“I was killed i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me,” Polonius cheekily tells Hamlet, alluding to his turn in Julius Caesar. “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there,” is the prince’s impudent reply. The Shakespearean echo in the National Building Museum’s new show on postwar Washingtonian architecture is no less apposite for being, presumably, unintentional: Capital Brutalism, as the exhibition (on view through February 2025) is called, presents an image of DC as a grand political theater, a place of looming set pieces and sweeping exits, of tragedy, certainly, but of comedy as well.
Occupying a modest suite on the second floor of Montgomery C. Meigs’s Italo-bombastic Pension Building of 1887, Capital Brutalism chronicles the city’s decades-long love affair with raw concrete through a selection of seven exemplary projects. Most of these will be familiar, even to out-of-towners just wandering in off the mall: Gordon Bunshaft’s Hirshhorn Museum (1974), Marcel Breuer’s Hubert H. Humphrey Building (opened in 1976 and named after Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president), and Charles F. Murphy’s Hoover Building (home, since 1975, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) all put in an appearance, looking suitably dramatic thanks to striking new portraits by local photographer Ty Cole. Alongside several of the featured buildings, curator Angela Person of the University of Oklahoma has included ingenious if improbable proposals from contemporary practices—Gensler’s makeover of Hoover as a multiuse commercial complex, BLDUS’s reimagining of Humphrey as an Archigram-esque “Temple of Play”—intended to demonstrate that these aging monoliths from the last century still have a place in the current one and ought to be spared the wrecking ball, to which so many have succumbed.
A tragic air permeates the gallery: that of the death of the Great Society dream and the decline of its premier stylistic counterpart. But there’s a lightness here too, especially if one happens to have grown up in the District (as I did) or in any American city where the library, the museum, and all the other civic mainstays of childhood invariably appeared in the form of these friendly, cement-and-aggregate monsters. Those who know the capital know that, while it may have its brute parts, it’s soft at heart.