Hubert H. Humphrey Building (Elevation) 200 Independence Avenue SW, Washington, D.C. — completed 1977 Marcel Breuer was asked to put 950,000 square feet of federal offices on a site with an expressway tunnel and a sewer line running directly beneath it, and answered by lifting almost the entire building off the ground: a minimal foundation, concrete-clad columns, and a deep cantilever carried on heavy concrete roof trusses. Commissioned by the GSA in 1966 under the working name Air Rights Building, it was completed in 1976 and dedicated to Hubert H. Humphrey on 1 November 1977, and has housed the Department of Health and Human Services ever since. Travertine on the lower floors, precast concrete above, windows set deep behind peaked brise-soleil — a building that reads as a conviction and began as a structural workaround.