
Brutalism in the Nation’s Capital
Brutalism is hard to love—if you’re not an architect, that is. Many of my design colleagues have a special place in their hearts for Brutalism. As objects, Brutalist buildings seem beyond affection: unshakable, uncompromising, unforgiving. To architects, they might represent the talents of many to get exactly the designs they wanted, built without compromise. Who needs to be loved?
“Capital Brutalism,” now on display at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum (and not to be confused with “brutal capitalism,” although there might be a connection), surveys eight Brutalist landmarks in the city where the style flourished in the last half of the 20th century. There must have been something in the D.C. water that was Brutalist fertilizer. Captured by architectural photographer Ty Cole for the exhibition, these specimens revel in their sharp angles, deep shadows, variegated surfaces, and pulverizing scales. If architecture can be sexy, these images are a kind of S&M orgy. Cole captures this architecture without apology, and his pictures are reason enough to pay a visit. In addition to the photographs, there are lots of original working drawings, construction photos, material samples, and—maybe the best part—architectural criticisms of these behemoths that would curl your hair.
So what is Brutalism, anyway? The exhibit catalog, produced by curators Angela M. Person and Cole, defines it as an extension of modernism that “emphasized exposed structural elements and building materials, including concrete, brick, steel, and glass.” Brutalism is known for the starkness of its concrete composition—in fact, the style’s moniker comes from the French “beton brut,” which translates as “raw concrete.” This description tells us what Brutalism is made of, but I don’t think it quite captures the architectural style’s devastating impact: alienating, scaleless, cold, indifferent to the humans that move around and within it. You could make Brutalism out of waffles and get the same effect. I studied architecture in D.C., and when I first visited what was then the Soviet Union, I discovered that Brutalism was truly an international style that spanned capitalism and communism. How was this possible, I wondered. Some of the same kinds of buildings were in Moscow and Washington. I concluded that it had something to do with bureaucracy.

One of the earliest Brutalist buildings in Washington was the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, by Marcel Breuer & Associates, et al., better known as the HUD Building and completed in 1968. It is situated in southwest D.C. by the subterranean I-395 spur. There is something so appropriate about this juxtaposition: Brutalist architecture and highways skewering urban centers (as interstates do in nearly every city in North America). Read again the catalog description of Brutalism, and you will find that it does not differ all that much from an elevated interstate. In many cases, as the exhibition points out, they went hand-in-hand. The site for the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (emphasis mine) was made possible by scraping existing Black neighborhoods, where thousands of people lived (“urban renewal” or “slum clearance,” in the parlance of the day, depending on the audience). The exhibition points out that many Brutalist federal buildings crushed the homes of the poor and powerless.
At first, the critics loved it. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of Breuer’s building, “The house that HUD built is a handsome, functional structure that adds quality design and genuine 20th-century style to a city badly in need of both.” In dedicating the building, Lyndon Johnson called it “bold and beautiful.” The next year, Breuer won the AIA’s Gold Medal. Later “critics”—people who actually worked in the building—had other impressions. In 2009, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said it was “among the most reviled in all of Washington—and with good reason.” I spent many an hour inside HUD headquarters when consulting with the department in the late 1990s. The hallways were windowless and completely baffling in terms of getting one’s bearings. The architecture rang true to HUD Secretary Jack Kemp’s description: “Ten floors of basement.”
The year following HUD, another federal Brutalist structure, the Forrestal Building, by lead architect David R. Dibner, opened to concern about its unrelenting, elevated mass that stretches across 10th Street SW like a concrete billboard, blocking views from L’Enfant Plaza to the National Mall. This time, Huxtable was not impressed. Years before it was actually finished, she called it “large, dull, clumsy.”

Some people look like their dogs, or their spouses. The J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue will forever bear a resemblance to its namesake. Designed by C.F. Murphy Associates and completed in 1974, the nearly 3-million-square-foot headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has the same features as its most infamous leader: repugnant, ominous, menacing; a complexion of concrete with limestone aggregate. According to the exhibition catalog, a 2023 international survey by Buildworld named the Hoover Building the ugliest building in the U.S. and the second ugliest in the world (behind the Scottish Parliament Building, a monstrosity of an entirely different kind).
The FBI landed on two city blocks, wiping out more than a hundred small businesses. Nat Owings (the O in SOM), who at the time chaired the President’s Pennsylvania Avenue Advisory Council, tried to humanize the design, advocating for retail space along the sidewalk. The FBI said that was a security risk. Huxtable delivered a lame assessment two years before construction was even complete, claiming that its potentially “deadly mass” had been “skillfully rearranged into visually defined structural and functional parts.”
Sorry, what?
In the next sentence, she took it all back: “Even so, it will look like a modern dinosaur. Washington is the great architectural boneyard.” Then–Washington Post architecture critic Wolf von Eckart was more on the mark, deeming the Hoover Building the “perfect stage set for a dramatization of George Orwell’s 1984.”

But it isn’t all bad. The exhibition includes a piece of infrastructure that has become an architectural icon for the nation’s capital: the Metro subway system. The impetus for the Metro was a reaction to the wholesale destruction of D.C. neighborhoods in order to build interstate highways, and the resulting pushback by Blacks and whites alike to create a mass-transit alternative. Metro’s design, by Chicago-based architect Harry Weese, was a bit of genius. Instead of a forest of steel columns and beams common in older subway systems, Weese created great arching, coffered concrete barrel vaults that span over and beyond the entire space of a Metro station and its platforms. Indirect lighting from below the spring lines of the vaults and reflecting off their surfaces give the stations an ethereal quality—Weese described it as “cathedral-like.” I hesitate to call Weese’s Metro stations Brutalist for the very reason that they have a finely tuned scale. They also resonate with the city’s pervasive Neoclassical architecture. They “fit” the context of D.C. in ways that no other building in this exhibition does. And Weese saw the Metro as providing fitting public spaces that should edify: “We wanted people to be respectful of their surroundings and of each other.” That’s what architecture should do.

Running like a golden thread through “Capital Brutalism” is a series of suggested reworks by contemporary designers as antidotes to Washington’s Brutalist barrage. Gensler makes the FBI’s Hoover Building into a “hackable” edifice: an existing structure that’s updated beyond recognition through targeted removal of building elements plus the inclusion of new uses and spaces: a more porous structure with a soccer field on the roof, big-box retail, and a hotel. Breuer’s dour Humphrey building, completed in 1977 (and one of his last) has been reimagined by the Washington-based architecture firm BLDUS as the “Temple of Play” for the newly created U.S. “Department of Play,” dedicated to “fundamentally reorienting the perspectives of Americans toward play and happiness.” The redesign takes Breuer’s design and adds even more space to accommodate “slides, climbing facilities, affordable dining, and other amenities.”
Looks like a lot of fun. Should we paint a mustache on every Brutalist building?
Feature image: DC Metro. All photos by Ty Cole, unless otherwise noted.