A view northwest from inside Nationals Park in June 2019, towards the West Half apartments. by the author.

During this year’s World Series, millions of baseball fans will have their eyes turned to Nationals Park, with the new skyline of Half Street SE beyond the left field line. But if federal planners from the 1960s had their way, that view could have been of a tremendous Brutalist office compound instead of a ballfield, dining/entertainment venues, and thousands of high-rise homes.

In 1965, the National Capital Planning Commission published Proposed Physical Development Policies for Washington, DC, followed by the 1967 Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital. Both of these documents specified a leviathan federal office compound along South Capitol Street. The 1965 document proposed a single structure east of South Capitol, reaching about a mile from the House offices, across I-695, down to the Anacostia River; the 1967 illustration showed a battery of towers stretching from First St. SW into the Navy Yard, but entirely south of I-695.

1965 illustration of South Capitol corridor. by NCPC.

The 1965 policies specified that compound would have offices for 50,000 federal employees; the 1967 plan raised that figure to 55,000. (It also recommended additional federal office compounds, with a comparatively modest 12,000 jobs apiece, on sites in Tenleytown,* Columbia Heights, and downtown Anacostia.) This Southeast Federal Center would have been twice the size of the Pentagon, which has 26,000 offices inside, or Amazon’s Arlington HQ2. If built at that scale, the complex would have been around 13 million square feet in size and easily the largest building in the world at the time.

1967 illustration of Southeast Federal Center. by NCPC.

Given the time period, the building might well have resembled Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist design for the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, for which planning began in 1965 and construction began in 1971.

A playground beneath the Hubert Humphrey Federal Building, designed by Marcel Breuer. by the author.

Moreover, the building would have been bracketed by additional office and residential towers. The 1965 drawing shows what look to be five-block-long sepentine apartment slabs stacked atop one another. Geometrically daring high-rise housing was an architectural fad of the era, such as this angular social housing built from 1969 to 1975 in Ivry-sur-Seine, just outside Paris.

Housing in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, designed by Jean Renaudie. by the author.

An era of thinking big

Megastructures were quite the fad in the late 1960s, as a seemingly limitless postwar economic and demographic boom, plus futuristic technologies like reinforced concrete, plastics, and air conditioning, fueled architects’ grandiose fever-dreams. (Those of us who grew up playing SimCity might remember “arcologies,” superstructures’ natural apotheosis.)

The 1967 plan was released just as federal employment had leapt by 16%, spurred by a substantial expansion in federal spending during the Johnson administration. Shortly thereafter, though, the 1970s brought with them inflation, oil shortages, and then higher interest rates; the resulting economic shock waves abruptly reasserted limits to growth, and curtailed many grand schemes cooked up in the 1960s.

Federal employment growth flatlined, and indeed remains at 1970s levels today—even as the nation’s population has grown by 60%. Future office growth, federal or otherwise, overwhelmingly occurred in lower-cost suburbs rather than in purpose-built downtown headquarters.

Other megastructure schemes from that era also faded from view. For instance, planners in the early 1970s envisioned Reston Town Center as a single megastructure. At its heart would have been a enclosed shopping mall bridging Reston Parkway, tied to office and apartment towers at its edges. Yet as urban designer Alan Ward noted in a book about Reston, “a single massive building is relatively difficult to adapt to the changing needs of the times, and it is not easy to undo.”

By the time construction began at Reston Town Center in 1988, plans had not only been downsized substantially but (in a novel move) divided the suburban site into city blocks. Small blocks created flexibility and scalability within the plan, and allowed increments to adapt, and even redevelop, over time.

The plan lived into the 21st century

Even in much more recent years, NCPC suggested that federal offices could bring people to what was long a waterfront area with low-value industrial uses. (Both sides of South Capitol Street at the Anacostia riverfront were recently rock-crushing and asphalt operations, one of which is still in use.)

NCPC’s Extending the Legacy Plan from 1997 suggested moving the Supreme Court to the South Capitol river banks; it hoped that would result in South Capitol becoming a lawyer-lined boulevard like K Street NW. That plan’s legacy remains in the racetrack-like ceremonial traffic ovals that are to be constructed at either end of the new Frederick Douglass Bridge.

USDOT headquarters brought 5,000 federal jobs to the Southeast Federal Center. Yards Park, in the foreground, was built on surplus federal land. by the author.

Instead, the Supreme Court opted to stay put behind the Capitol, and the GSA launched a public-private effort to develop its “Southeast Federal Center” lands block by block, as a new USDOT headquarters and The Yards. The area’s future character would change dramatically, from dour desk jobs to entertainment epicenter, when the District used eminent domain to clear the riverfront site for a baseball stadium instead.

* This site is now UDC and the International Chancery Center. The 1967 plan recommended urban-renewing the West End as embassies, and including UDC as part of a multi-block Anacostia federal center.