As The Scrapbook briefly noted in February, the new offices of The Weekly Standard have afforded us a front-row seat to the ongoing demolition of the Washington Post building. The old Post building site, we should report, is now a mere hole in the ground—the Post itself moved a few blocks away—and work on a successor structure is in the archaeological phase. But reference to the now-pulverized structure as “the old Post building” got The Scrapbook thinking: By any measure, the old Post building really wasn’t so old (it opened in 1972) yet it had long outlived its usefulness. And it was generally regarded as a local eyesore.
Which is why The Scrapbook noticed a recent Post story on another subject, to wit: the governors of neighboring Maryland (Larry Hogan, R) and Virginia (Terry McAuliffe, D) are competing against one another to land the future headquarters of the FBI in their states. The Scrapbook has no horse in this particular race, but our attention was drawn to a stray sentence in the story: “For more than a decade,” the Post reports, “the FBI has been pushing for a new headquarters to replace the dated and crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington.”
Dated? Crumbling? The FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue (opened in 1975) is even younger than its cousin the Post monstrosity—indeed, a couple of centuries younger than some of the better-known public structures in the nation’s capital, including the Capitol—but there seems to be a consensus that it has to go. The Scrapbook suspects the reason is not that the FBI building is “dated,” whatever that means, or even “crumbling,” which we can well imagine; but because it is manifestly, obtrusively, ostentatiously ugly, 1970s-style.
The pertinent fact of modern Washington’s appearance is that the two great growth spurts of the federal government—the 1930s/40s and the 1960s/70s—coincided with two very distinct architectural epochs. The Washington of the New Deal idealized the nation’s past, especially its Founding era, and so the great majority of federal structures built in that time were pleasingly neoclassical by design. In contrast, the Washington of the New Frontier and Great Society looked toward an undefined future, and the architecture of that turbulent period reflects it.
And what hideous architecture it is! From the stark concrete boxes of L’Enfant Plaza near Capitol Hill to the great blank tidal waves of masonry that contain HUD and Labor and assorted lesser agencies, not to mention the bland, box-like John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts along the Potomac, the graceful aesthetic of old Washington was succeeded some decades ago by one brutalist bunker after another, altering the city’s landscape from an echo of history to the set of a bad science-fiction serial.
The Scrapbook has always looked favorably on architectural preservation, and still does. But having suffered through the demolition spree of the 1960s and ’70s, we admit to a certain satisfaction at this moment of nemesis. Indeed, the patience of long-suffering Washington is being rewarded: Now that old Post building is an unhappy memory, and the looming FBI slab will soon be another. Even the glowering 1971 cement tower that housed the Christian Science Center near the White House is a thing of the past.
Is the Kennedy Center dated and crumbling? Keep the wrecking ball rolling!
