National Statuary Hall
Before talking about National Statuary Hall, I would like to thank the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies again for creating and sponsoring the Passion Project Program. I can create this blog because of the Passion Project Program, and I have loved creating this blog so far. In this post, I will go through Statuary Hall’s history of construction, its unique features, the uses for the space over time, and some famous events that happened in the room.
After the original chamber for the House of Representatives burned during the War of 1812, Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed a new chamber for the House of Representatives. Charles Bulfinch, the person who oversaw the construction of the original Rotunda, oversaw the Hall of the House of Representatives’ construction, and they completed the room in 1819. Latrobe wanted the room to resemble an ancient Greek amphitheater, which highlights a theme in the Capitol Building of portraying and trying to represent the classical western civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The room is a semi-circle, and there are columns surrounding the room. The members’ desks all face the Speaker’s rostrum, where the Speaker of the House sits. The fact that all the members face the Speaker draws immediate contrast to the British houses of Parliament, where members face each other. Due to problems in the sound explained below, the House eventually moved into a new chamber in 1857. In 1864, the room became National Statuary Hall, and it now hosts some of the states’ statues.
The primary architectural feature of National Statuary Hall today is the namesake of the room, each states’ two statues. In 1864, Congress passed a law that turned the Old House Chamber into National Statuary Hall. The bill allowed every state to contribute two states to the set, and the entire collection is now one hundred statues from the fifty states. All of the statues were in National Statuary Hall at one point, but there are now only thirty-five in the room, and the rest of the statues are across the Capitol and the Capitol Visitors Center. It is important to note that there is much criticism of some of the states’ statues. Many statues portray Confederate soldiers or officials, and there are three times as many statues depicting Confederates as statues depicting black people. There have been recent efforts by Speaker Pelosi and others to remove these statues from the Capitol Building, but there has been no significant process so far.
The second key architectural feature of National Statuary Hall is the Whispering Gallery. Due to the room’s shape, a unique architectural feature enables soft sounds in one part of the room to sound louder in a different part of the room. The unique amplifying effect of the room had a significant negative impact on the efficiency of the House of Representatives’ functioning, and it contributed to the House moving to a new Chamber in 1857. The effect had changed slightly over time due to changes in the floor and ceiling, but you can still experience it for yourself once the Capitol Building reopens from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The use of the room has changed over the years. From 1819 until 1857, the room served as the meeting place for the House of Representatives. However, the room’s unique acoustics made it hard for the House to function, and they eventually moved into a newly constructed chamber when efforts to minimize the acoustic effects failed. After the House of Representatives moved to their new space in 1857, there was a period in which the room’s use was unclear. For a period, the space was mainly a passing point between the Capitol Rotunda and the new House Chamber, and it also stored some goods from around the Building. Since 1864, the space has served as the holding space for the states’ statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection, and the space currently holds thirty-five of the states’ statues. Ceremonial events also take place in National Statuary Hall, such as honoring ceremonies for foreign citizens and lying in state ceremonies for exceptional Americans.
Many important events have happened within the space, both as the Old House Chamber and National Statuary Hall. While the space served as the chamber for the House of Representatives, the Marquis De Lafayette, mentioned in the previous post, delivered the first address to Congress by a foreign person. Additionally, many Presidents of the United States were inaugurated in the space including, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Millard Fillmore. John Quincy Adams had a longer story with the room because he was a Congressman after his time as President of the United States. The House of Representatives also elected him President after no candidate obtained enough votes during the election. He had a stroke at his desk in the House chamber, and he passed away a couple of days later in a nearby room. Since the space has become National Statuary Hall, there have been many important ceremonies, including the recent lying in state ceremonies for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Congressman Elijah Cummings.
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