[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 136 (Thursday, October 26, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11126-S11127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page S11126]]
              UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE AT ISLIP, NEW YORK

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on October 16 the new United 
States Courthouse at Islip, New York, was dedicated in a splendid 
ceremony at which the distinguished architect Richard Meier spoke, in 
the company of Robert A. Peck, the singularly gifted Commissioner of 
the Public Buildings Service of the General Services Administration.
  The ceremony was splendid for the simple reason that the courthouse 
is magnificent. Perhaps the finest public building of our era. 
Certainly the finest courthouse. And it could never have happened save 
for the Design Excellence Program Commissioner Peck has put in place 
with his characteristic compound of genius and persistence.
  Major Peck, as he is known to his friends (he was a Green Beret 
officer), is a public servant of unexampled ability and achievement. 
His record is known to all. Some number of years ago when he was 
counsel to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, he put 
together for the Committee a slide show consisting of photographs of 
early public buildings in early America. He did not plead his case; he 
made it. The buildings exude a confidence and expectation that clearly 
explain the endurance of American democracy. I recall in particular a 
white wooden-frame courthouse in Rhode Island. Graceful, serene, 
unthreatening yet equally forceful. Of a sudden it came to us. As 
nowhere else on earth, the courthouse is a symbol of government in the 
United States. Go to London, go to Paris. There are courthouses, or at 
least courtrooms there. If you can find them. Amidst the cathedrals and 
the palaces, and to be sure, the buildings of the legislature. Here it 
is different. The courthouse square is where folk gather.
  The Nation owes Robert A. Peck more than it will ever know. But this 
would hardly matter to him. As the time approaches when he will leave 
government, he takes with him the knowledge of his singular public 
service.
  I ask that Major Peck's address on the occasion of the courthouse 
dedication be included in the Record at this point, along with a brief 
summary of his service.
  The material follows:

 Robert A. Peck, Commissioner, GSA Public Building Service, 16 October 
                                  2000

       Building partners, GSA colleagues, and distinguished 
     guests; may it please the court: This is a fine day, a great 
     day for this Court, for New York, for Long Island and for us 
     in the General Services Administration. But more important 
     still, we might well someday regard this as the day that 
     marked the full flowering of a renaissance in public building 
     in America.
       At the turn of another century, at this season exactly two 
     hundred years ago, the White House and the Capitol were 
     occupied, if not quite completed, in Washington. It is not by 
     chance that they quickly became the architectural icons of 
     American democracy. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson 
     intended them to be just that. They conscientiously sought to 
     erect Federal buildings of a scale, style and quality that 
     would reflect the noble origins and intentions of the new 
     government.
       And so began a tradition of American public building that 
     would, for a century and a half, produce some of the finest 
     buildings in America. The federal government built 
     courthouses, post offices, land offices and custom houses all 
     over the expanding nation. You can see photos of Federal 
     buildings of imposing stature, constructed of enduring 
     materials and elegantly detailed, sitting on unpaved streets 
     in what were literally one-horse towns. The buildings 
     simultaneously planted the flag and put the towns on the map. 
     The government was proud to build them and the townspeople 
     were proud to have them. States and cities followed suit with 
     stately civic buildings, malls, and memorials.
       Then, after World War II, something happened. As the scale 
     of government increased, public buildings diminished. Not in 
     size, but in accomplishment. Just as GSA was being founded, 
     fifty-one years ago, public architecture fell into decline 
     and, quickly, into deserved disrepute.
       As in so many other things, there was a brief shining 
     moment for public architecture in the Kennedy Administration. 
     Drafted by a then-special assistant to the Secretary of 
     Labor, one Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a set of Guiding 
     Principles for Federal Architecture appeared from nowhere. 
     Certainly no one had asked for them. The Principles called 
     for federal architecture which is ``distinguished and which 
     will reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of 
     the American National Government.'' But the Kennedy era 
     produced few buildings and, in any event, the spark didn't 
     ignite.
       GSA would try on occasion. I was witness to one noteworthy 
     hearing in the first or second year of Senator Moynihan's 
     first term in which a GSA official, pointing to a tepid 
     design, said the government was trying to put the poetry back 
     in its architecture. Senator Moynihan advised, ``better try 
     to learn the prose first.''
       Look at this building. Walt Whitman does come to mind, or 
     perhaps Mozart or Copland, if architecture is indeed frozen 
     music.
       GSA is now some forty buildings into the largest public 
     buildings program since that of the 1930's. We are turning 
     out building after building, mostly courthouses but also 
     office buildings, border stations and even laboratories, that 
     meet the test of the Guiding Principles.
       GSA's Design Excellence Program has changed our 
     expectations for public architecture. Members of Congress 
     from both parties and local community leaders now demand 
     quality from us. Many cities are following suit and are 
     hiring the best designers they can find to build new civic 
     structures, in so doing reviving their own traditions born in 
     the City Beautiful movement of a century ago.
       Inside GSA, Design Excellence has spurred us to demand 
     higher quality of ourselves, not just in architecture but in 
     all that we do. We aspire to build historic landmarks for the 
     next generation. Just as so many Federal buildings of the 
     19th and early 20th century have become local landmarks that 
     citizens rally to defend, so we are determined that our new 
     buildings will stir affectionate and passionate defenders in 
     the years to come.
       Richard Meier's accomplishment here sets a mark that will 
     be hard to surpass but that challenges us to accept nothing 
     short of the inspirational when we build.
       GSA in this Administration made a bold decision to pursue 
     design excellence. All praise is due to GSA's chief 
     architect, Ed Feiner, a native of New York City and his GSA 
     colleague, Marilyn Farley, who persevered through years of 
     indifferent response inside GSA to become the architects of 
     our Design Excellence process. In his New Yorker review of 
     this building, Paul Goldberger said the GSA was a much more 
     enlightened client for Richard Meier than was at least one 
     other well-known client of his. To Ed and Marilyn go much of 
     the credit for this.
       We are fortunate to have as our clients in this, as in so 
     many of our projects, the federal judiciary. They are not 
     easy clients, as you might expect of those with lifetime 
     tenure who are used to having the final say. But they are the 
     best clients, because they care about the quality of the 
     buildings in which they carry out perhaps the most sensitive 
     function in our society. Judge Wexler has lived and breathed 
     this building for a long, long time and we are all in his 
     debt.
       At these dedications, those of us who speak--the judges and 
     the architects excluded--often have had little to do with the 
     day to day agonies and triumphs of seeing a project like this 
     to completion. So thanks to the GSA project managers, the 
     construction managers, the architect's team and the builders, 
     those who sat here in the construction trailers, who hammered 
     out the details and who worked in the prose of budgets and 
     schedules. And thanks to the construction workers, too often 
     overlooked as we congratulate each other.
       Again, thank you to Richard Meier. Your building is at once 
     a structure that stirs emotion and embodies reason, a 
     building that at once demonstrates the power of large ideas 
     and proves, as Mies van der Rohe said, that god is in the 
     details.
       May I sound a few cautionary notes and, in this political 
     season, petition for help? We have retained our way on public 
     architecture only recently, to the enduring benefit of our 
     people, our communities and our policy. But we could regress.
       There are still some, not many, thankfully, who would limit 
     budgets to such a degree that we would be putting up throw-
     away buildings. GSA has combined judicious and vigorous 
     budget-setting with our design excellence procedures to make 
     sure that we build with prudence as well as with grace.
       There are some, again not many, who think GSA should build 
     in a ``traditional'' style, whatever that means. At the turn 
     of the last century, the federal government did decree an 
     official style. As happens too frequently in government, what 
     started out as a declaration in favor of a fresh idea 
     remained in force so long that it prevented the government 
     from keeping up with changing times. The Guiding Principles 
     wisely forbade the government from having an official style 
     and directed instead that the government take architectural 
     direction from the best practitioners in the private design 
     community. We need support in building buildings like this 
     one, a striking and ennobling structure of and for the 21st 
     century.
       And finally, there is the nation's understandable concern 
     with security. We must build buildings like this one, that 
     intelligently and rationally counter likely and deterrable 
     risks. We must not and need not wall off our public buildings 
     and our public servants from the public they are intended to 
     serve. We must not let the terrorists become our most 
     influential architects.
       Everyone in GSA who has had anything to do with this 
     project will be proud as long we he or she lives that we had 
     even a small role in giving New York and the nation this 
     temple of democracy. We are proud to be building buildings 
     worthy of the American people--none so worthy as this.

[[Page S11127]]

     
                                  ____
                             Robert A. Peck

       Robert A. Peck was appointed Commissioner of the Public 
     Buildings Service of the U.S. General Services Administration 
     on December 26, 1995. The position dates in a direct line to 
     the establishment of a Federal Office of Construction in 
     1853. As head of the Public Buildings Service, Bob Peck is in 
     charge of asset management and design, construction, leasing, 
     building operations, security and disposals for a real estate 
     portfolio of more than 330 million square feet in more than 
     8,300 public and private buildings accommodating over one 
     million workers. PBS owns or leases nearly all civilian 
     Federal office space, courthouses and border stations and 
     many laboratories and storage facilities. The PBS annual 
     budget is approximately $5.5 billion, nearly 90% of which is 
     contracted to the private sector.
       Mr. Peck has been a land use and real estate lawyer, real 
     estate investment executive and vice president for government 
     and public affairs at the American Institute of Architects.
       In prior public service, Mr. Peck has worked at the U.S. 
     Office of Management and Budget, the National Endowment for 
     the Arts, the Carter White House and the Federal 
     Communications Commission. He was chief of staff to U.S. 
     Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and a counsel to the 
     Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (where among 
     his other duties was oversight of the Public Buildings 
     Service). He was also a Special Forces (Green Beret) officer 
     in the U.S. Army Reserve.
       Mr. Peck received his B.A., cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with 
     distinction in economics, from the University of Pennsylvania 
     in 1969 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1972. He has 
     been a visiting lecturer in art history at Yale University 
     and a visiting Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate 
     School of Design. In 1997, he was named an honorary member of 
     the American Institute of Architects and in 2000 received a 
     Corporate Real Estate Leadership award from Site Selection, 
     the magazine of the International Development Research 
     Council.
       Bob Peck has been active in historic preservation and urban 
     design, serving as president of the D.C. Preservation League 
     and as a presidential appointee on the U.S. Commission of 
     Fine Arts, the Federal design review board for the nation's 
     capital. He has written and spoken extensively on 
     preservation, urban planning, infrastructure investment and 
     transportation. He is a member of the Board of Regents of the 
     American Architectural Foundation and serves on the national 
     advisory board of the Mayors Institute on City 
     Design.

                          ____________________