Monumental Dullness

With the trowel used by George Washington in laying the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol Building in 1793, Dwight Eisenhower last week spread the mortar for the cornerstone of the State Department's new $57.4 million, eight-story-tall, two-block-square headquarters in Washington. For the 8,000-odd staffers now crammed into State's Foggy Bottom headquarters or farmed out among 28 other office buildings, the prospect of at last being in one building by 1960 was welcome. But with an opportunity to build the largest structure in Washington (and second in size among federal buildings only to the Pentagon across the Potomac), the State Department settled for another massive, untrimmed behemoth with about as much esthetic appeal as a concrete bunker.

The problem the State Department put to its architects* was the formidable one of housing its burgeoning staff in building that would not tower above the nearby Lincoln Memorial, would harmonize with the prevailing federal classic and actually incorporate State's present headquarters building. The answer is a utilitarian concrete block that primarily aims to function.

Main features to break the monotony are glass corridors and a three-story, sheet-glass grand entrance for protocol occasions. The roof will be reinforced for helicopter landing; the basement will house an 800-car garage. Inside, the building freezes the State Department's pyramidal hierarchy in concrete, with the Secretary's office, surrounded by his immediate aides on the seventh floor, lesser departments pushed lower and lower toward the first. Windows are rationed on prestige basis. To pump around the lifeblood of memorandums there are miles of pneumatic tubing.

Getting together efficiently under one roof will save the State Department more than $2,000,000 a year. But the new building points up the question of how many more blocks of drab modern Washington can take before one of the most beautiful U.S. cities becomes a barracks city of monumental dullness.

* Chicago's Graham, Anderson, Probst & White; Detroit's Harley, Ellington & Day, Inc., with Washington, D.C.'s A. R. Clas as associate.

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