Donald Trump has it in for Brutalism

MARCEL marcel lajos breuer loved concrete. His way of life with the stuff made him famous. His plan for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), in Washington, DC, landed on the National Register of Historic Places less for its curious layout—which resembles a headless person doing the spreadeagle—than its distinction as the first federal building made of precast concrete. Today, its occupants like it rather less. HUD employees call it ten floors of basement. They complain of black mould and toilets that rarely flush. One of the elevator banks hasn’t worked in months. “Welcome to Club HUD,” sighs a weary officegoer.

Donald Trump has little love for federal employees and even less for HUD, whose mission is to provide poor people with housing. But on the subject of its Brutalist headquarters (pictured above and twice more below), he and its staff seem to agree: after half a century the time has come to abandon it. Earlier this year the Trump administration said it would sell the building, along with three other federal properties in the capital managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that oversees the government’s property portfolio.

Then came a twist. In December a former GSA official alleged in court that the Trump administration really intends to demolish the buildings. The government denies this. But preservationists, caught off guard by Mr Trump’s surprise tearing-down of the East Wing of the White House to build a new ballroom, are sounding the alarm. They worry that he will bypass the capital’s onerous preservation rules and public-consultation requirements just as he did with the East Wing. They are especially worried about the fate of some New Deal-era murals in one of the four properties. The iconic HUD building, they note, informed a Brutalist spree across the city, including the metro.

Preservationists have public opinion on their side in the ballroom fiasco. Footage of the demolition blanketed the news for days and the president’s approval rating took a hit. Brutalism, characterised by hulking, exposed concrete, is a different story. Popular in the 1960s because its main material was cheap, it has been called the movement the public loves to hate and architects dare to love. Also: a style of the “bombproof blockhouse”, “willful, preventable ugliness”, “hostile to human life”, “neo-penitentiary”. Brutalist architects’ mark on Washington includes the headquarters of the FBI. Even the bureaucrat who approved that design described it, in 1967, as “the scariest thing going up in the city”.

Mr Trump has nixed anything resembling Brutalism in future federal commissions. The style’s admirers see his attack, perhaps breathlessly, as an assault on the post-war welfare state itself. Monumental in ambition, Brutalist buildings celebrate the collective good over the individual, they say: everything anathema to Mr Trump.

Less is said about the buildings’ disrepair and lack of functionality, and the fact that retrofitting them is awfully expensive. Washington’s office market is still in the post-covid doldrums, meaning leasing new space is probably cheaper anyway. Several years ago Congress created the Public Buildings Reform Board to find ways to shrink the federal portfolio amid billions of dollars of deferred maintenance costs and low occupancy rates. Dan Mathews, a board member, says private landlords could never have got away with underinvestment as the government has. Nobody would lease these offices on the private market.

Meanwhile the real-estate crowd is largely gung-ho at the prospect of their demolition, not merely their sale, since conversions would probably cost more than new construction. Like HUD, the health and energy departments occupy Brutalist buildings steps from the Mall. The offices themselves are a “liability”; the value is in the land, says Doug Firstenberg, a developer who talks of south-west DC’s potential as a “mixed-use” neighbourhood for retail and residential. Richard Levy, another developer, says facing-down preservationists is arduous but doable. He spent eight years fighting them in court to turn a decommissioned GSA heating plant in Georgetown into a building of Four Seasons flats. He drew resolve from an I Ching quotation on his wall that reads: “Perseverance furthers”.

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