J. Edgar Hoover Building
The J. Edgar Hoover Building is a low-rise office building located at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Planning for the building began in 1962, and a site was formally selected in January 1963. Design work, focusing on avoiding the blocky, monolithic structure typical of most federal architecture at the time, began in 1963 and was largely complete by 1964, though final approval did not occur until 1967. Land clearance and excavation of the foundation began in March 1965; delays in obtaining congressional funding meant that only the three-story substructure was complete by 1970. Work on the superstructure began in May 1971. These delays meant that the cost of the project grew from $60 million to $126.108 million. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975.
The building is named after former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. President Richard Nixon directed federal agencies to refer to the structure as the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on May 4, 1972, two days after Hoover's death, but the order did not have the force of law. The U.S. Congress enacted legislation formally naming the structure on October 14, 1972, and President Nixon signed it on October 30.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building has of internal space, numerous amenities, and a special, secure system of elevators and corridors to keep public tours separate from the rest of the building. The building has three floors below-ground, and an underground parking garage. The structure is eight stories high on the Pennsylvania Avenue NW side, and 11 stories high on the E Street NW side. Two wings connect the two main buildings, forming an open-air, trapezoidal courtyard. The exterior is buff-colored precast and cast-in-place concrete with repetitive, square, bronze-tinted windows set deep in concrete frames.
Critical reaction to the J. Edgar Hoover Building ranged from strong praise to strong disapproval when it opened. More recently, it has been widely condemned on aesthetic and urban planning grounds.
Plans have been made to relocate the FBI's headquarters elsewhere, but those plans were abandoned in 2017 due to a lack of funding for a new headquarters building.
Design and construction
Planning
Since 1935, as an element of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI had been headquartered in the Department of Justice Building. In March 1962, the Kennedy administration proposed spending $60 million to construct a headquarters for the FBI on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue NW opposite the Justice Department. The administration argued that the FBI, which had offices in the Justice Department building as well as 16 other sites in the capital, was too dispersed to function effectively. Initially, prospects for the new building seemed good. A House committee approved the budget request on April 11, and a Senate committee approved it a day later. But the United States House of Representatives deleted the funds when the budget reached the House floor. A budget conference committee then voted in September to restore enough funds for site selection, planning, and preliminary design.The site selection process for the new FBI headquarters was largely driven by factors unrelated to organizational efficiency. By 1960, Pennsylvania Avenue was marked by deteriorating homes, shops, and office buildings on the north side and the monumental Neoclassical federal office buildings of Federal Triangle on the south side. Kennedy noticed the dilapidated condition of the street when his inaugural procession traversed Pennsylvania Avenue in January 1961. At a cabinet meeting on August 4, 1961, Kennedy established the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space to recommend new structures to accommodate the growing federal government. Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was assigned to help staff the committee. In the Ad Hoc Committee's final report, Moynihan proposed that Pennsylvania Avenue be redeveloped using the powers of the federal government. The report suggested razing every block north of Pennsylvania Avenue from the United States Capitol to 15th Street NW, and building a mixture of cultural buildings, government buildings, hotels, office buildings, restaurants, and retail on these blocks. Kennedy approved the report on June 1, 1962, and established an informal "President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue" to draw up a plan to redevelop Pennsylvania Avenue.
The site selected by GSA on January 3, 1963, for the new FBI headquarters were two city blocks bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 9th Street NW, E Street NW, and 10th Street NW. GSA administrator Bernard Boutin said the site was selected after informal consultation with the President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Capital Planning Commission. Boutin said construction of the new FBI building would help revitalize the Pennsylvania Avenue area as suggested by both the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space and the President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue. Boutin emphasized that the design of the new structure would be in harmony with other buildings planned by the President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue, and would necessitate the closing of a short section of D Street NW between 9th and 10th Streets NW. More than 100 small retail businesses were to be evicted.
Design
The early consensus was that the new FBI building would avoid the block-filling style of box-like architecture advocated by the General Services Administration. Staff at the NCPC advocated an aggregation of smaller, interconnected buildings, while President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue architectural consultant Nathaniel A. Owings suggested that small retail shops be incorporated into the ground floor of the building. Staff at the President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue said the council would "blow its top" if the FBI headquarters design was monolithic.In January 1963, GSA estimated that construction on the building would begin in 1964, and be complete in 1967. In June 1963, GSA hired the firm of Charles F. Murphy and Associates to assist with the design. Stanislaw Z. Gladych was the chief architect, and Carter H. Manny, Jr. was the partner in charge. Murphy and Associates struggled to meld competing views of what the building should be. The President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue wanted a building with a pedestrian arcade on Pennsylvania Avenue side, and retail shops on the ground level on the other three sides. But the FBI rejected this view, instead advocating a structure which was bomb-proof on the first few stories and which had but a few, tightly secured access points elsewhere. Murphy and Associates initially designed a monumental building. This approach was rejected by GSA for wasting space and because it would draw criticism for its apparent misuse of taxpayer dollars on lavishness. Murphy and Associates next designed a "Chicago school" structure. This was a rectangular building whose front was aligned along an east–west axis rather than Pennsylvania Avenue. This created a strong setback on Pennsylvania Avenue, which the architects turned into a pedestrian plaza. Although this design was largely accepted, the setback was not and the building's south side was again aligned with the avenue. Although the FBI was not extensively interested in the building's architectural design, mid- and low-level managers meddled extensively in the building's details.
With design work still incomplete by April 1964, GSA pushed back the start of construction to 1966. On April 22, GSA announced that, after consulting informally with the NCPC, the FBI building would have two levels. The Pennsylvania Avenue façade would be four to six stories high, while the E Street side would rise to eight or nine stories. The goal was to avoid creating a solid front of monolithic office buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
On October 1, 1964, the NCPC approved the preliminary design of the FBI building. During the design phase, the architects discovered that the NCPC supported the FBI's desire for a highly secure building, and this influenced the structure's design significantly. The plans by Murphy and Associates called for an eight-story structure on Pennsylvania Avenue and a 12-story building along E Street. The two buildings were connected by wings along 9th and 10th Streets NW, forming an open-air courtyard in the interior. A portion of these wings would push underground into the hill which rose behind Pennsylvania Avenue. The building was set back from Pennsylvania Avenue. It also had underground parking accessible from 9th and 10th streets. An open deck, designed to allow pedestrians to enter on E Street and stroll along the second floor of the building, existed on the east and west sides of the FBI building. The architects noted that this deck could be extended on the south side. The NCPC voiced only one concern. It worried that the "penthouses" atop the building were illegal. The penthouses raised the building's height to — higher than permitted by law.
The United States Commission of Fine Arts reviewed the plans on October 21, 1964. GSA and Murphy and Associates had declined to make the FBI building's plans public prior to this meeting. During informal discussions with CFA staff in the initial design phase, the architects learned that the CFA wanted the FBI building to have a powerful base which appeared to anchor it to the earth. Although this was in direct conflict with the open architecture advocated by the President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was more in line with what the NCPC and FBI wanted. Since it was not clear whether the proposed design that had met with NCPC approval would be accepted by the CFA, the design was confidential so that changes could still be made without the appearance that they had been forced on the architects. The still-incomplete designs unveiled during the CFA meeting now showed a massive, three-story roof deck overhanging the main building on E Street, with glass curtain wall-enclosed walkways connecting the Pennsylvania Avenue building to the 9th and 10th street wings. The trapezoidal interior courtyard was designed to hold sculpture and accommodate public exhibits about the FBI. The façade now exhibited repetitive, angular concrete elements similar to those used by Le Corbusier in the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Chandigarh, India; Paul Rudolph in his Brutalist Yale Art and Architecture Building at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and Gyo Obata in the final design for the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.