"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work," Gustave Flaubert once said. I come back to this quote any time there is news of a Brutalist building being demolished or endangered. Whenever a Brutalist structure is scheduled for demolition, the city that hosts it grows that much more more regular and orderly. And that much less original, and, yes—in a couple of different senses of the word—less violent.  

This week came the news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leaving its home in Washington, D.C. While plans to keep the bureau downtown were always a longshot, a short list of candidates released by the GSA confirms that the FBI will build a new consolidated headquarters in either Maryland or Virginia. Washingtonian spotted the release and wasted no time in celebrating the FBI's departure—despite the fact that the move will send as many as 4,800 jobs to the suburbs.

That's how much D.C. residents hate the J. Edgar Hoover Building. And really, that doesn't come close to painting how passionately people hate this building.

Despite the fact that the FBI Building has denied the city another Cosi or craft cocktail bar—somehow Washington persists.
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Its critics will simply say that it is ugly, which is a meaningless criticism, and I don't mean that as an appeal to tastes. Washington is filled with ugly buildings. This just isn't one of them. The FBI Building is utterly unique, unlike any other building in Washington. The are other buildings rendered in Heroic Concrete in a handful of cities—rhinoceroses like the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore, Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City, Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. Two of those are endangered; one is extinct.

Another stripe of critic will say that the FBI Building crushes the streetscape, and to the extent that this is true (it is not very true), it is not the building's fault. Cross 10th Street NW on Pennsylvania Ave. NW from the Hoover Building and you can order a $12 lavender gin rickey at Central Michel Richard. Caddy corner to the building at 9th and E Streets NW isMinibar, a molecular gastronomy with a $250 prix fixe menu. It is true that you cannot do these things inside FBI headquarters, but what do you expect? Whatever the totalitarian qualities of the structure, it hasn't cratered downtown.