History

The Federal Triangle development, which began in earnest under President Herbert Hoover and was continued and expanded under President Roosevelt, required the demolition of a large area known informally as “Murder Bay” — a dense zone of boarding houses, saloons, and commercial buildings that had accumulated between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall since the Civil War era. The replacement programme called for a sequence of monumental federal buildings that would transform this zone into a civic ensemble worthy of the capital’s ceremonial axis.

The Internal Revenue Service Building was, despite being chronologically one of the later buildings in the sequence, the element that closed the Federal Triangle along its Constitution Avenue side. Louis A. Simon, who served as Supervising Architect of the Treasury from 1934 to 1934, oversaw the design of the IRS Building as a Classical Moderne composition that conformed to the overall design framework established for the Triangle while allowing for the specific functional requirements of the tax collection agency, whose large bureaucratic workforce required extensive open floor plates and efficient vertical circulation.

The building’s facade treatment — the rusticated base, the central arcade zone with its arched windows, and the attic level with paired windows and restrained ornament — repeats the tripartite Classical Moderne vocabulary of the other Triangle buildings while managing the challenge of the building’s exceptional length along Constitution Avenue. The result is a facade that reads as coherent and monumental despite its scale, which is among the most ambitious dimensions of any single building facade in the New Deal federal programme.