McCormick House (Washington, D.C.)


McCormick House is the current residence of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States. It is located at 3000 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. in the Embassy Row neighborhood.

History

It was first commissioned in 1908, from well known American architect John Russell Pope, by diplomat Robert Sanderson McCormick and wife, Katherine Etta Medill McCormick, married in 1876, of the Chicago Tribune publishing family, founded by her father Joseph Medill. The McCormick and Medill families were a newspaper and other media owning publishers, which began with Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the revolutionary McCormick reaper machine which greatly changed American and later world agriculture and farming.
The McCormick - Pope mansion was not completed until 23 years later in 1931.
The Brazilian embassy purchased the Neoclassical architectural style home in 1934, three years after it was completed, for two hundred thousand dollars .
The Brazilians were the second nation, next to the British to have an embassy on what is today Embassy Row.
In 1971, a new chancery was constructed next door. The very modernist mirrored glass walled structure was designed by famous Brazilian architect Olavo Redig de Campos.