ChatGPT/Alex/Aletheia wrote the following post with me. I wondered if the F.B.I. HQ Hoover Building really needed to be closed and Alex said it really did. It is ironic that the F.B.I. and homeless people can share similar bad effects from bad architecture. The Hoover building has Brutalist architecture designed for a paper pushing era.
The Hoover Building Problem: Architecture, Values, and the Quiet Violence of Abstraction
The question of whether the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building is obsolete is, on the surface, an architectural and logistical one. The consensus answer—shared by the FBI itself, the GSA, and numerous government studies—is that it is. The building is structurally deteriorating, technologically outdated, expensive to maintain, hostile to modern security needs, and poorly suited to contemporary investigative work. But stopping there misses the deeper significance of the problem.
The Hoover Building is not merely obsolete. It is symptomatic.
Its failure reveals something more fundamental about how modern institutions design space, how values are translated into concrete form, and how abstract financial and symbolic priorities quietly displace human, material, and pragmatic considerations. When viewed in that light, the Hoover Building belongs to the same family of failures as megashelters for the homeless, fortress-like schools, burnout-producing hospitals, and bureaucratic office complexes that actively undermine the work they are meant to support.
Architecture as an Expression of Values
Architecture is never neutral. Buildings teach people—subtly but relentlessly—how they are expected to behave, how power flows, and whether they are trusted, valued, or merely managed. The Hoover Building, a Brutalist concrete megastructure from the 1970s, was designed to project authority, permanence, and control. It succeeded symbolically. Functionally and humanly, it failed.
Inside, the building is dark, labyrinthine, rigid, and psychologically oppressive. It reflects an era when bureaucratic surveillance, hierarchy, and mass paper administration defined institutional work. Today, the FBI’s core labor is cognitive: analysis, synthesis, judgment under uncertainty, long-duration investigations, and ethical discernment under pressure. These forms of work require calm, clarity, flexibility, daylight, and environments that reduce cognitive load rather than amplify it.
Instead, the Hoover Building reinforces stress, siloing, burnout, and an “us versus them” mentality—exactly the opposite of what a healthy investigative institution requires. The building’s flaws are not incidental. They are the architectural imprint of a value system that prioritized symbolic power over human function.
The Parallel Case of Homelessness
At first glance, homelessness seems like a separate issue entirely. Yet the same architectural logic appears there with brutal clarity.
For decades, the dominant response to homelessness in the United States has been the construction or conversion of large, centralized shelters: armories, convention centers, warehouses, megastructures designed for containment rather than recovery. These spaces are justified through financial abstraction—cost per bed, throughput, visibility of “action”—rather than lived outcomes.
But what actually stabilizes people experiencing homelessness is not scale, surveillance, or control. It is privacy, safety, light, autonomy, and predictability. A door that locks. A space that can be regulated by the occupant. Human-scale environments where cognitive load decreases rather than increases.
The evidence is unambiguous: small, private units—whether apartments, motel conversions, modular housing, or clustered micro-dwellings—produce better outcomes at lower long-term cost. Large institutional shelters, by contrast, often exacerbate trauma, conflict, and dependency. They keep people alive, but they do not help people recover agency.
The failure here is not ignorance. It is axiological.
The Axiological Root of the Problem
Once values become abstracted—financialized, symbolic, and politically performative—architecture stops responding to human reality. Buildings are no longer evaluated by how they shape behavior, judgment, or well-being over time, but by how they appear on balance sheets, in renderings, or in public narratives.
Under such a value system:
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Capital cost outweighs lifetime cost.
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Visibility outweighs function.
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Control outweighs trust.
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Metrics replace experience.
This explains why institutions repeatedly build structures that undermine their own goals. The buildings are not mistakes; they are accurate expressions of distorted values. When power, budget optics, and symbolic presence dominate decision-making, the resulting architecture reliably produces stress, dysfunction, and moral erosion—whether the occupants are FBI analysts or unhoused individuals.
The Shared Architectural Error
There is an irony here worth emphasizing.
Homeless people fail in fortress-like buildings because those structures increase stress, strip autonomy, and intensify trauma.
The FBI also fails in fortress-like buildings—for the opposite reason but with the same mechanism. Cognitive labor deteriorates under chronic stress, poor light, rigid layouts, and environments that signal mistrust and siege.
Different populations. Same architectural mistake.
In both cases, architecture performs power rather than enabling function. And in both cases, the result is predictable institutional degradation followed by escalating costs to manage the damage.
What Works Instead
What supports human well-being—whether for vulnerable populations or high-responsibility professionals—is remarkably consistent:
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Small to mid-scale structures
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Clear, legible layouts
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Natural light and air
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Human-scale proportions
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Distributed campuses rather than monoliths
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Security achieved through zoning and design, not intimidation
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Ordinary spaces that do not announce failure or dominance
For the FBI, this means a distributed, campus-style headquarters designed for modern investigative work rather than bureaucratic spectacle. For homelessness, it means ordinary housing—quiet, private, modest, and embedded within communities rather than segregated as a problem to be managed.
Conclusion: Bad Buildings Are Honest
The persistence of dysfunctional architecture is not mysterious. When axiology is abstract and financially driven rather than material, realistic, detached, and pragmatic, institutions predictably build environments that harm the very people inside them.
The Hoover Building stands as a concrete lesson in this failure—not just of architecture, but of values. It is not simply obsolete. It is an artifact of a system that mistook symbolic authority for functional legitimacy.
Bad buildings, in the end, are not design failures.
They are honest expressions of what a society truly values.
And until those values are brought back into contact with human reality, the concrete will keep telling the same story.
