EXCERPT
My previous piece for The American Conservative concerned the mayhem postwar “urban renewal” wrought in Washington, D.C.’s southwest quadrant. A conspicuous feature of that mayhem is the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development building designed by onetime Bauhaus luminary Marcel Breuer. Commissioned by Uncle Sam’s real estate developer and landlord, the General Services Administration (GSA), and completed in 1968, it is a Brutalist pile entailing the diagrammatic fusion of curved masses that was a specialty of Breuer’s. He had previously employed the technique at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and an IBM research facility in the south of France.
Catesby Leigh is a senior fellow of Common Sense Society.
Read the full article in The American Conservative.