Review: Why Are Federal Buildings So Ugly?

Developers, please feel free to tear down nearly any building erected during the 1960s and ’70s in the United States. Capital Brutalism, an exhibit on view through February 17 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., amply demonstrates why.

Brutalist buildings are unornamented concrete hulks. Perhaps the most iconic is the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, declared the ugliest building in the U.S. and the second ugliest in the world in a Buildworld survey. As documented in the exhibition, our nation’s capital is pockmarked with many other Brutalist piles.

The Brutalist concrete behemoth home of the Department of Housing and Urban Development arose as part of an “urban renewal” project that displaced some 1,500 businesses and 23,000 residents, comprising primarily African American and immigrant families. Yes: The housing bureaucracy’s headquarters is built on razed homes.

The exhibition asks, “Might we find a way to love these places and to live with them into the future?” Not me. But see this well-crafted show to make up your own mind.

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