A Sculpture in Light and Concrete

The Pan American Health Organization's new headquarters, from the south. Several offices and a library with a capacity of 25,000 books were already installed when photograph was taken in August. Dedication will take place September 27.

By Juan Villaverde

Something really new in Washington has made its appearance in a picturesque section of the city known as Foggy Bottom. The creation of the Uruguayan architect Román Fresnedo Siri, it stands on a triangular block near the Lincoln Memorial and the projected site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and not far from the Potomac River or historic Arlington National Cemetery. Something new, provocative, and beautiful. To say that anything is really new in architecture in Washington is to say a lot, because extensive reconstruction work has been going on in the city for many years. Houses, rows of houses, even whole blocks have been reduced to debris from one day to the next, and modern structures are going up all over. The old gives way, not from the blows of the pick or the blast of dynamite--which had something about them almost poetic or noble--but falls instead before the irreverent thrust of the bulldozer and the prosaic thud of the enormous ball swinging from the long, outstretched arm of the crane. And never a thought for the past, or a sigh of nostalgia . . .

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