Brutally Ugly or Brutally Misunderstood?
People either love or hate DC's concrete, Brutalist buildings. A new exhibition asks whether they're misunderstood & brings in architects to reimagine the polarizing spaces. I speak with the curators.
In the early 2000s, a major fight in Washington, D.C. was heating up.
This fight was not in the halls of Congress, but over a concrete, octagonal church at the corner of 16th and I Street NW.
The congregants of Third Church of Christ, Scientist hated the design of their church. The brutalist building had been described as rude, ugly, and uncivilized. It was also costing more money to keep up and their dwindling congregation couldn’t swing it. Its prime location, two blocks from the White House, meant that it could bring in huge money with a real estate sale. But the concrete building also had a landmark preservation status, restricting the few options the owners had left.
The church had been controversial before it even opened its doors. Designed by I.M. Pei’s partner Araldo Cossutta in the late 60s and completed in 1971, the seven-story tower was derided as “rude,” “militaristic” and a “chubby pillbox.”
Wolf Von Eckardt, reviewing it for the Washington Post in 1970, took particular issue with how close the imposing structure would be to the White House: “any building that takes part in this event requires some architectural decorum.”
And though he couldn’t see the interior of the unbuilt church just yet, that didn’t quite matter:
“There isn’t anything wrong with wearing blue jeans either. But it would be very bad manners to wear them to a formal White House dinner- whether what is inside them is beautiful or not.”
What Von Eckardt missed was a lot of intention behind Cossutta’s decisions. The octagonal shape was inspired by the famous octagonal Baptistry in Florence. The round interior was meant to symbolize the unity and community of the congregation. The skylight around the ceiling’s perimeter funneled shifting streams of light which “intensifies the feeling of spirituality.” And Cossutta’s initial preference for an exterior faced in marble or granite was abandoned for the less expensive concrete.
In 1991, a group filed a petition with the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) to give the church landmark status. They cited its significance because it was designed by an architectural firm that “has contributed significantly to the cultural heritage of both the national capital and the nation” and because the church “admirably embodies the distinguishing characteristics of postwar modern architecture.”
The HPRB unanimously approved its landmark status. But by 2007, the congregation, which already hated the church, had enough. They said it was too expensive and difficult to maintain. The church brought in less money than it cost to operate. You had to “build scaffolding just to reach some of the bulbs.” The exterior had “chronic and recurring” problems, possibly due to “defective workmanship.”
The congregants filed a lawsuit to break the landmark status. They wanted this church gone.
After a series of back-and-forths, Harriet Tregoning, the Director of the Office of Planning and Mayor’s Agent for Historic Preservation, sided with the congregants.
Her decision made clear that she too saw the church as an architectural failure:
“Although the Church’s present predicament results from design choices it agreed to, albeit reluctantly, those choices were made in the hope of achieving breakthrough architecture. To force this congregation to live with, and almost certainly die as a result of the failure of its experiment would dissuade others from choosing the novel over the mundane.”
Cossutta’s church was destroyed in 2014. Though The Third Church of Christ, Scientist is no longer, more than 40 Brutalist buildings still stand in the nation’s capital, many of which are government office buildings. And they are still divisive as ever. Should the be admired or destroyed?
“Imposing Monsters”
The Brutalist buildings that dot the DC landscape are highly structural pieces. They are perhaps best recognized by exposed, raw concrete exteriors (the word “Brutalist” comes from the French “béton brut,” meaning raw concrete).
Brutalism is an extension of modernism that became popular in post-War Europe as a way to quickly and cheaply rebuild cities that had been destroyed. In the mid-1900s America, they were often chosen as the design for urban renewal projects. The projects in themselves are controversial, as thousands of long-time residents were displaced and their homes razed to make space for these “imposing monsters” of buildings.
Dr. Angela Person, a cultural geographer & professor at the University of Oklahoma, understands why people have an aversion to the style, but thinks many don’t appreciate the “optimism it represented in the post-war moment,” she said.
In 2012, while working on her Ph.D dissertation on the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a brutalist art museum beside the National Mall, she came across the work of Ty Cole, an architectural photographer who was trying to show-off Brutalist buildings in a different light.
He found that photographs of these structures were typically being showcased as dystopian.
“Photographers were presenting it in a really negative way. And I wanted to change that the way I shot it, because I really wanted to be positive,” he said.
Person reached out to Cole and they bonded over their passion for these hulking buildings.
More than ten years after Brutalism brought these collaborators together, they have opened a new exhibition in the National Building Museum that explores the city’s style of buildings. “Capital Brutalism” takes a closer look at these concrete structures and asks: might we find a way to love these polarizing places and to live with them into the future?
“Capital Brutalism”
Seven polarizing Brutalist buildings take center stage in this exhibition.
“What we’re trying to do with the exhibition is help people see these buildings in a new light,” Person told me in an interview recently. “They're here, they're aging, and it's a pivotal moment to decide: what are we going to do with them?”
The FBI Headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building is one of the most hated buildings in the world; last year, a ranking by Buildworld named the building the “Ugliest in America.”
Person said it’s not just aesthetic aversion that haters have for this building; there’s genuine generational trauma as well.
“Tens of thousands of folks, primarily African American and immigrant populations, were removed from these neighborhoods, and then in their place emerged, in many cases, these brutalist buildings,” she said. “There’s a lot of generational, neighborhood-level trauma that exists as part of the historical narrative. I don’t feel comfortable ever discounting that as one important reason that people don’t love these buildings.”
Where Person adds the historical context for the neighborhoods, the architects, and the Brutalist movement, Cole focuses on the present with his photographs and tries offer a vantage point people might not have traditionally considered.
“These buildings tend to have a looming presence when you’re approaching it from the pedestrian standpoint,” Cole said. “Softening them makes a huge difference.” That, he says, inspires his style of photographing.
Reimagining the Brutal
With these buildings aging, what does that mean for their future? It can be costly to renovate them. The anti-Brutalists will surely put these buildings in the crosshairs of destruction, if given the chance. But what does that mean for preserving a period of work or a historical government building, no matter how “ugly” some people might find it?
Perhaps reimagining them would breathe new life in the buildings… and bring new enthusiasm for Brutalism.
Cole came up with the idea of commissioning different architecture firms to tackle each building and conceptualize all the future potential it has. He also thought it might push back on the “broken window effect;” the idea that people don’t take care of what they feel like is broken.
Gensler, an architecture firm based in New York took up “the ugliest building”: the FBI Headquarters.
They took a “hackable building” philosophy to the two-million square foot building by “updating it beyond recognition” and incorporating “ a diverse mix of uses within the building.
That means the roof would house a soccer field and a garden. Other parts of the headquarters would be turned into hotel rooms, as more employees work remotely. They also want to make the behemoth “penetrable” and more inviting to people outside.
Studio Gang took up the Forrestal Building, which houses the Department of Energy.
The firm said the 760-foot bar of the building gives an “all-or-nothing impression: as if it must either stay frozen in time forever, despite its deficiencies, or be completely demolished to make way for something new.”
Instead, they took a third route: take out the middle of the building, splicing one building into two. The new edges would allow for light to come in. As for the middle section? That can be repurposed elsewhere, such as new residential spaces.
“This is probably one of the most hated buildings in DC,” Person said. “Studio Gang removed this very controversial segment of the building, which softens its presence and makes it feel a little bit more human-scale.”
Cole’s favorite rendering is BLDUS’s whimsical reinvention of the Humphrey Building, which houses the General Services Administration. The Marcel Breuer building will no longer house a bureaucratic government office, but rather a new cabinet sector: the Department of Play, housed in the Temple of Play.
Pyramidal new builds would allow space for slides and creative ways to get in between floors.
The architects hoped that this new cabinet position would “fundamentally reorient the perspectives of Americans toward play and happiness.”
The Future of Concrete
New York-based architect and interior designer Clive Lonstein says that Brutalism, architecturally, is ripe for a renaissance.
“In terms of interior design, Brutalism is very well appreciated,” Lonstein said. “It’s really translated into some beautiful pieces of furniture and furnishings, which are very popular.” He said that side tables of concrete, structural lamps, sofas that mix hard with soft, are popular and Brutalist-inspired.
“I think that if people can appreciate something on the interior, where you sit and live with it, that can translate into the architecture and the exteriors.”
Lonstein thinks part of the problem, like Person and Cole, is the way it was presented.
“Often, there’s no landscaping around them. They were not done in a way that softened or showcased them nicely. Creating a different environment can show off the beauty of these buildings,” he said.
Still, changing the landscape around them isn’t easy, quick or cost effective.
But it might be cheaper in the long-run than destroying the structures and re-building them from the ground up. And it certainly will be more environmentally friendly.
“I think that when we're looking at federal buildings where taxpayer money was used to construct them, I think it's really important to advocate that they’re part of the historical fabric of our country,” Person said.
“I think it's important to preserve as many of these buildings as we can, especially because, as many of the architects who've done the reimaginings have pointed out, they have good bones, they have big floor plans, they're highly adaptable…. there’s a strong incentive to appreciate and reuse them.”
Then, there’s also a question that Cole posed: “if you tear it down, what goes in its place?”
I look at the FBI all the time. I envision each square a series of crayon colors, changing with the day,night, light, seasons. They’ve put up so many blackout curtains I can no longer catch glimpses of the people who gave it humanity. One winter night, a heavy snow falling, I was sure I saw a woman at a window waiting for her ride. It was only a well coated coat tree. Mystery behind the curtains. I hope it doesn’t leave.