The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building houses the main offices of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. It is located at 20th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C. The building, designed in the stripped-down classical style, was designed by Paul Philippe Cret and completed in 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the building on October 20, 1937.
The building was named after Marriner S. Eccles (1890–1977), a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve by an Act of Congress on October 15, 1982.
n 1935 the Federal Reserve Board decided to consolidate its growing staff in a new building, to be sited on Constitution Avenue and designed according to the results of an invited, juried competition. The winning design, by the Philadelphia architect Paul Philippe Cret, was a daringly modernist interpretation of the Beaux-Arts style and has become a noted part of American architectural history.
The principal officials overseeing the competition were Charles Moore, chairman of the presidentially appointed United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Adolph C. Miller. Miller had been a member of the Board since the Federal Reserve had begun operations in 1914; after leaving the Board in 1936, he continued as chairman of the Board's Building Committee.
These two men deliberated over the nature of the building design between October 1934 and February 1935. They could not ignore the traditional style of public architecture in the nation's capital—monumental scale, classical references provided by columns and pediments, and generous use of symbolic ornamentation.[citation needed] But they could—and did—work to update that style. Miller drafted a statement about the Board to help the competing architects understand the concerns of their potential client. Accompanying the Program of Competition, the statement conveyed the sense of Miller and Moore that traditional style would not be their utmost concern.
The building that emerged from the competition, with its modernism based on a simplified classicism, was unique for Washington at that time. The result is a credit to the vision of Miller and Moore and to the winning design by Paul Philippe Cret.
Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), a naturalized U.S. citizen who had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons and Paris, won the 1935 invited, juried competition for the design of the new headquarters of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Cret first came to the United States in 1903 to establish a department of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He resigned from the faculty in 1907 to establish his own practice.
One of his earliest buildings, for which he was an associate architect, is the Pan American Union Building, in Washington, D.C. (1908), which is characterized by a quintessential Beaux-Arts style. Work on less lavishly decorated public buildings followed in other cities in the years preceding his Federal Reserve Board commission, including Detroit (1922), Hartford (1926), Indianapolis (1928), and Fort Worth (1932). In Philadelphia, he designed the Barnes Foundation (1923), the Rodin Museum (1928), and a new building for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (1930). In Washington, D.C., he completed the Folger Library (1929) and the D.C. Heating Plant (1933), as well as the Klingle Valley (1931) and Calvert Street (1933) bridges.
The École des Beaux-Arts movement in architecture, which was grounded in the study of Greek and Roman architectural traditions, called for the interrelationship of all the arts. An architectural firm practicing in this tradition would therefore have to have the skill and resources to engage in every aspect of the building: exterior, interior, structural, functional, technical, and aesthetic. To complete the project, Cret's firm made more than 300 drawings of every degree of finish: freehand sketches, measured plans, site plans, elevational studies, and perspective drawings. A single drawing could contain information as to a frontal view, a side view, a view from the top, and section details, if necessary.
True to the Beaux-Arts tradition, Cret oversaw every aspect of the building project and in some cases involved himself in the details. He himself put his hand to the design of the Board's new official seal, illustrating four variations on the placement of the eagle, the shield, and the inscriptions (under the Banking Act of 1935, the Board had just had a change in name, from the Federal Reserve Board to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System). The Board suggested that Cret's design for the seal should be circled with 48 stars representing the states. Cret also designed the bronze fireplace ornament in the Board Room, for which he proposed symbols of Productivity and Stability. Chester Morrill, Secretary to the Board, felt that Cret's choice of balance scales to symbolize Stability was more appropriate to a judicial setting; Cret substituted a column for the scales.
The four-story building, with an exterior of Georgia marble, is in the shape of the letter H, with the space on either side of the building's center (that is, on either side of the "crossbar" of the H) forming east and west courtyards. In the 1970s, a fifth story was added to the center section of the building.