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The FBI is relocating its headquarters from the J. Edgar Hoover Building to the Ronald Reagan Building, after decades in one of D.C.’s most polarizing examples of brutalist architecture.
FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media Friday that the FBI’s main headquarters will be leaving the J. Edgar Hoover Building and moving a few blocks down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Ronald Reagan Building, something first announced back in July.
That means our long national nightmare is nearly over.
The Hoover building marked its 50th anniversary back in September, and since then, it’s been called everything from an eyesore to one of the ugliest buildings in the world.
While President Richard Nixon personally directed the building to be named after the FBI’s first and longest director J. Edgar Hoover, two days after Hoover’s death in 1972, it was another commander-in-chief who was responsible for the building itself and its style.
“JFK actually commissioned this idea of a style of federal architecture,” Caitlin Bristol, the National Building Museum’s director of exhibition development, told WTOP. “Patrick Moynihan wrote this sort of treatise about what federal architecture should be at the time, and that’s when a lot of these buildings sprung up.”
Bristol said brutalist buildings were economical and quick to construct, compared to the neoclassical grand buildings like the U.S. Capitol and White House.
During the Building Museum’s exhibit on the brutalist architecture in D.C., she said the Hoover building was the most polarizing.
“People have a lot of feelings about the Hoover building,” Bristol said. “A lot of reasons people are conflicted about brutalism are that they are very stark, they are very heavy. Sometimes, there is not a lot of light or air movement. They are very severe looking.”
On Sept. 30, 1975, President Gerald Ford dedicated the 2.8 million-square-foot building that covers more than 6.5 acres to the FBI’s first and longest director.
Shortly after the Hoover building was completed, it did not receive kind reviews, and a certain word kept being mentioned: ‘drab’.
Whether it was from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Paul Gapp from the Chicago Tribune, who described it as “Federal Drab,” or The Washington Post’s Wolf Von Eckardt, who not only said it was a “perfect stage set for a dramatization of George Orwell’s ‘1984’,” but described the interior as “a drab factory with harsh light, endless corridors, hard floors and no visual relief.”
While not as grand as many of the other buildings in the nation’s capital, that did not stop tourists from wanting to visit.
At one point, the Hoover building would receive a half million people a year for tours. The FBI even met with executives from Disney, seeking guidance on how to handle the big crowds.
The link to take the FBI Experience tour is still working, but reservations must be booked a month in advance.
It’s still unclear what will happen to the decades-old building, but it will remain one of the most talked-about architectural designs in D.C.
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Jimmy Alexander
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