The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; The New Senate Office Building

[Tease]

WOLF VON ECKARDT: The great virtue of the Hart Senate Office Building isthat it is the first truly modern building -- contemporary building -- on Capitol Hill.

PAUL GOLDBERGER, architecture critic, The New York Times: What I find so shocking is not that we spent $137.7 million, but that $137.7 million seems to have bought so little.

[Titles]

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. For several weeks now a number of U.S. senators, some enthusiastically, some reluctantly, have been moving into new quarters -- very controversial new quarters. It is the new Senate office building called the Hart Building, and a lot of ink has been used in describing it. It is the most expensive building on Capitol Hill, where architectural penny-pinching is not the rule. And, according to which architectural critic you trust, it is a medieval mausoleum, a dead shell, a Mussolini-style marble barn, or worse. It had as rocky a road to completion as anything in Washington, except perhaps the Washington Monument. A lot of the chaff was political because the need for such a building symbolized the huge growth of Senate Staffs who were bursting out of their old quarters. But the Hart Building is nearly finished, and the senators are moving in. So tonight, a look at Washington's latest architectural extravaganza and why it generates as much abuse as praise. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, this thing almost didn't make it. In 1978, when only a hole had been dug and construction work begun, there was an all-out effort to kill it, to fill the hole back up and turn the site into a park on top, a parking garage underground. The senator/killers, primarily Chafee of Rhode Island and Proxmire of Wisconsin, called it the Taj Mahal on the Potomac, and said it was a palace that would turn a Persian prince green with envy. Their effort narrowly failed, and the work proceeded because naming it after the late and revered senator, Philip Hart of Michigan, gave it a politically explainable memorial aspect; because plans for a gymnasium, a rooftop restaurant and a $400,000 Alexander Calder artwork were dropped; and because the Senate leadership slipped it through without a clean roll-call vote. So it went on to become a building rather than a parking garage, but that has not silenced the controversy. It has only switched it to the finished building itself. As a piece of architecture, there are differences of opinion, as we now hear from two architecture critics, the first being one who likes it -- Wolf Von Eckert, of Time magazine.

WOLF VON ECKARDT, architecture critic, Time magazine: The great virtue of the Hart Senate Office Building is that it is the first truly modern building -- contemporary building -- on Capitol Hill. But the thing that impresses me most of all is that it is the first office building on Capitol Hill that combines the demand requirement for being "classic," being dignified, with good working conditions. The offices have a lot of flexibility. They are anticipating the electronic age, the computer age, and there's room for all the machinery, and there's room for the growing staff. This is a building designed to last. Now, I'm not saying this is an architecturally very exciting building, but it's a building that has its moments, and I think one of the great moments in the building is the staircase, which sort of contrasts to the, well, the stark angularity of these columns and of the colonnade here and the atrium by having an almost baroque, rounded, very elating feeling about it. That I think is quite artful, and delightful. A great many Americans work in offices now; in fact, they spend more time in their offices then they do in their living rooms. And there you can appreciate how nice it is that these offices here have an opening; they can look out. Not everybody can have an outdoor cabin, but everybody in these offices has some openness, something to look out to, and something to relieve the claustrophobia that you can very often have in the tight little cell that most of us have to spend so much time in. You can also see the openness of the corridors. You don't get that feeling that you have in most government offices of walking down the gamut, so to speak, and this Kafkaesque, oppressive feeling that you have trotting down, looking for the right door numbers. And the signing here, for instance, is particularly nicely done -- the signs at the door with the numbers and the names of the senators.

[goes into an office] That's a nice handle. It's well made, good quality. I wish I had it at home. And this is a typical office in this building. This is a Senator's own office, and it's not very large. It's rather small, actually; it certainly is no Taj Mahal. The only thing that gives it some dignity, some presence is that it has nice, high, 16-foot ceilings.

We live at a time of very uncertain architecture, and very shoddy construction. And therefore I find this building quite a relief because it serves its purpose well, and for a change it is quality.

PAUL GOLDBERGER, architecture critic, The New York Times: The thing about the Hart Building is that it seems to prove the point once again that the federal government is always 20 years behind the times where it comes to architecture.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New York Times, feels differently about the Hart Building. In January, Goldberger did a harsh, very uncomplimentary appraisal of the building for his newspaper.

Mr. GOLDBERGER: It's a modern, boxy thing that looks really like it belongs next to a Dallas freeway in 1962. It's big, banal; it seems to go on forever, even though it really doesn't. The atrium in the middle is a nice idea in one sense, but once again, since we have been Hyatt-hotelized to death all over this landscape by now, to see one in the Senate office building 20 years later seems, once again, to be kind of tired and old. And there's not enough traffic in the building to keep the atrium alive. At least those hotel atriums are full of people. You can sit there; you can have a drink; you can eat; you can read. This is just a vast ocean of white marble, so bright that you need to wear sunglasses in it, almost. And absolutely nothing is going on. I mean, you could play a game of basketball in that atrium these days because nobody is in it. The other thing about that atrium, of course, is since many offices face it, that means a lot of the offices look into each other. You may look across the atrium into someone else's office.

So there are really two very distinct problems with this building. There is the functional problem.It's awkward and confused more than anything else. And then there's the aesthetic problem. On the outside the Hart Building is really a bunch of little boxes -- the outside almost looks like a waffle iron -- a bunch of little boxes coming together to make a big box. And I'm not sure that little boxes coming together to make a big box are really the best of modern architecture. Then there are a lot of specific problems with the inside when you get beyond the aesthetics that it represents.

The internal office layout has both good and bad aspects. The idea of the duplex suite is itself a good one. In a lot of the old Senate office building the suites are simply rooms along corridors, strung out, and put together very awkwardly. There's no question that creating a duplex suite -- two stories with 8-foot ceilings and then a higher senatorial space -- is in fact a good thing because every senator's staff is together, and it's almost like a little house within this building. But even that wasn't done very well. The senators' ceilings are really too high; the staff ceilings are really too low. The best Senate office by far, I think, was Senator Hatfield's, which is an interesting mix of modern and antique pieces. And he used the prototype of an office planning system by, I think, something called the Acoustical Screen Company, which is actually very handsome -- using the kind of fabric that you see on a stereo speaker with oak together to create a partition and desk system that's really very, very handsome and works very well with this building, and he's put some very fine antiques of his own in with it. I've seen other offices where old furniture was simply carted over from the old Senate office building and in fact it looks terrible. I mean, there's again -- it's just stuff thrown in and since that stuff is not particularly good on its own and the building is itself so weak, you just end up with a sense of nothing.

What I find so shocking is not that we spent $137.7 million, but that $137.7 million seems to have bought so little, that we don't seem to have gotten anything for it, that we seem to have gotten a building so woefully ordinary. And this building is not a crime against civilization; it's not a sign that we're decadent, awful, stupid, evil or anything else. It's just a sign that our government doesn't seem to have very much imagination.

LEHRER: As a place to work it also remains controversial among the senators themselves. Two different views again, first the favorable opinion of Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii.

Sen. DANIEL INOUYE, (D) Hawaii: From the standpoint of working I think this is an excellent arrangement for me. For others it may not be, but I'd like to have all of my staff within range. Prior to this, I had my main office in the Russell Building and staff in two other buildings across the street in the old apartment buildings, if you have seen them. And it's not conducive for good management. But this way I think we have got the most for the dollar. Comparing these three buildings, in current dollars -- obviously we'll have to do that -- the Russell Building cost approximately $265 per square foot; the Dirksen, $126 per square foot; and this one $125 per square foot. I don't know why they call this the Taj Mahal. Compared to the others this is a tenement.

My Russell Building office is much smaller. For example, while we were in Russell my staff had approximately 70 square feet per person. In this building it's roughly 140. The furniture that you will find in my suite is the same furniture that I had in the other office. I added a few things, like pots for my plants and a few pieces of furniture. But as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, it's the same thing.

I'd like to show my visitors that I'm from Hawaii and not necessarily from, say, Boston. I don't think Boston people live like this. In fact, I was reluctant to move because I'm not a moving type. I've been in the Senate now for over 22 years, and this is, believe it or not, my third move.It was obvious, because of the media interest and the controversy created by some of my colleagues, that you would not pick up any political points. But it was here; it was an accomplished fact. What are we supposed to do with it, just let it stand? That would have been the height of waste.

Sen. RICHARD LUGAR, (R) Indiana: Moving is moving, whether it's a house or an office, and we would like to have stayed and enjoyed, I suppose, all the nice things to which we had become accustomed. How do you get out to the hallway from here?

LEHRER [voice-over]: The opposing view comes from Senator Richard Lugar, Rupublican of Indiana, who moved his staff into the Hart Building in late January under strong protest. He didn't have enough seniority to refuse to move.

Sen. LUGAR: Where will you be, Ann? Where are you? Right here?

Well, the decree went out that, I think, only 14 senators could stay in Dirksen. I think there were about 40 there at the time. This meant that the most senior one was asked, "Do you want to stay or do you want to go?" and so we sort of worked our way down through the batting order. After 14 had decided to stay that meant all the rest had to hit the pavement. And it was at that point that we issued our press release -- "Lugar evicted" -- which gave an impression, quite accurately, we're about to be thrown out on the pavement.My first choice was to extend down the first floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building into a space that is now occupied by another senator, if he moved, and that way I thought we would retain our close position to the elevator to get to the floor. Our staff could walk out of the building and not spend half of their lifetimes on the elevators.

Our dilemma, quite frankly, comes that we're a good bit farther away from the Capitol attempting to get back and forth to the floor either to vote or to take part in debates, to take part in committee work. The problem is that the subways now have double duty. In the past they picked up 30 or 40 people -- however many were in Dirksen -- and had the short stop back and forth. Now they must stop at Dirksen and disgorge passengers, then come on to Hart and then come back to Dirksen, and then back to the floor. Now, I think at the time of our first vote, in fairness, only one of the subways was working. But that is often our plight. I suspect that in due course some consolidation would have required a building. Whether it was this building with its enormous features, is certainly questionable. Almost every critic points out the coldness of hundreds of feet of marble rising up out of there. Some of my staff have pointed out, appropriately, we ought to have at least newspapers or a city market or flower salesmen or something that relieves the inhumanity of the project. But leaving all that aside, I think for the moment there will be very great public scrutiny of any further monies. But I think that everybody has learned a lesson in the process.I doubt whether something like this will occur again in my lifetime, although you never cease to be surprised, I suppose.

MacNEIL: A further look at the design and the controversy with the architect who built it and a critic of the process. The Hart Building was designed by John Carl Warnecke, whose other Washington projects include President Kennedy's gravesite, Lafayette Park, and a new office building for the White House staff. Our other guest is David Meeker, executive director of the American Institute of Architects. He is a former deputy mayor of Indianapolis, and assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development. First of all, Mr. Warnecke, how do you respond to all this criticism? Do you feel personally wounded by it? How do you take it?

JOHN CARL WARNECKE: Well, the remarks certainly by Wolf Von Eckardt are complimentary, and I think he seemed to understand the need that we saw of getting a very straightforward, functional, modern office building. That was the request of the Senate office building commission at that time: to get good, efficient modern office space, particularly in contrast to some of the older buildings -- the Rayburn building, for instance, where you very seldom can find your way around. In this building we at least attempted to see where we were at all times, and a very simple solution. An economical solution is what they wanted, not a wasteful solution. As far as the other remarks by Paul Goldberger, I can see at this moment, with only 15 senators presently occupying the building, the building has yet to really come to life. It's like a new home without furniture. If you only have enough furniture to furnish one quarter of the space, it's bound to look sparse.

MacNEIL: You think it's going to work when the right number of people are in it?

Mr. WARNECKE: A great deal more life will take place; you'll see more action. I think a lot was left out. We had to reduce the cost of the building, as mentioned earlier, in the middle of the whole process. And we lost the wood paneling, the nice, warm wood paneling that I think would be very important in the senators' office building. We lost some of the nicer features -- the bronze doors that really will pay off economically in the long run, replaced by aluminum doors that'll have to be replaced every 20 years or more. So I think we did lose a lot of the things that we might have wanted in that building in the process because of the long delay in the construction process.

MacNEIL: Let me ask you this, and I'd like to hear Mr. Meeker's point of view on this as well. Is all the controversy, do you think, justified by design considerations, or is it political? What do you think? What's your view?

Mr. WARNECKE: Well, I think it's a -- this building is a true combination of both politics and architecture. I don't think there's any separation of the two. If you're ever going to design a building on the Hill, you are designing for the political animal, and the peak of it, in our democratic society. Therefore it's the peak of exposure. It's going to be the public interest; it's far more than I ever anticipated. Having designed the Hawaiian state capitol and a lot of other public buildings and headquarters for AT&T, I never suspected the amount of public focus on a building of this type.

MacNEIL: What's your view of that, Mr. Meeker? Is all the controversy generated politically, or is it generated by Mr. Warnecke's design?

DAVID MEEKER: I think more is generated politically than by Mr. Warnecke's design. I think that the design doesn't represent in office use, open space planning or arrangement anything revolutionary. It's certainly evolutionary to the processes of the Congress of the United States, and I believe it's an issue that's been involved in a recession, an election, and for a few individuals, an opportunity to make a high level of media attention by taking some shots that I think are relatively cheap shots. This isn't the Taj Mahal, and it is not an office building that would be built speculatively in downtown Washington. It should not be compared to that. Its peer is a corporate headquarters building, and in terms of cost, function, lifespan and so on, it seems to be that this is aneconomical building. The Russell Building, for instance, had a furor resembling this when it was built in 1909. It is now a historic national landmark.So it's people taking a quick opportunity to get time and space.

MacNEIL: How were you constrained in designing this building in a way you wouldn't be if you were designing a building for a private sponsor?

Mr. WARNECKE: Actually the design process, through the architect of the Capitol, George White, was really very straightforward. I think one of the real misconceptions from the beginning was that he had to come up with a budget in order to get an appropriation in very short order, and he came up for a building, a design that they found was a repeat of the old Dirksen, of 600,000 square feet. But by the time we really resolved the problem, we had a building of 1,100,000 square feet. So some of the earlier figures -- the $47 million -- were never really true, and it's finally the $85-million budget which is the right budget that we're talking about.

MacNEIL: Were you actually told, "It has to be this way, you have to use these kind of materials.You have to use marble from such-and-such a state"?

Mr. WARNECKE: No. They left that up -- I think we had -- I think we would have been highly criticized if we came up with buildings of the wrong material, but I think we came up with the appropriate material for continuity with the very special character of the Hill -- the white marble. And I think the scale of the building had to be in scale with the other buildings on the Hill. So our dictum was really to get as much modern, functional office space as we could within the overall character of the Hill. And we were given very wide liberty in that respect. I don't think from a public architecture point of view that we were restrained in that sense.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Mr. Meeker, Senator Lugar said on the tape that he doubted that anything like this would ever happen again, at least in his lifetime. Is he right about that?

Mr. MEEKER: Well, if he lives to be as long as his mother Bertha did, I don't think he's right in that. The Lugars tend to be a relatively long-lived family, and these things repeat themselves. It was in 1958 when we were having a discussion similar to this about the Rayburn Building, so I would guess --

LEHRER: But his point was that the Hart experience has taught all of us a lesson. I think that's what he said. Is there a lesson to be learned from this?

Mr. MEEKER: No, I don't think so because the constituency and the makeup of Congress is a constantly changing thing and it has a relatively short institutional memory.My real problem with this building began with the $47-million appropriation. I think the process is backwards. I believe that what is a more realistic way to approach it is an appropriation to engage an architect to study what kind of a building is to be needed and to present a realistic appropriation. In this particular case the building was authorized in September, an appropriation of $47 million was authorized in October, and six months later an architect was engaged.And now the public and the Congress is stuck with the idea that the building was going to cost $47 million, so this is a C-5A for publicity purposes.

LEHRER: So the problem is a process problem --

Mr. MEEKER: Yes, sir.

LEHRER: -- from your perspective. Well, that process isn't going to change, is it?

Mr. MEEKER: I think it can change. I would follow the experience of the Foreign Building office of the State Department, or even some of the Defense Department procurement procedures for architectural services. They have an appropriation to secure an architect before they go for an appropriation for a structure, and that seems to me to be both a proper and a reasonable way. There should be more public awareness and scrutiny, and certainly when a building has its structural frame up it's a little late for some of the participants to say, "Oh, my God; oh, my God. Let's make it a parking lot." I think that's nonsense. I should be done in a more open issue. I would have to say that I don't believe that Congress has that in mind for itself because --

LEHRER: In other words, it isn't going to change?

Mr. MEEKER: I don't think it's going to change that much because it did get through without a clean bill, as you pointed out, and that's why I -- my old friend Dick Lugar, I think, is probably wrong because there'll be another building which won't get through with a clean bill either.

LEHRER: Mr. Warnecke, you told Robin a minute ago that you were surprised at all the controversy this thing has generated, and yet, as history has shown, the Ressell Building, the Dirksen Building, they all had this. Why were you so surprised? What did you expect to happen?

Mr. WARNECKE: Well, I guess I didn't anticipate the building -- a normal headquarters building we talk about, as one general president or chairman of the board -- or it usually has a single purpose. This building is housing for 50 senators. It's the headquarters of 50 of our senators. It's half of the entire Senate. So each senator himself looks at himself as the headquarters office, and each can take his shots at the building that happened to benefit his own political moment in his career there.

LEHRER: Let me ask --

Mr. WARNECKE: I soon saw, and became a little immune after awhile, to what I was looking at was political and what I was looking at was architectural.

LEHRER: Let me ask you this, Mr. Warnecke. Are you in the mood to try something like this again if in fact Dick Lugar is wrong and history does repeat itself?

Mr. WARNECKE: I of course think it's something that should be shared by other architects in our time.

LEHRER: I take that as a no.

Mr. WARNECKE: It's a particularly -- it was a particularly fascinating experience.I think public architecture per se is a fascinating experience because it does get the focus of the public, and there is a growing interest in America in the quality of our buildings among the younger generations of architects.

LEHRER: And that's never going to change, is it, Mr. Meeker? The public should be concerned about how their money is being spent for buildings?

Mr. MEEKER: Absolutely, and I hope the process would open up. This building was the first building that had a public hearing involved in it. I would like to see any future building have a lot of public hearings so that we at least have a better-informed complaint level.

LEHRER: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Meeker in Washington, Mr. Warnecke in New York, thank you. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight. We will be back on Monday night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.