Culture
A Map for Exploring D.C.'s Brutalist Landscape
From the concrete vaults of Harry Weese’s Metro to Gordon Bunshaft’s doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum, there’s no lack of heroic architecture to see in the nation’s capital.
Harry Weese once said about the metro system he designed for Washington, D.C.: “the Russians did it with marble, we did it with shadows.”
The path to building D.C.’s metrorail—one of the most expansive rapid transit systems in the United States—started with the signing of the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Weese, a confident and obsessive architect, gave the nation’s capital a distinctive design using concrete vaults to “induce an almost religious sense of awe,” wrote the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp.