“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 pre…