WALTER REED NATIONAL MILITARY MEDICAL CENTER, BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), a former secretary of the U.S. Navy and architecture enthusiast, took a personal interest in the design of a new naval hospital in the Maryland suburbs. After funds were appropriated in 1937, he helped choose its site near the new campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was under construction across Wisconsin Avenue. In contrast to the conventional NIH buildings, the hospital took the dramatic skyscraper form sketched by FDR on a piece of White House stationery and inspired by his visit to the Nebraska State Capitol.

Cret, who designed several federal buildings, refined FDR’s concept into a twenty-story tower with strong vertical lines of stacked window bays and a base of interconnected three- and four-story pavilions. Executed by a Navy Bureau of Docks and Yards architect, the reinforced concrete and structural steel building was clad with quartz-faced concrete panels that contrasted with the bronze window sash and serpentine spandrels of the stacked window bays. The elegant “Modern Classical” (Cret’s term) hospital was placed in a bucolic, landscaped site.

When completed in 1942, the complex housed a five-hundred-bed hospital and training and research facilities, including a medical school, dental school, and the Naval Medical Research Institute. Now with additional wings added to the pavilions, the hospital provides medical care to each sitting president and many other dignitaries and navy personnel.