Blast em: Get rid of the blocky brutalist buildings that blight our nations capital

There’s a reason God created dynamite. The brutalist federal buildings that have blighted Washington, DC for decades deserve the same fate as Carthage after the Third Punic War, and the nation’s capital is finally beginning to move on from these concrete monstrosities.The Department of Housing and Urban and Development just announced that it is leaving its godawful headquarters in Washington for less hideous space in northern Virginia.HUD Secretary Scott Turner has described the structure as “the ugliest building in DC,” which is a dubious claim only because there are so many other buildings in Washington that compete for that distinction. He’s not the first HUD secretary to hate the building.

Jack Kemp called it “10 floors of basement.”Meanwhile, the FBI is also departing its HQ, designated by the UK building materials retailer Buildworld as the ugliest building in the United States and the second ugliest in the world. The moves are in keeping with the spirit of President Donald Trump’s executive order stipulating that federal buildings should “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”That EO should be considered common sense, but has several trigger words for defenders of the architectural status quo, including “traditional,” “classical,” and perhaps foremost of all, “beautify.”In response, the American Institute of Architects expressed its “strong concerns that mandating architecture styles stifles innovation and harms local communities.”According to The Nation magazine, Trump’s initiative is part of an agenda to “to make historical architecture on the whole inextricable from Eurocentric white supremacy.” In short, it’s an unforgivable offense to want a government building to look nice. Brutalism, with its blocky, minimalist structures made of poured concrete, was a creation of ...