Trump Administration is Leaving Two Brutalist Office Buildings in Washington: Both Should Be Demolished

There's a reason God created dynamite.

Rich Lowry 

It's official. Washington, DC is home to some of the ugliest government buildings on the planet. 

Build World, a global design company, recently analyzed some of the world's worst architectural eyesores and decreed that the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI headquarters in Washington, is the ugliest building in America and the second ugliest in the world. 

J. Edgar Hoover Building

However, the J. Edgar Hoover Building has competition as the nation's top eyesore. Newly appointed HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the Robert C. Weaver Building, HUD's headquarters, is the ugliest in the nation's capital.

HUD Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Both buildings are Brutalist structures, representing a soulless, depressing architectural style that was fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. At the theoretical level, Brutalism championed "functionality, honesty, and social purpose," but the structures themselves mostly look like concrete, maximum security prisons.

The Trump administration plans to move government workers out of both buildings and sell them. However, decommissioning these monstrousities is not enough because they will remain a blight on the landscape of our nation's capital.

Rich Lowery, a syndicated columnist, believes both buildings should be blown up. "There's a reason God created dynamite, " he wrote, and I agree.

I worked as a professor for six years in Farish Hall, a forboding concrete building at the University of Houston.  I didn't know at the time that I had been assigned to a Brutalist building, but I knew on a subconscious level that I was spending my days in a dispiriting, oppressive, and prison-like environment.

Farish Hall at the University of Houston

I was pleased to learn that the University plans to demolish Farish Hall this year and will not replace it. That's a good start, but UH has other Brutalist buildings, and all of them should be razed. Agnes Arnold Hall, for example, where three students have leaped to their deaths, is nearly as ugly as Farish Hall.

Brutalist architecture has its defenders.  Indeed, some critics will praise the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the HUD headquarters simply because Trump wants to scrub them. 

In my view, Brutalist architecture is indefensible. Most Brutalist buildings appear indistinguishable from the Cold War bureaucratic structures of the Soviet Union. These eyesores are contrary to the American spirit, and all of them should be razed. Trump should demolish all the Brutalist government buildings in our nation's capital, and the universities should blow up the obscene Brutalist buildings that deface their campuses. 

What is the ugliest university building in America? I vote for the Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth

90 second movie review: The Brutalist is a fine movie with a few flaws

 The Brutalist, a period drama that takes place in the aftermath of World War II, stars Adrien Brody, who plays a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. Film critics have widely praised the movie, which garnered ten Academy Award nominations and won three Oscars, including Brody's award for Best Actor.

Brody's Oscar is well deserved. Brody plays the character of Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian architect who emigrates from Germany to the United States after surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp.  Traumatized by the Holocaust and separated from his wife, Toth struggles against various obstacles, including antisemitic prejudice, until Harrison Van Buren, a wealthy industrialist played by Guy Pearce, hires him to create a monumental structure in a small Pennsylvania town to commemorate Van Buren'sdeceased mother.

Toth's anguish and pain are perfectly portrayed on Brody's tortured face, along with his pent-up anger, which Toth displays from time to time throughout the film. Indeed, the energy in Brody's performance carries the entire movie.

Nevertheless, The Brutalist has a few flaws. First, the movie is far too long--three and a half hours, so long that it includes an intermission. Gone with Wind needed an intermission. Doctor Zhivago needed an intermission, The Brutalist needed to be shorter.

Second, Director Brady Corbet included some scenes that added nothing to the movie except gratuitous shock value. Van Buren, Toth's wealthy patron, rapes Toth in Italy.  The audience already knew that Van Buren was a creep. The rape scene should have been cut.

Finally, the film's title, The Brutalist,  links Toth's architectural style with Brutalist architecture, but that association was probably unclear to most moviegoers. Perhaps Corbet sensed this and included an epilogue in which Toth's niece explains that Toth's Brutalist architectural design was Toth's way of processing his traumatic experience at Buchenwald. The film would have been stronger if Corbet had connected Toth's trauma to his Brutalist architectural style earlier in the movie.

All told, The Brutalist is a fine movie. Laszlo Toth, Brody's chain-smoking, grief-stricken, agonized character, compellingly displayed the lifelong damage of trauma for those who survive it. Toth drew on his creative architectural talents as a way of coping with his psychic injuries, but, like every victim of profound trauma and violence, he never recovered from the pain. 

Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Photo credit: West Virginia University.