page_title: Eccles Building
section_title: Architectural competition
hierarchical_section_title: Eccles Building / Architectural competition
caption_attribution_description: Eccles Building 10/20/1937
context_page_description: The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building houses the main offices of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. It is located at 20th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C. The building, designed in the stripped classicism style, was designed by Paul Philippe Cret and completed in 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the building on October 20, 1937.
  The building was named after Marriner S. Eccles, Chairman of the Federal Reserve under President Roosevelt, by an Act of Congress on October 15, 1982. Previously it had been known as the Federal Reserve Building.
context_section_description: From 1913 to 1937, the Federal Reserve Board met in the United States Treasury building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., while employees were scattered across three locations throughout the city.
  In response to the Banking Act of 1935, which centralized control of the Federal Reserve System and placed it in the hands of the Board, the Board decided to consolidate its growing staff in a new building, to be sited on Constitution Avenue and designed by an architect selected through an invited competition.
  
  The principal officials overseeing the competition were Charles Moore, chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Adolph C. Miller, a member of the Board since 1914. Miller drafted a statement to help the competing architects understand the concerns of Board, explaining that the traditional style of public architecture – with columns, pediments, and generous use of symbolic ornamentation – would not be of the utmost concern. 
  
  In describing the character of the building as governmental, it is not, however, intended to suggest that its monumental character should be emphasized. It is thought desirable that its aesthetic appeal should be through dignity of conception, proportion, scale and purity of line rather than through stressing of purely decorative or monumental features. For this reason it is suggested that the use of columns, pediments and other such forms may be altogether omitted and should be restricted to the character of the building as above described.
  Proposals were received from architects such as John Russell Pope and James Gamble Rogers. Ultimately, the winner of the competition was the simplified classical design by Paul Philippe Cret.
caption: The Eccles Building in 1937
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