GSA and HUD Seek to Offload Marcel Breuer–designed Weaver Federal Building
Described as everything from “bold and beautiful” to “10 floors of basement” over its nearly six decades in existence, Marcel Breuer’s Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington, D.C. has officially landed on the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)’s real estate chopping block.
On April 17, the National Register of Historic Places–listed structure, a preeminent example of D.C. Brutalism and one of two Breuer-designed buildings in the nation’s capital, was added to the GSA’s list of federal assets identified for “accelerated disposition.” Roughly 30—and growing—properties are currently specified on the list, which was published by the GSA after an inventory of 440 “non-core” federal properties was made public and then quickly removed from view after outcry over the presence of myriad architecturally important buildings. Many of the assets that appear on the current list, including federal buildings in Utah, Oregon, and Florida, had been previously earmarked for sale by the GSA under the Biden administration. The Weaver Building is one of two properties in Washington to appear on the list so far, joined by a New Deal–era building at 301 7th Street SW that recently underwent an extensive renovation and was poised to become the new FEMA headquarters in 2027. (It too was slated for disposition under Biden.) That building is located opposite the Weaver Building, which is home to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In 2000, HUD headquarters was named in honor of Weaver, the department’s first secretary and the first African American Cabinet member.
News of the Weaver Building’s inclusion on the offloading priority list was jointly announced by the GSA and HUD as a key step in the latter’s planned relocation to new headquarters. The landmark property’s addition to the accelerated disposition list will “allow the GSA to more effectively right size the federal real estate portfolio to reduce the burden on the American taxpayer while also delivering space that enables HUD to achieve its mission,” explained the agency, which noted that the building is at half its total occupancy and faces over $500 million in deferred maintenance and modernization needs, costing American taxpayers “more than $56 million in yearly rent and operations expenditures.” (Not mentioned are the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs proposed for HUD, which targets employees involved with disaster relief, housing discrimination, and rental assistance.)
While the timeline and final location for the HUD relocation scheme are still “under evaluation,” the GSA notes that any future new headquarters will remain within the Washington, D.C. metro area.
Although derided by critics and HUD employees over the years followings its celebrated debut in 1968, there’s no denying the Weaver Building’s “exceptional architectural significance,” to quote the GSA. The curvilinear 700,000-square-foot structure—its 10 floors supported by tapered, load-bearing concrete pilotis—was the first completed federal office building built under President John F. Kennedy’s “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” (1962). The building, the GSA writes in a profile, “stands out as one of the most successful modern-era buildings in GSA’s inventory.” Upon its completion, it was also the first federal building to utilize precast concrete as the primary structural and exterior finish material, as well as the first fully modular design for a federal office building. Breuer’s other D.C. office building, the Hubert M. Humphrey Building, was inaugurated in 1977.
The Weaver Building is featured in the National Building Museum’s ongoing Capital Brutalism exhibition, in which six Brutalist D.C. structures—many, like the Weaver Building, are much-maligned and haven’t aged well—are dramatically reimagined by leading architecture firms. The exhibition is a particularly salient one as modern federal architecture—particularly Brutalism—finds itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s classical architecture–leaning culture wars. For the Weaver Building, Brooks + Scarpa “proposes a radical transformation,” writes Clifford Pearson in his review of the show, “converting about 45 percent of the space to affordable housing, updating offices to a new work culture, adding retail and public uses to the ground level, and creating a set of cascading terraces, planted rooftops, and glazed atria in the area between the building’s two wings.”
If the Weaver Building is ultimately offloaded by the GSA and HUD relocates to a more “right-sized” headquarters, here’s hoping that this landmark work of architecture’s future is as promising as the one Brooks + Scarpa has imagined for it.
