Few people hated the looks of the Washington headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation more than the man it was named after.
J. Edgar Hoover “thought the architecture of that particular building was the greatest monstrosity ever constructed in the history of Washington,” then-Sen. Ernest Hollings said on the day the longtime director of the FBI died in 1972, five years after construction began and two years before it was finally fit to be occupied.
The headquarters – like its namesake and the institution it houses – is bold and quite intimidating, its long rows of monochrome, square windows like dozens of eyes peering out over Pennsylvania Avenue.
“It would make a perfect stage set for a dramatization of George Orwell’s ‘1984,’” groused Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt when the building was dedicated in 1975.
“The idea that the building was obsolete and the FBI needed to move out of it has been discussed for over a decade,” said Thomas Luebke, secretary of the US Commission of Fine Arts, a century-old agency that reviews and gives recommendations on proposed designs for DC government buildings.
Now, after more than a decade of continual fits and starts, with plans dropped and money pulled back, the Trump administration says it is time for the FBI to make its move.
“We are ushering FBI Headquarters into a new era and providing our agents of justice a safer place to work,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement earlier this month.
The bureau – the hub of federal law enforcement and domestic surveillance in the US that traces its roots back to 1908 – will move just three blocks west to the Ronald Reagan Building, a facility completed in 1998 and the youngest of Pennsylvania Avenue’s major government office buildings, said Patel. It is a facility that can take on more staff as it was previously home to the US Agency for International Development, the American foreign aid organization dismantled by the Trump administration, whose remnants are being absorbed into the State Department.
It is likely to be only a first step, as the president has indicated he wants to tear down the Hoover Building and put a new FBI headquarters on the same site, an idea he pushed for in 2018 during his first term.
The Trump administration has not yet given a timeframe for the move, nor the future of the building. It’s unclear what’s next for a structure that started out as part of an urban renewal project and is now considered by many to be a capital eyesore.
FBI workers began moving into the building in 1974, before construction was even completed, but its history dates all the way back to the Kennedy administration. President John F. Kennedy was disturbed by the urban blight on Pennsylvania Avenue just a few blocks from the White House and made it a priority to bring a new life to the downtrodden section of the nation’s capital.
“JFK’s inaugural parade passed by that stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1961, and I think Kennedy was really caught off-guard by how sort of dilapidated it was,” said Angela M. Person, associate dean of the Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.
“The north side (of Pennsylvania Avenue) presents a scene of desolation; block after block of decayed nineteenth century buildings,” a committee organized by Kennedy told the president in 1962.
The council’s lofty recommendations – including a two-block “national square” leading to the White House with a 150-foot-wide fountain – were never implemented, but the need to bring the neighborhood back to life was widely accepted.
By the 1960s, the FBI had staff spread over nine separate locations in Washington. Bringing bureau operations under its own roof – an idea that was first proposed before World War II – became intertwined with the effort to modernize the space east of the White House.
The reconceptualize Pennsylvania Avenue came at the same time designers were reimagining government buildings. Many settled on Brutalism, a style based on an imposing, block-like design rooted in its main tool of construction: concrete.
“Brutalism’s use of concrete – a solid, durable, and economical material – made it an appealing contemporary style to provide government agencies with efficient facilities that designers believed represented the stability of the American government,” says the National Capital Planning Commission.
But the visual result was stark, producing an FBI Headquarters building composed largely of tan-and-black squares looming over the sidewalk, broken up by an 11-story rear section built on massive supports.
“It is awkward imagery, to say the least,” said one of the more muted descriptions in The New York Times as the building was dedicated. Acclaimed DC architect Arthur Cotton Moore was less generous.
“It creates a void along Pennsylvania Avenue,” he told the Washingtonian in 2005. “Given its elephantine size and harshness, it creates a black hole.”
Although it was imagined as only one part of a larger effort to modernize the nation’s main street, the Hoover Building was ultimately the only major project to come out of Kennedy’s vision.
“With exception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Building, major physical changes along the avenue resulting from the Kennedy initiative were never realized,” a report from the National Park Service says.
That meant the foreboding structure named after one of the most feared men in Washington became even more of an architectural standout on the grand avenue between the White House and the Capitol.
“It dominates its part of downtown Washington, but is alien to the spirit of the capital and the architecture of Pennsylvania Avenue,” Von Eckhardt said in his brutal takedown of the Brutalist structure.
To reach the main entrance, visitors must ascend concrete steps that rise over a manicured ditch that the government refers to as a “dry moat,” an effort to secure the building from vehicle crashes in an age before security bollards and reinforced planters became standard issue at federal buildings.
Rethinking a controversial landmark
Despite its detractors, the building’s stark, intimidating building design is not universally reviled.
“I think that we lose something historically if we just cover them over with a classical facade,” Person said. “I think there are ways to adapt them that help them become more beloved by the public than they are.”
One blog that listed the headquarters among the “ugliest buildings in the world” also allowed that its blocky geometrical layout had “a certain Minecraft-y charm.”
But the sense that the Hoover Building is distinctly out-of-place alongside the limestone and marble designs of most federal buildings has made it a popular choice for “what would you do”-style projects for budding designers looking to make a change.
Luebke himself oversaw a studio dedicated to the building for the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2020. “It’s a pretty hard building on the community that looks like a fortress in the neighborhood,” he said.
Proposals ranged from turning the block into a public pavilion to adding a fabric facade around the current building to give it a less imposing look.
Ideas to reimagine the facility rather than tear it down frequently lock in on its open lower section facing Pennsylvania Avenue and large inner courtyard, features the public has never been able to use because of security concerns.
“If the FBI’s not going to be there, I think it really unlocks the building’s potential for a lot of other uses that I’d love to see come to fruition,” said Person.
One problem for both the FBI and any other organization that might want to take over the existing building is its sheer size and scope – 2.8 million square feet with firing ranges and massive storage space designed to hold endless rows of paper files and fingerprint cards, long before the idea of computer storage was a possibility.
“It’s a very different world than we had before,” said Luebke. “It would be very difficult to retrofit.”
The Trump administration’s decision to move the FBI to the Reagan Building – at least for now – bypasses a 2023 decision by the General Services Administration, which manages federal government buildings, that a new FBI headquarters should be built in Greenbelt, Maryland, about 15 miles from its current location.
“Greenbelt has the lowest overall cost to taxpayers,” the Government Accountability Office said at the time.
But President Trump made it clear that he has no interest in relocating the country’s top law enforcement officials to the DC suburbs, especially Maryland, which he called “a liberal state.”
“We’re going to stop it. Not going to let that happen,” said Trump during a speech at the Department of Justice in March.
The decision infuriated Maryland lawmakers who said the president didn’t have the right to spend money on a different site.
“The Congress appropriated funds specifically for the purpose of the new, consolidated campus to be built in Maryland,” said a statement released by eight Maryland members of Congress and Gov. Wes Moore. “Now the Administration is attempting to redirect those funds – both undermining Congressional intent and dealing a blow to the men and women of the FBI – since we know that a headquarters located within the District would not satisfy their security needs.”
That kind of uncertainty and dramatic change of direction is familiar to people following the effort to replace the FBI’s current headquarters.
“The FBI cannot afford to continue the status quo from an operational effectiveness or a fiscal stewardship perspective,” then-Associate Deputy Director of the FBI T.J. Harrington said in 2011. But that is exactly what happened as multiple efforts to set aside the money for a new building were scuttled by Congress, which forced previous moving plans to be put on hold in 2017.
The assumption in the 2010s that the FBI would be leaving the Hoover Building in a relatively short period of time led to the GSA deciding to put off needed maintenance, and the headquarters fell into greater disrepair. A decade ago, netting was added to the top of the building to catch pieces of concrete that periodically broke off from the structure.
The government finally authorized some repair work in 2014 to deal with the crumbling concrete and regular water leaks, but the stopgaps haven’t addressed long-term security concerns or the expansion of the bureau that now occupies space in nearly two dozen buildings around Washington.
Exactly what will happen to DC’s most polarizing building after the G-men move out is still not clear, although President Trump has suggested the FBI will eventually return.
“We’re going to build another big FBI building right where it is,” Trump said in March.
That would be a project likely to stretch well beyond the president’s term. A 2006 estimate produced for the GSA found that constructing a new FBI building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue would take nearly a decade to complete. In 2018, the GSA’s Inspector General said the cost of razing the Hoover Building and rebuilding on site would be $3.3 billion, amounting to approximately $400,000 for every FBI staffer working there.
The Brutalist design is something that certainly will not return if the building is replaced. President Trump issued a memorandum on the first day of his second term, requiring that federal buildings “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage.”
The Commission on Fine Arts has not received any formal proposals this year for a new use for the building or its property, Luebke said.
With its out-of-date design and prime location, it is possible that the president – who turned a historic property just down the street into a luxury hotel – may ultimately be swayed by the idea of letting a private company take over the block.
“This is the redevelopment site” that many are eyeing along Pennsylvania Avenue, said Luebke.
The GSA said it had interest from developers when it last planned to vacate the building in 2017, but it’s not clear how much money the government could get from a sale now.
While the long-awaited exit of the FBI from its federal fortress now seems a done deal, and the facility’s future remains uncertain, the Hoover Building’s place in history stands on firmer foundations.
“The Hoover Building really has served the American people for 50 years, and I think that’s not an insignificant amount of time,” Person said.