By Rich Lowry
Synicated Columnist
Blow up Washington, D.C.’s brutalist buildings, and the sooner, the better
There’s a reason God created dynamite. The brutalist federal buildings that have blighted Washington, D.C., for decades deserve the same fate as Carthage after the Third Punic War, and the nation’s capital is finally beginning to move on from these concrete monstrosities.
The Department of Housing and Urban and Development just announced that it is leaving its god-awful headquarters in Washington for a less hideous space in Northern Virginia. HUD Secretary Scott Turner has described the structure as “the ugliest building in D.C.,” which is a dubious claim only because there are so many other buildings in Washington that compete for that distinction. He’s not the first HUD secretary to hate the building. Jack Kemp called it “10 floors of basement.”
Meanwhile, the FBI is also departing its HQ, designated by the U.K. building materials retailer Buildworld as the ugliest building in the United States and the second ugliest in the world.
The moves are in keeping with the spirit of President Trump’s executive order stipulating that federal buildings should “respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”
That EO should be considered common sense, but has several trigger words for defenders of the architectural status quo, including “traditional,” “classical” and, perhaps foremost of all, “beautify.” In response, the American Institute of Architects expressed its “strong concerns that mandating architecture styles stifles innovation and harms local communities.”
According to The Nation magazine, Trump’s initiative is part of an agenda to “make historical architecture on the whole inextricable from Eurocentric white supremacy.” In short, it’s an unforgivable offense to want a government building to look nice.
Brutalism, with its blocky, minimalist structures made of poured concrete, was a creation of a post-war Europe that wanted to embrace the fresh and new and to economize on rebuilding. Although the name “brutalism” perfectly captures the aesthetic effect, it actually comes from the French for “raw concrete,” “beton brut.”
To be sure, concrete is extremely important to modern life, but no one has ever said, “Oh, it’s so elegant and uplifting.” The brutalist buildings in Washington were largely built between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, an era of grievous architectural mistakes, including cookie-cutter multiple-purpose baseball stadiums and modernist Catholic churches. The buildings never had a heyday, but were hated when they were erected and are still hated now.
The seedbed of the trend was a Kennedy administration commission that advocated contemporary designs and said — laughably, in retrospect — that federal architecture should “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American national government.”
Instead, the brutalist buildings speak of a lumbering bureaucracy with no regard for the sensibilities or priorities of ordinary people. They are about what you’d expect if a DMV were headquartered in a maximum-security prison or in a massive pillbox.
The buildings could easily be used as stage sets for docudramas about East Germany. They are a tribute to soulless monumentality and a gut punch to the human spirit. If they don’t eventually get a well-deserved appointment with a wrecking ball, they should be donated to North Korea.
The original justifications of brutalism no longer apply. The buildings aren’t new anymore, and aren’t cheap. They haven’t aged well in any sense, not aesthetically or functionally. The FBI building is literally falling apart, and the expense of maintaining the HUD building has become ruinous.
Defenders of the brutalist buildings say that they are now part of our heritage and should be preserved as such. That’s not fair, though, to the people who have to work in them, or who walk or drive by them every day. They are a net subtraction to the D.C. landscape and to human happiness. If one of them has to be kept for historical reasons, it should be made into a Smithsonian museum devoted to idiotic fads that were indulged for much too long.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.