page_title: J. Edgar Hoover Building
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: J. Edgar Hoover Building / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking west at the east facade on the 9th Street NW side of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation) in Washington, D.C., in the United States. The office building, constructed in the Brutalist style, began construction in 1967 and was completed in 1975. Brutalism is an architectural style that refers to the French language term "beton brut" -- or "raw concrete." Many architects were impressed with advances in constructution techniques which allowed bare concrete to remain visible without adding granite or marble cladding, or polishing the concrete (both very expensive to do). The FBI building was intended to be clad in granite, and holes were left in the facade to accommodate the steel pegs for the cladding. But this was abandoned shortly before the building was constructed as too costly and unnecessary. The FBI building is widely disparaged as one of the ugliest buildings in Washington, D.C., and in the United States.
context_page_description: 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. 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 to $126.108 million from $60 million. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975.
  The building is named for 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, but the order did not have the force of law. The U.S.
context_section_description: At the time it was completed, the J. Edgar Hoover building was reported to have 2.4 million square feet (220,000 m²) to 2.535 million square feet (235,500 m²) of interior space, of which 1 million square feet (93,000 m²) were usable office space. According to more current information provided by the FBI, the building contained 2,800,876 square feet (260,209.9 m²) of interior space in 2010. Its internal amenities included:
  An amphitheater
  A 162-seat auditorium
  An automobile repair shop
  A two-story basketball court
  An eighth-floor cafeteria, with access to a roof garden
  Classrooms
  Cryptographic vault
  Developing laboratories for both still photography and motion pictures
  Exercise rooms
  A film library
  A firing range
  80,000 square feet (7,400 m²) of laboratory space
  A medical clinic
  Morgue
  A printing plant
  A test pattern and ballistics range
  A 700-seat theater
  The structure has three floors below ground. Originally only two below-ground floors were planned, but a third was added during the review process. The top two floors of the northern (E Street) structure housed the fingerprint bureau. Special features of the building included a pneumatic tube system and a conveyor belt system for handling mail and files. A special, reinforced, extra-thick "protection slab" existed beneath the second floor to help protect the building from street-level explosions. A gravel-filled dry moat ran along the building on E Street NW.
  The building's corner piers contained the mechanical services (elevators, HVAC, etc.). A dual elevator system was installed, one for use by the public and one for use by staff. A dual set of hallways also existed in portions of the buildings. The smaller set of dual hallways was for public use. The public elevators connected only to the public hallways, isolating the public from FBI workers. Several portions of the public hallway contained glass partitions through which the public could see FBI personnel at work.
  The J. Edgar Hoover Building is in an architectural style known as Brutalism. The term is derived from the French term béton brut ("raw concrete"); in Brutalist structures, unprocessed concrete surfaces are commonly used to create "rugged, dramatic surfaces and monumental sculptural forms." The concrete of the Hoover Building shows the marks from the rough wood forms into which the liquid concrete was poured. The exterior is constructed of buff-colored precast and cast-in-place concrete. The intent was to attach sheets of polished concrete or granite to the exterior. The exterior walls were built to accommodate these attachments, but this plan was abandoned as the building neared completion. The windows were of bronze-tinted glass. The cornice line is 160 feet (49 m) high on the E Street side. The interior, as built, consisted of white vinyl floor tiles, and polished concrete ceilings and floors painted white. The open-air courtyard was paved with grayish-beige stone, and contained an arcade to shelter employees as they moved around its edge.
caption: Façade of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, showing holes where cladding was to have been attached to the raw concrete.
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