Completed in 1968, The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building is a US government-owned office building in southwest DC by architect Marcel Breuer. Its Brutalist style, like Brutalism can do, has proved polarizing. Formerly the home of the Department of Housing & Development (HUD), it’s now in the process of being offloaded by the General Services Administration (GSA).
Derived from the French phrase béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”, Brutalism is pretty much all about that concrete: unpainted, uncovered, with a lot of it still showing patterns from the wooden forms it was initially poured in.
I took these photos with a camera converted for infrared (IR) light (830nm, specifically). And for me there’s nothing quite like Brutalist buildings and IR photography. The high contrast the IR spectrum provides enhances the starkness of the bare concrete against a dark sky, making window reflections of the sky almost as dark as the shadows.
As for the future of the Weaver Federal Building, who knows. I hope it will get an adaptive reuse renovation into something that will keep it useful and prevents its demolition.
