Montgomery Meigs' Masterpiece

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Montgomery Meigs' Masterpiece
Washington, D.C.'s Old Pension Building is not your typical government structure.

By Kathryn Jacob

How appropriate that the National Building Museum, dedicated to celebrating American design, engineering, and construction, resides in the old Pension Building in Washington, D.C. Rescued from the wrecker's ball and restored to its Gilded Age glory in the 1980s, this is a building to inspire awe even in those indifferent to architecture. Its sumptuous, light-filled interior, the site of more than a dozen inaugural balls since 1885, is all the more surprising because it comes wrapped in such an austere red-brick package.

The Pension Building was the last government project of General Montgomery C. Meigs, its architect and engineer. In the 1850s Meigs oversaw the building of the Washington aqueduct and the Capitol's extensions and dome. As quartermaster general of the Union Army throughout the Civil War, he outfitted nearly one million troops and kept supplies flowing even while mourning the death of his son, killed by Confederate guerrillas in October 1864.

Congress stipulated only that the building be inexpensive and fireproof, but for Meigs it also had to be grand and noble...

In 1881 Congress asked Meigs to design a new home for the Pension Bureau, a huge department responsible for handling benefits for the country's thousands of ex-soldiers. Congress stipulated only that the building be inexpensive and fireproof, but for Meigs it also had to be grand and noble, a fitting reflection of the cause for which Civil War veterans had fought. For his model Meigs drew upon the sixteenth-century Farnese Palace in Rome, which he had long admired. He designed an enormous Italian Renaissance rectangle, 400 feet by 200 feet and 75 feet high to the cornice level, to be built of red brick (15,500,000 of them), with an inner court topped by a gabled clerestory. Construction began in 1882. When the Pension Building was completed in 1887, it was the largest brick building in the world. According to Meigs' meticulous records, it cost $886,614.04.

From the beginning, Meigs envisioned encircling his building with a dramatic frieze, like the one on the Parthenon. But he didn't want classical or allegorical figures for his frieze. He wanted realism--men and boys who looked just like the ones he was so proud of, like his own son--and he wanted every boot, wagon wheel, crutch, saber, saddle and sidearm he'd supplied as quartermaster to be visible.

Meigs chose terra cotta as the medium for the frieze because it was inexpensive, durable and could be worked to a high degree of detail. To sculpt it he chose Bohemian-born New York artist Caspar Buberl, with whom he had worked on the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building. Although Meigs and Buberl sparred over every detail, they eventually agreed upon six themes (infantry, cavalry, artillery, navy, medicine and, of course, quartermaster) to be repeated in various sequences around the building's 1,200-foot perimeter.

Not until the entire building was completed did the full effect of Buberl's frieze dawn on Meigs. The high relief, the earthy, raw quality of the clay, the realism of the figures, the palpable sense of purpose--all created exactly the impression Meigs wanted. No one man among the approximately 1,355 figures stood out. Together they move forward, marching, rowing, galloping, and limping along with an inexorable cadence that is difficult to resist.

Meigs lavished equal attention on the inside of the Pension Building. The main hall is an astonishing 316 feet long, 116 feet wide, and 159 feet--or 15 stories--high and has a rhythmic order all its own. The arcaded galleries surrounding the ground floor consist of arch after arch linking 72 terra cotta Doric-style columns; the same number of cast-iron Ionic-style columns grace the second floor. Brilliant bands of vermillion, cobalt, bronze, and gold--colors Meigs himself chose--repeat and repeat. Above the fourth floor, tier upon tier of clerestory windows flood the courtyard with light.

Mindful of the 1,500 clerks who would toil within the Pension Building's walls, Meigs labored to provide them with ample light and good air circulation, rare commodities in government office buildings of the 1880s. He placed all of the offices around the perimeter of the Great Hall, where they would receive sunshine and fresh air from the building's 240-some windows.

It isn't the arches, the colors or the windows, however, that first grab the visitor's attention. Everything pales before the eight immense Corinthian columns that support the roof and create the vast arches that break the room into nearly even thirds. Each of these behemoths is eight feet in diameter, 25 feet in circumference, 75 feet tall and built of 70,000 bricks. They are sheathed in plaster and painted to resemble golden Sienna marble. They were and still are among the largest interior columns in the world.

The focal point of the courtyard is a large circular fountain, 28 feet in diameter, with a single jet of water shooting toward the ceiling. The water guides the eye to 244 niches set way up in the cornice. Meigs filled them with statuettes of military figures, ethnological casts, and busts of himself, his father, and his wife, but they had all disappeared by the early 1920s. In 1984 the Building Museum commissioned a series of eight repeating busts representing Americans involved with buildings: bricklayer, architect, construction worker, landscape architect, financier, engineer, craftsman, and developer.

While the Pension Building was heralded as an architectural and engineering triumph upon completion in 1887, it had its detractors. A story attributed to both Generals William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan has them lodging only one complaint: "Too bad the damn thing is fireproof." Most critics, however, agreed with the author of a glowing review, which Meigs pasted into his scrapbook. The reviewer called the structure "a building the like of which is not to be seen anywhere else in the country." Indeed it is!

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