Roman Architecture in Washington, D.C.

In 1790, shortly after Washington was chosen as America's new capital city, Pierre L'Enfant, a French-American military engineer, presented to President Washington a plan for the new city. It was an elaborate Baroque plan with spokes of radial avenues, and L'Enfant, who was not much of a team player, was quickly dismissed from any involvement in the project. But his plan, with its bold conception of America's new capital, has persisted for more than two centuries. L'Enfant's most important avenues crossed here, at Capitol Hill. Although Capitol Hill was only 88 feet high, it was the most eminent thing around here, and struck L'Enfant as a pedestal waiting for a superstructure. It took quite a while for that superstructure, the Capitol Building, to be constructed. The cornerstone of the first part, for the Senate, was laid in 1793. Most of what we see now dates to the mid-19th century, when the two long wings and the famous dome were constructed. The architectural language throughout is neoclassical. It's not based on any one building. Jefferson had recommended using the Pantheon, for example, as an exemplar. But here they've just taken elements of many classical buildings, pediments, columns, and the Great Rotunda, and combined them into this vast synthesis. This is the National Mall, the vast park at the heart of Washington. We're standing at the eastern Capitol side. The Washington Monument in the center is behind me. From end to end, the mall is two miles long, a vast, almost overwhelming open space. It appeared in L'Enfant's original plan, but it was its current appearance largely to the Macmillan Plan, a senatorial commission convened around the turn of the 20th century to re-establish the monumental beauty of the mall under the influence of the neoclassical City Beautiful movement. One of the chief recommendations of the Macmillan Plan was the removal of the train tracks and station from the National Mall, and the replacement with a new, suitably grand station. That station, Union Station, was designed by Daniel Burnham, best remembered as the mastermind behind the White City, the Beaux-Arts fairyland built for Chicago's 1893 World's Fair. True to form, Burnham built a grand neoclassical pile in Union Station. The main waiting hall, where I'm standing, is modeled on the grandest Roman buildings, the Baths of Diocletian and the Basilica of Maxentius. You can see the Dacian-style guardians here standing above the colonnades. The exterior is styled in a facade like a Roman triumphal arch. It's a gateway to America's Capitol. Until 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court met in the Capitol. It only received its own building at the behest of William Howard Taft, the former U.S. President and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Taft wanted a building of importance and dignity, and got one, courtesy of Cass Gilbert, who designed this essay in Neoclassicism that you see behind me. It is an Octo-style Corinthian temple of justice, crowned by a pediment that features a statue of Even then, there were some who complained that this design was too grandiose. But it's hard to imagine any other style being chosen here in America's Roman Capitol.