Jefferson

When its doors opened to the public in 1897, the Library of Congress, now the Thomas Jefferson Building, stood as an unparalleled national achievement. Congress chose the architectural team of John L. Smithmyer and Paul J. Pelz for an Italian Renaissance design whose elaborately decorated facade and classical interior expressed the young nation's growing cultural nationalism and optimism for the future. In 1888, Congress assigned Brigadier General Thomas Lincoln Casey and Superintendent Bernard R. Green to oversee construction after their recent work on redesigning and completing the Washington Monument and building the State, War, and Navy Building, now the Old Executive Office Building. In 1892, General Casey's son, Edward Pearce Casey, became the Library of Congress's lead architect and supervised the building's final construction and decoration. Embellished with works by more than forty American painters and sculptors, the building linked the United States to classical themes and traditions while also displaying contemporary American culture and technological ingenuity. At the entrance, three deep arches contain massive bronze doors, each fourteen feet tall and weighing more than a ton, with female figures on the doors and tympana representing, from left to right, Tradition, The Art of Printing, and Writing. Together, these figures were understood to symbolize the successive and gradually more perfect ways in which humankind has preserved religion, history, literature, and science.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States