Celebrating Brutalism in Washington, D.C.
WETA Arts recently posted a mini feature on Brutalist architecture in the District, and we’re thrilled to have been a part of it! Take a look on YouTube:
WETA Arts host Felicia Curry discusses architecture with BrutalistDC founder Deane Madsen in this mini feature (via YouTube) that visits the FBI Building, L’Enfant Plaza, and Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, VA.
FBI Building © Ty Cole
The National Building Museum opens Capital Brutalism on June 1, and we couldn’t be more excited! It has long been a dream to have an exhibition on all of the Brutalist buildings DC has to offer, and it’s finally happening, just in time for the 2024 AIA Convention to land in the District.
Exhibition co-curators Angela Person and Ty Cole have put together an amazing show that looks at the past, present, and possible futures of seven local landmarks. Historic images and documents are accompanied by Ty Cole’s new photography as well as a selection of creative reimaginings by leading architecture firms including BLDUS, Brooks + Scarpa, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Gensler, and Studio Gang, along with students from the School of Architecture at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. BrutalistDC founder Deane Madsen consulted on the exhibition and lent several pieces of memorabilia to the show.
Capital Brutalism was first shown (as Brutal DC) at the Southern Utah Museum of Art last winter.
The Hirshhorn Museum is a perennial favorite here at Brutalist DC, and we’re always looking for new angles that accentuate its textural qualities. On this otherwise dreary day, enough water had collected on a wall at the nearby Air & Space Museum that an opportunity for a double Hirshhorn exposure presented itself. With a depth of field that rendered the foreground out-of-focus, the Hirshhorn appears softer in its reflection, allowing its distinct cylindrical form to blur at the edges. This image, drawn from the Brutalist DC Instagram feed and taken by Brutalist DC founder Deane Madsen, took second place in the color category of AIA|Miami’s 2018 Architecture Photography Competition.
See the full set of winners at AIA|Miami.
Brutalism is in the news once again, with founder Deane Madsen appearing on CGTN America to discuss Washington, D.C.’s collection of Brutalism at the Hirshhorn Museum. CGTN reporter Owen Fairclough surveys the deep catalogue of D.C.’s Brutalist buildings and interviews Madsen about his love of the style. Walking in the courtyard of the Hirshhorn Museum, Madsen praises Brutalism’s texture, materiality, and expression of structure, all of which are on display at the Hirshhorn. Of course, Brutalism is an often misunderstood moniker, as brief snippets with passersby illustrate.
The segment first aired on Oct. 5, 2018. Watch the full clip via CGTN America or below:
Many thanks to Owen Fairclough, Ahmad Coo, and the rest of the CGTN production team for putting all of this together. Thanks also to the gracious Hirshhorn Museum staff for facilitating the filming. A gratuitous selection of screenshots from the segment follows.
photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum
Over the past few years, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum has emerged as one of the main proponents of World Architecture Day in the Washington, D.C. region. This year, the Hirshhorn teams up with the National Building Museum for two full days of programming (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1) to mark the occasion, and, as an endcap to the week, the Hirshhorn will have Brutalist DC founder Deane Madsen for coffee and conversation as part of its Hirshhorn/AM program.
2018 marks the third year running that Brutalist DC has teamed up with the Hirshhorn to celebrate World Architecture Day. Previous collaborations include an IGDC instameet and architecture tour in 2017, and a Walk With Locals meet-up and architecture tour in 2016.
On Tap Magazine recently released its July edition, which focused on design in Washington. BrutalistDC founder Deane Madsen was thrilled to be interviewed by M.K. Koszycki for the issue, an excerpt of which is below:
On Tap: Why is Brutalist architecture so important to the architectural landscape of DC?
Deane Madsen: For one, there’s just so much of it. Look at any satellite image of Southwest DC and you’ll find enormous superblocks of government buildings rendered in concrete: the Department of Energy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, L’Enfant Plaza. Two, most of it arose during an era of urban renewal in Washington. The Brutalist architecture in the District breaks from the traditions of Neoclassical, Federal and Gothic Revival to present buildings constructed at the height of post-war optimism.
OT: What are some common misconceptions about Brutalism and how do you respond to them?
DM: Probably the biggest misconception about Brutalist buildings is that they’re somehow brutal. I sometimes joke that these buildings are not, in fact, out to kill you—chunks of concrete falling off the FBI Building are the result of neglect, not malice. The other default reaction to Brutalism is that it’s ugly. I get it, not everyone appreciates the aesthetic. And there’s no way I’m going to be able to change someone’s taste, but when I’m giving tours of Brutalist buildings, I encourage people to get up close and examine tactile features such as board-formed concrete. On the pairs of columns at the base of HUD, for example, you can actually feel the grain of the wood that was used to form the columns embedded in the concrete. The attention to detail paid to the concrete formwork resounds throughout the rest of the architecture as well, and if I can help people appreciate the architectural effort behind these buildings, perhaps they can also grow to like them.
OT: What led you to create the BrutalistDC Instagram account and website?
DM: Washington has an amazing breadth of architecture, but the city’s government buildings of the 1960s and 1970s—the urban renewal era—are much maligned, and, quite frankly, I was tired of seeing Brutalist buildings top lists of DC’s ugliest. My goal in creating BrutalistDC was to advocate for an underappreciated set of buildings and to show them in ways that highlight their textural beauty.
OT: What are your favorite Brutalist buildings in DC and why?
DM: The Hirshhorn Museum is easily my favorite Brutalist building in D.C., for many reasons, but the foremost is that the staff of the Hirshhorn understands the value of their museum’s architecture, and works hard to maintain, promote, and improve it; a recent lobby renovation stands out as an example of a sensitive addition to an already great space. The Hirshhorn benefits from its prime location at the midpoint of the National Mall, and its diminutive scale relative to the nearby Air & Space Museum and
National Gallery of Art makes for a pleasant respite. The Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden is also perhaps one of D.C.’s best-kept secrets, with shaded greens populated with works by the likes of Auguste Rodin, Barbara Pepper, and Henry Moore, along with more recent acquisitions such as Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin.
Beyond the Hirshhorn, there are plenty of other buildings to love, but I’m especially keen on the architecture of D.C. Metro, which was designed by Harry Weese and opened in 1976. The deeply coffered, column-free vaults evoke the monumental scale of Washington (each station is 600 feet long) while also serving up dramatic—and photogenic—shadows, thanks to lighting designer William Lam.
Read the full article at On Tap Magazine.
In a recent post on Curbed, architecture critic Alexandra Lange dove into the history of the Washington, D.C. Metro (a.k.a. WMATA), finding that its designers envisioned a forward-looking transit system with longstanding appeal. Metro architect Harry Weese and his firm traveled the world studying existing transportation examples, noting details down to the fabric selection of ticket collectors’ uniforms, before returning stateside to design what has become one of D.C.’s most recognizable landmarks. The D.C. Metro system has been celebrated since its 1976 opening for its column-free, Brutalist vaults of concrete, and was the recipient of the AIA 25-Year Award for Architecture in 2014. This spring, D.C. Metro became the focus of controversy discussed elsewhere and on these pages for (in addition to longstanding issues of management, safety, and scheduling) an ill-advised whitewashing of the vaults at its Union Station stop.
Here’s Lisbon. There’s nothing like a drawing for flavor. pic.twitter.com/ECxY419dLp
— Alexandra Lange (@LangeAlexandra) July 5, 2017
One resource Lange studied was a self-published book with a cumbersome title–”For the Glory of Washington: A Chronicle of Events Leading to the Creation of the System-Wide Architectural Concept for the Design of the Washington Metro Stations, December 1965 – November 1967″–by Stanley Allen, who was chairman of Harry Weese Associates at the time. This book chronicles the firm’s deep involvement in the systemwide design of the D.C. Metro system. Lange sifts through accounts of a worldwide subway tour to preliminary sketches to CFA hearings, and links her findings to current stances on infrastructural maintenance across the country:
To honor the people who clean, upgrade, and augment, we have to see transit design as Weese did: distributed across the city, both as a network of connected stations, platforms, and trains, and as a network of connected tasks. Weese and his team identified the problem, but needed the sometimes harsh design critiques of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), “the only federal commission dedicated to design review and aesthetic excellence,” as it says on its website, to create a solution that spoke to place, operations and maintenance.
Maintenance has long plagued the D.C. Metro system. In response to outcry from the architectural community and preservationists over the Union Station paint job, some Metro riders voiced approval for the painting, citing the need for brighter conditions. But underground white paint can only reflect the light that shines on it, besides which, it is a temporary solution–a $100,000 bandage that will need to be re-applied continuously–when upgrades to William Lam’s lighting design, if budget allowed them, would provide a more permanent fix. Again, Lange:
If WMATA had consulted with the CFA or historians, they might have learned that the concrete, if cleaned, with the lighting maintained as Lam intended, would solve the very brightness problems the paint (three coats, easily soiled) provided a short-term solution for. … The paint offers a momentary ‘Ah!’ but the money would be better spent on soap and replacing the lightbulbs with new LEDs—work less likely to be noticed because it’s maintenance.
The purists among supporters of Brutalism note that the style’s moniker stems from béton brut–or, raw concrete–meaning that the paint not only issues a long-term repainting sentence that WMATA seems incapable of serving, but also detracts from the architectural and stylistic integrity of the D.C. Metro.
Former Washington Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey raised a similar outcry in 1992 over the repainting of the Farragut North Metro station, comparing the D.C. Metro’s 600-foot-long, public great halls to classical architecture:
Like much of the city’s above-ground architecture–the barrel vaults in, say, John Russel Pope’s National Gallery West Building or Daniel Burnham’s Union Station–it is based upon classical precedents. But in its forthright expression of structure in those bold concrete vaults, it’s also modern–a shadowy, richly textured space of our own time. There’s no mistaking that the color and texture of the concrete contribute greatly to the architectural effect.
Perhaps Forgey gets to the point quicker: Paint applied to the vaults flattens out the texture for which the D.C. Metro stations and other Brutalist buildings are celebrated, and you don’t solve problems (of lighting, concrete deterioration, or any others) by painting over them.
On the evening of October 2, The Hirshhorn, IGDC, and BrutalistDC will co-host a World Architecture Day sunset tour of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Hirshhorn, which was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and opened in 1974, is a prime example of Brutalist architecture in Washington, D.C., sited at the midpoint between the Capitol and the Washington Monument along the National Mall. Its sunken sculpture garden offers a quiet, shaded refuge from the expansive lawn of the Mall, and the museum was envisioned by Bunshaft to be “a sculpture on the mall.”
From the Going Out Guide listing:
The Smithsonian’s lone brutalist building has affectionately (or derisively) been referred to as a “brutalist doughnut.” The museum will celebrate its round, empty-in-the-middle design on World Architecture Day with free Sugar Shack doughnuts for all visitors, in addition to architecture-focused talks and tours. Highlights include Amanda Kolson Hurley, author of a Washington Post Magazine article on preserving — and improving — brutalist architecture, discussing her story at 12:30 p.m., and @brutalistdc founder Deane Madsen leading an Instagram tour of the building at 6:15 p.m. 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Free.
We hope to see you there!
Read the full Going Out Guide list of upcoming events at The Washington Post.
BrutalistDC will take over the Instagram feed of the Southwest Business Improvement District (@SWBID) on Thursday, October 5. Expect a walking tour starting from the Waterfront Metro and ending at the U.S. Department of Energy.
We plan on covering a lot of ground, and hope to make it to the following buildings, most of which are on the Brutalist Washington Map:
Be sure to follow @SWBID and @BrutalistDC on Instragram to join in.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is once again pulling out all the stops to host a full day of Brutalist programming (and doughnuts!) on World Architecture Day, which falls this year on October 2. Following on the success of last year’s collaboration with WalkWithLocals, BrutalistDC has been invited back for another evening walking tour of the Hirshhorn grounds, starting at 6.15pm.
Here’s the Hirshhorn’s full schedule of #WorldArchitectureDay events:
For kids
10 a.m.: For a special edition of STORYTIME, the museum’s youngest visitors are invited to explore architecture through a read-aloud of Iggy Peck Architect by Andrea Beaty and a hands-on building activity.
For all ages
12:30 p.m.: Architecture specialist Amanda Hurley talks Brutalism and color, expanding on her Washington Post Magazine article arguing in favor of preserving brutalist architecture in Washington.
1–1:10 p.m.: Visitors can witness the motorized magic of “The Project for the Preservation of Natural Resources” as the miniature model—complete with working windmills and running water—comes to life in the exhibition “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects.”
2 p.m.: A Gallery Guide-led tour will explore architecture-inspired art on view, including the fantastical world of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s models in “The Utopian Projects.”
4 p.m.: Kelsey Keith, editor-in-chief of Curbed, debates the good, bad, beautiful and ugly of Brutalism, and the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking design in architecture history.
6:15 p.m.: Deane Madsen (@deane_madsen), former design editor of Architect magazine, will lead an IGDC (@igdc) brutalist Instameet tour #atHirshhorn. Founder of the Instagram account @brutalistdc, Madsen will explore the exterior and lush garden at sunset.
From the Hirshhorn:
Known best for the art displayed within its walls, the Hirshhorn will devote the day to spotlighting its sculptural Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, which opened to the public in 1974. Standing out among the classical buildings of the National Mall, the Hirshhorn—affectionately nicknamed the “Brutalist donut”—is one of the most popular examples of the Brutalist architectural style, which erupted from the 1950s through the 1970s.
For the second year in a row, visitors of all ages can drop by the museum to enjoy complimentary donuts, while supplies last, and partake in a wide-ranging schedule of architecture-themed activities led by Washington-based experts. Architecture, photography and art enthusiasts alike will be drawn in by local Instagram community IGDC to join in appreciating the monumental stature of this much-debated architectural style.
More information is available via The Hirshhorn.