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U.S. Capitol Building American architecture, in its principal legislative building, has mirrored the nation’s evolution into a new “Roman Empire.” It achieved this feat architecturally long before the United States became the world’s leader in the political reality of the post-World War II era.
The use of Classical architectural forms for the symbolism of the new United States was no accident. That type of construction was essential to differentiate the 18th century Georgian architecture of England previously built in the colonies to an altogether separate look for its hard-won national status. The fact that its architecture also evolved to one of empire was an unintended by-product the founders failed to grasp. Design The U.S. Capitol saw its small “Federal” William Thornton-designed 1793 Palladian cube (eventually referred to as the “North Pavilion”) collectively housing the Senate, House of Representatives, and Supreme Court, evolve with its many additions into today’s “imperial” 600-room palace symbolizing the center of American political gravity.
Greco-Roman Architecture While the Greek vocabulary of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders and straight-line post and beam construction is Classical, what makes Washington, D.C., Greco-Roman is both the combination of uses of the Greek “grammar” and Roman engineering. Apart from the gigantic scale of its construction, ancient Rome built its structures with domes, vaults, and arches as well.
Rome may have used Greek building blocks (more precisely, “Hellenistic”) for its look but this specific American application for Washington, D.C., definitely became quite similar to the “Roman Empire” in its eventual grandiosity. Slavery Its very construction was a result of society’s structure. Slavery was so accepted that the payable accounts for the project in the National Archives show money was paid only to the slaveholders themselves for the services of “Nace,” or “Gabe.” We can only surmise from the 385 payments listed that they almost certainly performed the most difficult labor.
L’Enfant Plan One reason the grand green sweep and angled avenues of Washington, D.C., has an 18th century Baroque plan is that a Frenchman and friend of George Washington, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, was the designer of this magnificence and happened to be influenced by the idea of European grandeur. This Baroque city planning was itself influenced by the 16th century Pope Sixtus V’s re-imagining of Rome’s grandiose look of radial streets linking important churches to the Vatican, coincidentally destroying many of its antiquities in the process.
What became Washington, D.C., was surveyed by a free Black man, mathematician Benjamin Banneker. The ten-mile-square plan of the new city was a combination of the land of Maryland and Virginia simply to be in the middle of the original thirteen colonies (however, that of Virginia was taken back in a “Retrocession” in March of 1847). In 1791, L’Enfant presented his map to the new Congress that started the layout of the city preceding by sixty years the grand look of Paris we see today. Pavilions Following the Capitol Building’s Thornton-designed 1793 North Pavilion, the South Pavilion, designed by Benjamin Latrobe in 1804-07 for the House of Representatives alone, mimicked the earlier building’s Palladian exterior. But its interior was a monumental, half-domed, Roman imperial hall (now National Statuary Hall). By 1808, Latrobe then remodeled the interior of the original North Pavilion into a grand room for the Senate above a ground floor Supreme Court.
Rotunda Thornton had envisioned a central rotunda as a domed Pantheon between the two identical pavilions at the outset but it wasn’t until 1818 that Charles Bulfinch linked the two little buildings with one.
Perhaps influenced by the Baroque designs of the 1645-67 Parisian church, “Val de Grace,” and especially the arrangement of Claude Perrault’s “Colonnade” columns for the Louvre’s eastern front of 1667-74, Bulfinch linked pairs of Corinthian pilasters and columns to decorate the West Front of this central segment.
Chambers In 1851, Thomas Ustick Walter, the fourth Capitol Architect, had designed bigger imperial chambers in marble for both the Senate and House on each end of the building. Reading as separate buildings and similar to the two original pavilions, Walter designed the Classical additions atop one-story rusticated stone bases of alternating layers of pulled-out and receded stone.
Each addition (making the entire length over 751 feet) holds a larger, windowless, two-story room at its center (the southern House of Representatives chamber is larger) surrounded by windowed cloakrooms, corridors, and offices. Re-decorated in 1949-50, they have lately more resembled Roman imperialism in their décor, with heroic bronze “fasces” and Italian marble columns backing the Speaker’s Rostrum of the House. Even though the new additions’ windows alternated with two-story Corinthian pilasters, unlike the round-headed (segmental) pediments for the Thornton North and Latrobe South Pavilions, exterior window consoles of each of the principal floors for the new Senate and House chambers were built with rows of triangular pediments.
Amazingly for the Victorian times, they had somewhat sober Classical interiors and simple cast iron pilasters. And like the middle children dressed in the “hand-me-downs” of the first born, the Supreme Court then inherited the old Senate room and the Library of Congress occupied its former space.
Not surprisingly, the chambers’ interiors, though vaguely Classical in their architecture, have nevertheless been redecorated with a Victorian color palette. Drapery swags, highly figured marble, striped fabric wall coverings, and exuberant wall-to-wall carpeting have always been at odds with industrial age iron-and-glass skylights (since replaced).
Dome When the end addition designs with their connecting ranges of windowed rooms and fluted Corinthian columns (also present on all portico sides) on the terraces outside were nearly finished, the old 1818 bell-shaped dome, primarily of wood and covered in copper, appeared too small. So Walter’s 1854 design for a nearly nine-million-pound, 288-foot fireproof one of cast iron, not too subtly suggested by Walter’s other rendering showing it, was funded at the last minute.
In the end it resembled portions of both the peristyle of Paris’ Neoclassic Pantheon and Wren’s Baroque St. Paul’s Cathedral cupola. Its hemisphere was punched-through with 36 higher blind windows. While appearing to be oval from a distance, they are actually Italianate concave-cornered glass panels.
Of the lower 72, those behind the columned peristyle are the only unimpeded ones. The 36 arched windows in the drum (tambour) and the 36 in the cupola light only the stairway and forest of trusswork constructions between the inner and outer domes. The “inner” coffered dome oculus frames the 180-foot-high concave Constantino Brumidi fresco, “The Apotheosis of Washington,” painted in 1865.
Interior The Brumidi painting was so admired by Meigs, he made the aesthetic decision to engage Brumidi for the painting of five more corridors linking Senate offices. The Italian’s familiarity with Raphael’s loggia in the Vatican produced a vaguely Pompeiian miasma of oil painted vines, birds, and patriotic cherubs.
Frieze However, Brumidi had also sketched a grisaille fresco-painted U.S. history frieze (“Frieze of American History”) in 1859 to substitute for the relief sculptures planned for the belt area by Walter. It had the longest gestation of any work of art in the Capitol with painting starting in 1878 and finishing in 1953.
Brumidi had died of Bright’s Disease in 1880 and his chosen successor, Filippo Costaggini, had been a student of the Roman Academy of Arts. He adhered to Brumidi’s overall design but painted the black and white frieze in a more precise and regulated format. When he finished his painting contract in 1889, a 31-foot gap existed in the 8.3-foot-high area from the original 1859 sketch. Costaggini had floated several schemes to finish the work but none were approved before he died in 1904 with the fresco still unfinished. The American Institute of Architects declared the whole trompe-l’oeil painting was “a miserable sham” and suggested it be destroyed.
A trial panel was painted by Charles Ayer Whipple that was so cartoonish, even art-challenged senators could see it was a failure and Whipple’s plan to finish the frieze was short-lived. After many political delays, Allyn Cox was brought in and the entire fresco was considered finished and cleaned by 1953. Exterior Atop the cupola, a 12-columned “tholos” is a tempietto modeled on a round Greek temple. Since 1865, it has held a light indicating the presence of either the Senate or House during nighttime sessions.
Surmounting the tholos is Thomas Crawford’s 19½-foot bronze sculpture, “Statue of Freedom,” designed at his studio in Rome. Created in 1855, Crawford’s death in 1857 meant he couldn’t supervise its casting and the process was overseen by a slave in 1860. The January 1st, 1863 “Emancipation Proclamation” meant the bronze sections making up the complete statue were then assembled atop the tholos by “former” slaves. The dome itself was constructed in a technically incorrect and somewhat too prominent size in relation to the truncated main block and relatively smaller pediment but it finally balanced the building’s increased length.
Olmsted The great landscape designer of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, was contracted to surround the Capitol Building with a suitable park in 1874. In addition to a fanciful, brick summerhouse on the West Lawn (though he had planned two), he decided that side needed a bigger podium on which the monumental structure would stand.
During the next few years, a granite base, walls of marble and underground space provided a hundred more rooms around the vast Capitol mimicking the rusticated ground floors of the 1793 Thornton and 1804 Latrobe-built North and South Pavilions.
Somewhat duplicating Thornton’s and Bulfinch’s original Pantheonic designs, a double and sometimes triple row of eight curiously un-fluted monumental Corinthian columns (different from the fluted shafts on the House and Senate blocks) were most likely used to mimic the un-fluted pilasters on the two North and South Pavilions.
The columns, set in an “Octastyle” arrangement under the triangular pediment, also join set-back ranges of four more columns under flat entablatures flanking both sides (similar to that of the flanking additions). The entire elongated portico is a slightly larger width than the great dome above it. Most of the original Aquia Creek sandstone was kept in place behind the walls of marble. Some wound up in Washington’s Rock Creek Park or sold as bookends by the Capitol Historical Society. Emancipation Hall In 2001, a huge underground Visitors Center under the eastern grounds began construction to finish in 2008 the design we see today. It positioned Crawford’s original plaster of the “Statue of Freedom” in its most central spot.
And from 2013 to 2016, the decrepit cast-iron dome was completely repaired and repainted both inside and out with nighttime lights installed behind the translucent (“metal chilled”) cupola windows. History
On January 6, 2021, the building was such a symbol of the nation, it had attracted an angry mob poised to disrupt the legislators’ Constitutional duties and overturn the recent election.
(Above) Insurrection on January 6, 2021. After climbing the Olmsted podium, they broke into its most treasured spaces only to wander around taking “vacation” selfies while under the cavernous dome. Hopping on statue podiums and waving “Trump” flags, the crowd headed to the House and Senate chambers. And after traversing the Rotunda floor, they again loudly and forcibly tried to break into the legislative chambers to cause more mayhem by attempting to attack the Speaker of the House and hang the Vice President.
The building has always stirred strong feelings in what has also been a contentious place. Despite arguments on both sides of national issues, its halls have seen the abolition of slavery, financial support for the elderly, and socialistic labor projects for the unemployed. Today, the U.S. Capitol Building remains as the physical embodiment of the democratic experiment itself. No other world-famous building looks like the U.S. Capitol and no other structure makes us think that anything is possible.
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