The Swamp Goes Concrete

An intelligent, provocative show at the National Building Museum looks at D.C.’s Brutalist phase.

M ost of us will say we hate Brutalism. That’s the post-war architecture style based on exposed, rusticated concrete and outsized geometric forms. I think most everyone hates Washington, D.C., unless, that is, “fleecing people who work, prosper, have children, love freedom, or want a better future” is your profession. I’m with ya, friends. Washington Brutalism would seem, then, to be uniquely vile, like leprosy. Not that I’m a contrarian, but Brutalism comes in many shapes and sizes as well as 50 shades of gray cement, gravel, crushed stone, slag, and ash.

Capital Brutalism, the very good exhibition at the National Building Museum in the Swamp, reflects on the history and look of a selection of Washington’s most distinctive, distinguished, and polarizing Brutalist buildings. I’d been to the museum only once before. What an elegant Roman pile, and what good stories this offbeat place tells.

Last year, Buildworld, a British building-supplies conglomerate with a witty, smart blog, tagged DC’s FBI Headquarters, Brutalist to the bone, as the second-ugliest building in the world, bested — “worsted” is for wool, not carbuncles — only by the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I’ve seen both. Aesthetically, they’re ugly. For top-to-bottom malignity of spirit and purpose, the Scottish Parliament has no peer. The FBI’s home-and-hearth offices near Federal Triangle? What’s that line about stinking fish?

I love cops, not the dirty ones, and, in any event, the exhibition is about buildings, not the heinous things that happen there. The FBI building, opened in 1975, is featured in Capital Brutalism. So are the Hirshhorn Museum from 1974, the DC Metro, which first opened in 1976, and Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library from 1970.

What do these have in common, aside from enough concrete to fill the Potomac? That dread word number “1970s,” a shag-carpeted, Carter-infused slough, pitiless and grim but for disco and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That the Robert C. Weaver Building, constructed for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the James V. Forrestal Building, now housing the Department of Energy, both opened in 1969 doesn’t let the 1970s or Brutalism off the hook.

Each of these buildings gets a smart, nuanced profile in the show. Each is its own thing. Old photographs, architectural plans, good history, and superb recent photography by artist Ty Cole (b. 1969) do as much as anything can to make us feel we’re there, and there’s then and now. Each building, we learn, is in some state of extremis. In a nifty, provocative move, the museum asked architects working now to present ideas on whether or not the buildings can be saved.

The introduction is divided into past, present, and future, three meaty but succinct paragraphs, telling us the basics. Brutalism, as a name, comes from “brut,” French for raw. It’s an extreme form of Modernist egalitarianism. It emphasizes basic structural components undisguised by buttons and bows, and it uses value materials. Concrete is cheap, but it also bellows “construction,” which, in all honesty, is what a building is. Brutalism is a look, but it’s also a process and an ethic. For Washington buildings, Brutalist style was cheap, efficient, and speedy.

Cities such as D.C. that, especially in the 1960s, went hog-wild for urban renewal — a form of official terrorism — invariably have Brutalist office buildings, churches, houses, and civic structures. The Weaver building was the first to be planned in compliance with the 1962, Kennedy-era edict called the “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.” This edict, a road to hell paved with good intentions, pushed agencies building new to treat architecture like art and to use the best in modern design. New federal architecture was also to express “the dignity, vigor, enterprise, and stability” of the U.S. government.

HUD, a Great Society initiative, was meant to beautify blighted cities and provide better homes for the poor. Its own home, the Weaver building, marked the first use of the federal bulldozer to raze vast, rundown but established neighborhoods — in this case an African-American one of about 25,000 people in southwest Washington — mostly for new, Brutalist buildings. Marcel Breuer was the architect of the HUD building, the first federal building with a concrete façade and concrete elements, precast and poured. It’s a back-to-back pair of crescents that look from the air like an attenuated X with deep, rectangular windows. The crescent shapes evoke grand Georgian spaces in places like Bath and Edinburgh.

Underneath the plaza surrounding the building is a parking garage. This meant that the plaza — basically the garage’s roof — had to be kept light, so no shrubs, no lawn, no trees, nothin’ green to soften what is very brut indeed. At 700,000 square feet and ten stories, the thing’s a behemoth.

The exhibition takes us step by step, with admirable clarity, as the Weaver building moves from concept to its site’s devastation, construction, premiere, and the contempt it inspired from the start among the good people made to work there. I love Cole’s photographs. He’s a renowned architectural photographer who captures both the allure and aggression of Brutalist architecture. His work is among the many highlights of Capital Brutalism. He accentuates the positive, and that’s not bad in itself. The Weaver building is photogenic. It’s sleek. It sweeps. It’s snazzy. Breuer, who designed what used to be the Whitney on Madison Avenue and the Wassily Chair, is a distinguished architect. The Weaver section of the show — the first section — softens the heart, which, by nature, finds Brutalism to be anti-human. That’s good. It shows that the museum is pushing us to think.

It’s good to have push and pull, too, and near the Weaver Building section is a space for the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters for the FBI. At around 2.5 million square feet, it’s the biggest building the exhibition considers and a monster in more ways than one. Its dings are legion. It’s a fortress because of practical security concerns. It’s too big. It’s dreary. Its hanging upper stories suggest a surveillance state. It’s East German. It’s an alien in the city that surrounds it. Sitting on an irregular lot, it’s not symmetrical. It looks as if it were designed by a committee, which, in effect it was. The Chicago-based architect, Charles F. Murphy & Associates, might have been used to the Chicago Way — a tenet of which is “my way or the morgue” — but the Washington Way is lots of chickens going peck, peck, peck. Lots of two cents were tossed into the design process, and it shows.

The show has a niche on the Lauinger Library, which resembles a concrete crypt, but its small scale — relative to the big federal buildings — makes it human-sized. Its undulating exterior wall and vertical elements give it balance, and concrete, though unusual on the Georgetown campus, isn’t entirely far-fetched. The Lauinger Library replaced the university’s old library, built in the 1890s of cast iron, another unorthodox material. Also, its concrete includes crushed dark-gray granite, giving it a tone that’s not in combat with surrounding buildings and the campus’s leafy landscape.

These and other buildings, such as the Forrestal Building, which belonged to the Defense Department before the Department of Energy claimed it, have never been well liked by the living and breathing who use them. They weren’t critically acclaimed, haven’t grown beloved over time, and aren’t in good shape. They’re all of AARP vintage. Construction standards from the ’60s and ’70s, even those of high-profile buildings, hardly rival those of the Greeks, Romans, and Italians from Brunelleschi to Bernini. Capital Brutalism’s subjects are in rough shape. Many argue for their demolition.

What to do with them? One of the best parts of the show is the in-depth take on their future by architects commissioned by the museum to think about preservation. I’m open, if for no other reason than that the concrete devil you know is better than the crackpot devil you don’t, and Washington is a crackpot town.

The museum asked Brooks + Scarpa, architects based in Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale, to look at the HUD building. The firm considers the basic problem in federal-office use. “Work-from-home,” the twist, or assault, on full-time work occasioned by the Covid mass hysteria, never ended. Federal office buildings are often 75 percent empty during the workday. At the same time, Washington is desperate for more housing. Brooks + Scarpa suggests replacing the interior core in part with a central garden and dedicating roughly half of the building’s 700,000 square feet to new, affordable — which means government-subsidized — homes. Studio Gang, a Chicago firm, sees the Forrestal building’s monotonous grid as flexible. It’s in good shape overall, too. It can be sliced and diced for new homes. Gensler, a national firm, calls the J. Edgar Hoover building “hackable,” which means that its central location, large floor plates, and massive square footage could make it a mini city center with community-wide uses such as big-box stores, a hotel, and a rooftop soccer field.

We can dream, can’t we? That’s part of what good architects do. Since the FBI is building its new $3.5 billion Versailles in suburban Maryland, its old concrete headquarters will probably return, demolition-style, to its aggregate origins, possibly with exorcists needed to expunge bad whammies. I’m not sure why the FBI needs headquarters anywhere near Washington. New federal buildings should head for the hills and hollers, to the Ozarks, Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and beautiful Boise, Idaho, where real people live.

I enjoyed the exhibition. The curators navigated the difficult waters inherent in shows about objects — architecture — that are not there. A big slab of concrete holds court, as do architectural models. Capital Brutalism is a history show and a design show, but it stimulates thinking and especially the imagination. Brutalism, we see, is a tough, macho, hegemonic style that might have suited the ’60s and ’70s but seems at odds with sensibilities today. Concrete, now, takes many forms. The concrete façade of the FBI building is, in places, lacerating. Today, concrete buildings can look smooth as silk. This depends on how it’s cast and poured.

I wish I had more time for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania, another good exhibition at the National Building Museum. Using plans and archives, it imagines what Wright’s many local projects aside from Fallingwater might have been. These plans, few realized, involved new buildings in Pittsburgh and the area around Fallingwater. Wright was a brilliant, voracious, foxy thinker, with happy acolytes in both Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and his son Edgar Jr. — Fallingwater’s owners. “Might have beens” include a chapel set in a rhododendron forest and a parking garage with a Space Age look.

The best part of the exhibition involves animated videos. Good, bad, and, I have to say, ugly, was a suite of Usonian cardboard chairs that Wright designed. Historic, yes. Intriguing, yes. Comfortable? Make mine a Barcalounger. Still, I recommend this fun, clever, and speculative look at Wright, a gift that keeps on giving.

The National Building Museum isn’t part of the Smithsonian. It’s a privately run nonprofit created in 1980 as a museum of architecture, urban planning, engineering, and construction. It’s located in the magnificent Renaissance Revival temple to pensions, built in the 1880s to house the U.S. Pension Bureau. The building was also meant to host Washington social events, none splashier than the Inaugural Balls, starting with Grover Cleveland’s 1892 bash. Each quadrennial ball was — and still is — designed to outdo the one before it. Though inspired by the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, the building’s splendor is the stuff of Augustus, Diocletian, and Maxentius. The 1,200-foot-long terra-cotta frieze outside salutes the Union infantry, medical corps, Navy, cavalry, and quartermaster and artillery units.

The museum’s board is mostly architects, engineers, and construction executives. That’s good. They know how to make things happen, especially things that need to last. This includes ideas. Nonprofit boards, especially in the arts and in education, are concrete-weight-heavy with financial-services people. This is far from ideal. This cohort as well as lawyers surely have many talents, but building things and running things aren’t often among them.