georgetown campus by John Carl Warnecke, was side-eyed by local residents. A Washington Post review spoke of students instantly warming to the building, and in 1976, it would win an AIA Award of Merit. The Hirshhorn, Gordon Bunshaft’s “Brutalist Donut”—which Person wrote her dissertation about—would earn significant ire from critics almost immediately; its window, nicknamed the gun turret, was fitting for such an unfriendly structure, said critic Paul Goldberger, and Huxtable would simply call it “Born-dead, neo-penitentiary modern.”



The grand ambitions of these buildings and projects, such as the Hoover FBI building, quickly soured, from a public perspective. I.M. Pei’s L’Enfant Plaza, a major commercial redevelopment in the city’s southwest, went, in the estimation of the Washington Post , from “the city’s major urban attraction” in 1968, shortly after opening, to “ghost town” just a few years later, owing to a perception of the development’s unfriendliness and lack of constant crowds.



“The architects are rockstars, right, so, I think everybody was excited about Marcel Breuer coming to D.C.,” said Cole. “A lot of trust is there. So I think, maybe once the buildings start getting occupied and used, maybe the reaction is, this isn’t exactly what we were hoping.”



FBI Building [Photo: ©Ty Cole/courtesy National Building Museum]



Functional Sculptures, Poor Offices



Architects definitely did not anticipate how public mood would radically shift around Brutalism. As the exhibit’s program notes, these buildings, which employed many of the biggest names in Modernism at the time, “managed to make the case for a heroic version of shared institutions in a manner that was compelling and grand.” Some architects saw their work as “ functional sculptures. ” In many cases, they also were the product of a 1945 urban renewal plan for the District that led to significant displacement, especially of Black populations, which has created its own strain of distaste around the style.



Part of the steep decline in these building’s reputation came from what they symbolized: a growing federal government, that especially after the Vietnam and Watergate eras, began being viewed with distrust. The conservative Reagan Revolution solidified the sense of government as an enemy, a view that has sadly hardened. As a trio of critics wrote in Architect Magazine in 2010, Brutalism was “authoritatively civic in the time of Kennedy-era optimism and the Great Society, before US attitudes toward the public realm changed so dramatically that it has become hard to evaluate the aesthetics on their original terms.”



And many of those who worked within felt their interiors left much to be desired in terms of comfort and habitability. 



“The folks who inhabit them have a very different experience,” said Person. “If you talk to a lot of these federal employees who have lived every day inside these buildings, they don’t always get natural light, they weren’t always updated or furnished in ways that were comfortable, and lighting design is maybe not always resolved in a way that’s really comfortable for task work.”



But despite a portion of the public being uncomfortable with both the look and interior reality of these buildings, the pendulum has shifted back in the last decade. Person believes a variety of factors are at play: despite their reputations, they photograph beautifully, and share well on social media; their age, and resultant preservation battles, have placed them in the news; and the younger generation has no association with them, and can appreciate these intriguing objects without any baggage.