Amid the flurry of orders President Trump signed on his first day in office was a memorandum: “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” It called for federal public buildings to respect “classical architectural heritage,” implicitly taking aim at a more recent stylistic addition to the landscape of the nation’s capital: Brutalism.
A Modernist subgenre popular in the United States especially in the 1960s and ’70s, Brutalism is typically defined by poured concrete, blockiness and a minimalist ethos, emphasizing functionality. Some call it austere, while others call it monumental. Some think it’s elitist, while others think it’s democratic. Some see it as enduring, while others see it as cheap. One characteristic, though, is universally agreed upon: Brutalism is polarizing. For decades, people have argued over the architectural style’s virtues or lack thereof, and whether Brutalist buildings are landmarks that should be preserved or eyesores that should be torn down.
Now the White House has weighed in — again. Mr. Trump’s memo revived an executive order he issued in 2020, during his first presidential term, which called out the Housing and Urban Development Department building and the Health and Human Services Department building as “controversial, attracting widespread criticism for their Brutalist designs.”
Controversy is nothing new for Brutalism, which was itself a form of criticism. While other architectural movements showed reverence for history — neo-Classical for ancient Greece and Rome, Gothic Revival for the Middle Ages — Brutalism was about modernity. It made use of new materials, new forms, new ideas, splitting from the past after a war that caused so much anguish.
In recent years, the hulking forms of this midcentury movement have become a subject of public fascination. On social media, fan accounts like @cats_of_brutalism, @african_brutalism and @brutal_zen have hundreds of thousands of followers. Airbnb listings that mention Brutalism nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, according to the company. And now, the style has a Hollywood spotlight, in the Oscar-nominated epic “The Brutalist.”
Simultaneously commanding and contested, Brutalist buildings are impossible to ignore, especially in this moment. For better or worse, they often represent institutions — government agencies, schools, housing, public works — many of which now seem particularly fragile.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality, has publicly criticized the style. “This is what all authoritarian movements do,” he said in 2021. “You don’t matter. Wear a mask, you’re all the same. Ugly architecture, Brutalist architecture.” The style, he said, “was designed to send that message, not to uplift, but to oppress.”
Though the U.S. government has issued architectural guidance for its buildings in the past, Mr. Trump’s effort breaks from historical norms by pushing for a specific style. But what does our contemporary obsession — both spiteful and fawning — with Brutalism say about our wants and needs as a society at this moment?
Concrete Possibilities
Brutalism emerged in postwar Europe as a kind of architectural blank slate, as technological advancements made concrete more widely available. The word itself derives from the architect Le Corbusier’s use of béton brut, or raw concrete.
“There was a real enthusiasm about what you can do with concrete, the plasticity of it,” said Brian D. Goldstein, an architectural historian at Swarthmore College. “It also motivated what people wanted because they could do different things with it, they could cast it in a scale that wasn’t possible with other kinds of materials.” With concrete, designers could build higher, with fewer columns.
That allowed Brutalism to become a truly global style, with variations in South Africa, Japan, Mexico and India. In Bengaluru, the Indian Institute of Management campus — designed by Balkrishna Doshi, who trained under Le Corbusier — is steeped in Indian tradition, with overflowing flora that turn the walls into living, breathing entities.
In Britain, where many regions were ravaged by wartime bombing, there was an urgent need to build more homes and schools, and this utilitarian style was conducive to faster, cheaper construction. “Decorating buildings with historical motifs was, in the immediate rush of emergency reconstruction, one of so many luxuries which must be forgone in order to get the country ‘back on its feet,’” the architectural historian Barnabas Calder wrote in “Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism.”
In a 1955 essay that helped popularize the “New Brutalism,” the critic Reyner Banham found a distinctive honesty in it. Analyzing the Hunstanton School in Norfolk, England, he wrote: “Most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel. Hunstanton appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact made of glass, brick, steel and concrete.” In other words, what you saw was what you got.
But what these neutral materials came to signal, in many regions, was institutional power. Brutalism was the welfare state in Britain and authoritarian rule in the Soviet Union. In the United States, it appears in the F.B.I. building, Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center and I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall, which is currently being considered for landmark designation.
Brutalism’s takeup in Washington, D.C., dates to the early 1960s. President John F. Kennedy, who had ambitious plans for public services, saw a need for more government office space and assembled a committee to guide new construction. The Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space developed a report on “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” which stated that architecture should “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American national government” and that “major emphasis should be placed on the choice of designs that embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought.”
Between 1961 and 1976, according to the General Services Administration, nine Modernist federal agency buildings were erected in Southwest D.C. Among them was the Housing and Urban Development Department building, which is now in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.
HUD was established by Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1965 to oversee the production of more low-income housing and to provide rent subsidies for older people. Its 10-story headquarters was designed by Marcel Breuer, a Jewish and Hungarian-born architect who studied at the Bauhaus before immigrating to the United States in 1937. The building was later named after Robert C. Weaver, the agency’s first secretary and the first Black cabinet member.
“At its best, Brutalism was the style of the Great Society,” Mr. Goldstein said. “It was the style of maybe the last kind of major moment when the federal government was asserting itself as a benevolent presence in public life.”
‘Faceless Bureaucracy’
Benevolence, though, is in the eye of the beholder.
Brutalist buildings symbolize a time when government programs were more expansive, Mr. Goldstein noted. “Some of the affection for it is motivated by a romance for an era when things could get done,” he said. “It’s an architecture of solidity, of permanence, of assertion and of visibility — intended to be seen. It is the notion that the government is not something to be hidden.”
“The style was really allied to social concerns,” said Nikil Saval, a writer (now a Democratic state senator in Pennsylvania) who covered the resurgence of interest in Brutalism in 2016. That association was in part because many architects were commissioned by the government at the time, he added.
But the government work that took place in Brutalist buildings didn’t always have a positive effect. For some, the style is a reminder of urban renewal policies, which displaced large numbers of low-income people in cities, or the civil rights abuses of the F.B.I.
The buildings’ very association with government is sinister to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like Justin Shubow, who served on the Commission of Fine Arts during Mr. Trump’s first term. “Brutalism represents faceless bureaucracy,” he said. “It represents a kind of federal power in the worst possible way.”
Mr. Shubow, who helped draft the 2020 executive order targeting Brutalism, told The New York Times that classical architecture “is the architecture of American democracy. It’s what the founders consciously chose for the core buildings of government in the new nation.”
The F.B.I. building — which Mr. Shubow calls “the ministry of fear” — “needs to be torn down and replaced,” he said. “I think there is an incredible opportunity to build a new classical F.B.I. building at that site.”
Brutalism also evokes another politically divisive issue: immigration.
For Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” that was part of its appeal as a subject. The film follows a Jewish-Hungarian architect — with similarities to Breuer — who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to America. Brutalism “symbolizes otherness,” Mr. Corbet said in an interview, pointing out that several Modernist buildings in the United States were designed by people who came from other countries.
Mr. Shubow cast that difference in a negative light, saying that the buildings “look extremely foreign” and “like something from the Soviet Union.”
And like foreign objects, these buildings, and the departments they house, have been singled out for removal.
Mr. Trump has said he wants to eliminate the federal Education Department, whose unadorned headquarters are named after Johnson, the Great Society president; layoffs there have already begun. He has threatened a purge of the F.B.I., inside the fortresslike J. Edgar Hoover Building, and fired prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 cases. One of his main advisers, the billionaire tech executive Elon Musk, has targeted HUD in an effort to curb what he calls waste in government.
The Culture War
Outside political discourse, there seems to be plenty of passion for Brutalism among everyday social media users. Dizzying roundups of concrete towers rake in hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok. With their sharp angles and dramatic stature, “those kinds of buildings just photograph well,” Mr. Goldstein said.
It’s a style that can require patience to appreciate, and its fans are often drawn to that. “It’s not a gingerbread house on a hilltop with a beautiful garden,” Mr. Goldstein said. “It’s something that’s a little tougher to love.”
Still, Brutalism’s detractors have presented the style’s unattractiveness as a fact. In 2018, Mr. Trump reportedly said of the F.B.I. building: “It’s one of the Brutalist-type buildings, you know, Brutalist architecture. Honestly, I think it’s one of the ugliest buildings in the city.” Mr. Shubow called Brutalism “aesthetic pollution,” a style celebrated by “architectural elites” but abhorred by “ordinary people.”
In this way, the administration is trying to “forge a cultural war between the people that they see as the cultural elites and others,” said Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a nonprofit that promotes preservation of Modernist sites.
Kennedy recognized the power that public buildings hold as billboards projecting the nation’s values and set new standards for federal architecture. By revising those guidelines, Mr. Trump is attempting to imbue the nation’s built environment with new ideals.
But a key philosophical difference between the two standards is that Mr. Trump’s 2020 order explicitly encouraged one style, declaring that “in the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.”
The Kennedy administration report stated: “The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa.” Aesthetic influence was in the hands of designers, and though the guidelines emphasized contemporariness, they did not promote or dismiss specific styles. The Trump administration seems to have abandoned that neutrality.
But it doesn’t need to be a case of classical versus Modernist. Buildings of both styles have coexisted for decades in the United States.
Ms. Waytkus said that she has no problem with classical architecture, and that her concern is around the costs that come with demolishing old buildings and erecting new ones. “The cost of new construction is high,” she said. “We’re emitting a lot of carbon in order to build new, and I think we should be avoiding building new as much as possible.”
The aging of Brutalist buildings is forcing the issue. “As buildings reach around 50, they start to reach a point where they need either to be renovated and updated or replaced,” Mr. Goldstein said. Naturally, questions and disagreements about preservation are then raised.
Partial demolition began on Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, N.Y., for example, in 2015. The building, with 87 staggered roofs and a textured concrete exterior, was damaged from flooding.
“Because of the seeming appearance of permanence in some of these buildings,” Mr. Goldstein said, “they probably haven’t gotten the maintenance required to really keep them up.”
“Concrete ages,” he noted. “The reinforcement bars rust. Concrete is split open and stained.”
The F.B.I. building, notably, has long been in need of repair. In the past, nets were erected to prevent broken concrete from falling on pedestrians passing by. During his first term, Mr. Trump had plans to build a new headquarters for the bureau on the same site. But in 2023, the General Services Administration selected a new site in Greenbelt, Md., for the headquarters. Then, last year, Kash Patel — who on Thursday was confirmed as the next bureau director — said that he would “shut down the F.B.I. Hoover building on Day 1” and immediately reopen it as “a museum of the deep state.”
If it is renovated or replaced, don’t be surprised if the new building comes with Corinthian columns.
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