The General Services Administration, together with the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office, has determined that one of the most banal buildings in the nation’s capital is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. It is the Department of Education’s headquarters, originally dubbed Federal Office Building 6 (FOB 6) and later renamed the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, located just south of the National Mall across the street from the Air and Space Museum. The adjacent four-acre plaza has also been found to be eligible for the register. The site is where the National Memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower is to be constructed.
The LBJ Building is a generic mid-century modernist box faced with a grid of identical, unadorned windows. It fills an entire superblock. When the sterile and forgettable structure was completed in 1961, nearby tenants said it looked like an IBM punch card. One of its accoutrements is an abandoned sunken courtyard that the building’s occupants call “the pit.” The plaza, diagonally bisected by Maryland Avenue (an important boulevard radiating southwest from the Capitol), is a paved hardscape that is mostly a parking lot, with nary a tree or human being in sight. The former chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts said that the desolate plaza “frightens you a little.”
The LBJ Building stands out as a key mid-century modernist building that the GSA is trying to put on the register. Architecture from that period contained a number of strands, all of which were united by their minimalism, abolition of ornament, and use of exposed industrial materials: steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. One of the leading strands of mid-century modernism was the International Style (which actually dates back to the 1920s). As its name suggests, the style eliminated any concern for local context and national traditions, as did all forms of mid-century modernism. Its primary form is that of a sleek, sharp-edged box with a flat roof and flat walls, especially glass “curtain walls,” sheets of glass hung from the exterior steel skeleton. The ethos of the style is that of efficient, faceless corporate bureaucracy.
