FBI Making the Move From Hoover to Reagan

While this week's announcement is being touted by the FBI and General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government's buildings in the US, as “cost effective and resource efficient”—given that the FBI will not be building a new headquarters in DC or in suburban Virginia or Maryland, as legislators have wanted for nearly two decades—it can also be seen as architectural commentary. Since 1975, the FBI has occupied the J. Edgar Hoover Building, designed by Charles F. Murphy and Associates in the 1960s, in the then-favorable brutalist style. When Donald J. Trump was sworn in for his second term earlier this year, the “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” presidential action he signed took aim at brutalist buildings like the FBI Headquarters in favor of neoclassical designs, something he had tried to do in his first term. Moving the FBI out of its old brutalist building into a neoclassical edifice has been discussed widely by Trump supporters.

The Ronald Reagan Building, by comparison, is clearly more aligned with Trump's mandate for “regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage.” Second only to the Pentagon in the size of federal buildings when it was inaugurated in 1998, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center was designed by James Ingo Freed in the late 1980s, when Freed was “expected to design a neo-classical edifice of stone,” according to Herbert Muschamp; the New York Times architecture critic assessed the project as “an overwhelming monument to compromise” in his 1998 review. In addition to the usual office space and spaces befitting it also being a center of global trade, per its full name, the project was intended to have cultural components, but the performance venues and other cultural pieces were ultimately removed. Architecturally, Muschamp found the class exterior “overwrought” but appreciated the “excellent outdoor space” in the middle of the large site. 

Today, fifty years after the dedication of the Hoover Building and over a quarter century after the Reagan Building was inaugurated, maintenance, adaptive reuse, and other issues aligned with prolonging the lives of buildings so they don't need to be demolished have come to the fore, ahead of style, regardless of Trump's presidential actions. In this contemporary context, the Hoover Building is a stunning example of deferred maintenance, with estimates of such costs being around $300 million—just one reason the FBI has been looking to move for many years. Although deferred maintenance is not restricted to government buildings nor solely to brutalist architecture, critics of the latter have described brutalist buildings as inflexible and incapable of being retrofitted or easily maintained.

Though not mentioned in this week's announcement, the FBI will be taking over the offices of USAID, or United States Agency for International Development, which was created in 1961 to provide foreign aid and development assistance to countries in need. Trump dismantled the agency soon after he took office this year, officially terminating it just this week. The agency had approximately 3,000 employees in the Reagan Building, while the FBI has around 7,300 employees in the Hoover Building. It is not clear where the balance of the FBI employees will be housed, or when the FBI will be making the roughly half-mile move to the Reagan Building.