History

The Federal Triangle was the largest and most ambitious single public works project in American history up to its time. Conceived under President Herbert Hoover and executed largely under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, the development replaced a zone of degraded commercial and residential buildings along the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue — the ceremonial axis connecting the White House to the Capitol — with a sequence of monumental federal office buildings in the Classical Moderne style. The project was overseen by a Board of Architects whose membership included some of the most distinguished architects in the United States, working under a unified design framework intended to create a coherent civic ensemble.

The Department of Justice Building was assigned to Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, a Philadelphia firm whose partners had trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition but were adapting their practice to the modernised classicism of the 1920s and 1930s. The challenge of the commission was to design a building that fulfilled the monumental requirements of the federal programme — the weight of stone, the grandeur of proportion, the dignity of public institution — while incorporating the simplified ornamental vocabulary and streamlined detailing that distinguished New Deal federal architecture from the elaborated Beaux-Arts of the pre-war generation.

The building was completed in 1934 and has served as the headquarters of the Department of Justice ever since. It was renamed for Robert F. Kennedy, who served as Attorney General from 1961 to 1964 under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, in a ceremony in 2001. The building’s famous Great Hall, with its soaring arched ceilings and allegorical murals, has been the site of major press conferences, swearing-in ceremonies, and public events throughout its history as the heart of federal law enforcement administration.