Preserving History--The Brutalists

I've lived in Reston 40 years now.  A hot controversy these days is whether a building from Reston's early days is worth saving.  The arguments for saving it are basically the fame of the architect, a prominent "Brutalist" one.

Given my education, I might be expected to be on the preservationist side.  But no. (I'm stealing the image form a Reston Patch post, linked  to above.)  I see no point in preserving all of mankind's mistakes.  I like some modern architecture, but I don't think this building qualifies as good.  The only valid argument for its preservation I can think of is as an example of how misguided we humans can be, how prone to fads and following the crowd.

The Epitome of Bureaucratic Architecture

And named to honor one of the great all-time bureaucrats: J. Edgar Hoover.

As the Washington Post article this morning says:

The Hoover building was constructed at a time when the government needed room for fingerprint records, investigative reports and files, a requirement computers have rendered largely unneeded.

 GSA is proposing to trade the building to the private sector in return for a new FBI campus somewhere in DC or suburbs.

It's constructed in the "brutalist" style popular in the 1960's, goodness knows why, except we were idiots then.

Modern Architecture

As you might expect from a geezer I'm not a real fan of modern architecture, particularly the modern architecture of the 1960's and 70's.  I do love Saarinen's Dulles Airport and St. Louis Arch. 

And this building in Reston, now vacant, works pretty well for me.  Not great, but okay.

The Architect and the Master Bureaucrat

Lots of people attack bureaucracy along the lines of James Scott's "Seeing Like a State", arguing that a master plan, or "scheme" as the Brits would say, is always suspect because it takes no account of local knowledge and local realities.  That line of attack can be persuasive; I'm sometimes tempted to buy it and turn in my liberal's stripes.

But then I read a post like Walter Jeffries and my temptation fades away, which is rather ironic because Walter is a fervent opponent of big bureaucracy and bureaucratic schemes like NAIS (for identifying farm animals). Walter and his family have a farm in Vermont, very energy-efficient. For maybe the last 12-16 months they've been actively engaged in building a butcher shop.  They've got the foundation and walls up, with lots of work yet to go.  Walt's post lists all the complicated factors he has to take into account, ending with the fact that all his design work will end up in concrete so he can't afford a mistake.

Now building a butcher shop is complex, but not nearly as complex as building say the Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, or any other large building or development.  But we expect architects and building engineers to be able to pull it off, and they do, normally.  So too I expect Walter to pull it off.  The success of architects and Walter renews my faith in the idea that human reason and sweat can actually create things which work, things which can include bureaucracies.