After nearly half a century of occupation, the FBI is preparing to leave its historic headquarters in Washington. FBI Director Kash Patel announced a few days ago the permanent closure of the J. Edgar Hoover building and the move of the agency’s headquarters to other premises. The FBI will move its employees to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, a nearby federal complex on Pennsylvania Avenue that houses U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Part of the staff will notably occupy the offices of USAID, the American Agency for International Development, today partly emptied due to teleworking and especially the dismantling of the agency. Quite a symbol.
Designed by American architect Charles Murphy, the J. Edgar Hoover Building was completed in 1975. It is part of a massive brutalism characteristic of post-war federal architecture, and covers 260,000 m². Since its inauguration, it has attracted strong criticism for its aesthetics considered austere. Former FBI Director John Edgar Hoover himself called him “largest monstrosity ever built in Washington”.
The future headquarters of the FBI, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, has an area of 290,000 m2.
The building is now dilapidated: nets are installed to catch falling pieces of concrete, and several urgent renovations are required. According to the federal administration, this building “has accumulated years of deferred maintenance, from obsolete water pipes to chunks of concrete breaking away from the structure”. The journalist Wolf Von Eckardt of Washington Post described this building as“dull factory with harsh lighting, endless corridors, hard floors and no visual relief”.
The hypothesis of a renovation was deemed economically unviable according to the administration. An internal audit estimated that it will be cheaper to demolish it and build a new building than to restore it. This logic goes beyond the case of the FBI and concerns federal brutalist buildings more broadly: the heavy maintenance of the materials (prestressed concrete) quickly becomes prohibitive. Thus the renovation of James V. Forrestal, headquarters of the Department of Energy (Washington DC), is estimated at $500 million.
For several decades, however, the building was open to the public (half a million visitors annually) and was even the subject of a tourist guide because of its fame – for better or for worse. This debate illustrates a larger dilemma: many modernist or brutalist buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are now being called into question.
In Dallas (Texas), the City Hall designed by Ieoh Ming Pei is today threatened with demolition. This concrete building in the shape of an inverted pyramid, symbol of brutalist Dallas, suffers the same economic argument: rehabilitation would cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, higher than replacing it. Preservation organizations (Docomomo US) denounce the prioritization of “economic development” over the conservation of modern heritage.
