Guardian of Capitol Improvements : It’s a Grand Old Building, Which Keeps Washington’s Official Architect Busy

In his first year on the job as architect of the Capitol, Alan Hantman, guardian of the buildings that have come to symbolize our nation’s independence, has faced a broad range of daunting tasks, from preserving and restoring the almost 200-year-old structure to updating it and others for the needs of the 21st century.

In that time as the 10th national architect, Hantman asked Congress for--and received--a substantial one-third increase in his budget to do such things as fix the leaky dome of the Capitol and wire hundreds of congressional staff offices for online access and to create Web sites.

A graduate of New York City public universities, Hantman, 55, served a similar architectural and supervisory role at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan for 10 years. In his new job, he manages a $200-million budget and 2,000 employees. He earns $125,900 annually in one of the nation’s most prestigious architectural posts.

Hantman, 55, spoke of the work at his office in the Capitol’s subbasement surrounded by historic portraits of many of his predecessors and architectural drawings of the sprawling buildings in the Capitol complex that he oversees.

Question: Talk to me a bit about your impressions when you first walked into the Capitol. Do you have any recollection of what went through your mind?

Answer: Actually, my first impressions were before I was selected as architect. I had come from New York for multiple interviews by Amtrak to Union Station and I’d step out of the arcade and, because it was at night, I’d see the dome lit against the sky. That was just something. I’ve still not gotten used to the concept of--no matter how corny it sounds--that dome. It is pristine, pure form, especially when it’s lit against the night sky.

Once I walked into the building, I recognized that things were being done, but clearly the building could be cared for better than it had been in terms of displays and little sales shops here and there, things like that.

Q: Your job has been described as everything from building super of a small city to architect and fund-raiser. Describe it for me.

A: Oh, there’s really several segments to the job. Clearly we are responsible for Congress. The voters of America send a lot of representatives up here to Capitol Hill, and whatever we can do to help them do the people’s business is our responsibility. So if they need facilities in their office, better telecommunications. . . . If their basic building systems don’t work right, we’re not helping them do their job.

Q: Simply, what do you oversee?

A: We have the Capitol, which is situated on Capitol Square. Then we have the office buildings of the Senate, of which there are three, and the office buildings of the House, of which there are really five. There are support office buildings. Then we have--and some people don’t know this--the Library of Congress. We’re responsible for the buildings, the basic utilities and infrastructure and historic preservation. We’re also responsible for the Supreme Court and the Federal Judiciary Building. We also have the U.S. Botanic Gardens--the architect has been the acting director [of the gardens] since 1938. I don’t know when you stop acting and really become a director. We have our own power plant, which provides steam and chilled water to all our complex. . . .

Then we have some 25 acres outside D.C., where we have greenhouses, another 100 acres out at Ft. Meade of storage facilities for the Library of Congress where they’re building a dense book depository.

So all of that plus 273 acres of grounds that surround all of these buildings are part of our area of responsibility.

Q: What would you redesign if you could?

A: There are some buildings that we’ve inherited over time that don’t fit in with the monumental core of Capitol Hill. For example, the police headquarters is a converted office building; there’s an old hotel that House pages use as their dorm--it’s an old brick building that just doesn’t fit in.

Q: Could you compare the place that Rockefeller Center has in the consciousness of America to that of the Capitol?

A: I think in my confirmation hearing I tried to summarize it because I was very proud to have invested 10 years of my career at Rockefeller Center. To me it is--was and is--the heart of New York City. It’s really the village square, if you will, the heart of the city, and now I’ve come to the heart of the nation.

Q: The evolution of the Capitol reflects different periods of the country’s history. It started out a little building, and it’s grown. Can you explain how that growth parallels the growth of our government?

A: It was meant to house the legislative branches, both the House and the Senate, as well as the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress at one point in time. It really coincided with the westward expansion of the country when you began having more senators and more Congress people and you needed more room. The old Senate chamber was no longer big enough. With the supporting staff that people had, the officials of the Congress had no room. So it really did, in fact, coincide with this wonderful westward movement, and that’s how it became the north wing for the Senate and the south wing for the House.

Q: Do you get a sense of how foreign visitors view our Capitol?

A: If you see the dome glowing at night, you really recognize that it is something above and beyond the cast-iron and stone that make it up. It’s so much larger than reality. It’s a symbol, and I think many people from around the world view it that way. The shortcoming is that it clearly was not designed to handle 25,000 visitors a day during peak seasons. Clearly, when visitors arrive they are not prepared to know what they’re going to be seeing.

Q: Is there any more room to expand the Capitol?

A: What we think should be the next way to expand is to go ahead with the plans for the visitors center under the east plaza.

The visitors center would allow us to provide for the needs of all of our congressional constituents and foreign visitors as well. They’re just really not well-served right now. I mean, they’re out in the 90-degree weather waiting to come in for a tour, and there’s no adequate rest facilities or cafeteria facilities or a place to change a baby or anything of that nature. There’s no way to orient people to what they’re going to see before they come into the Rotunda, to talk about our form of government, to explain what the tapestries are about.

Q: And it would be underground, right?

A: Right. Three levels underground. Right now visitors line up on East Capitol Street waiting for their opportunity to come up into the building. The concept would be to have ramps leading from East Capitol Street underneath the ground where they could see a film or look at computer terminals to learn what legislation is currently pending or what their congressperson has been doing in terms of their voting.

Q: What parts of the building have seen the most wear and tear? Where is the building really hurting right now?

A: We’re looking right now at the dome itself. It’s 140 years old. There’s rust up there. There’s cracked cast-iron plates. We need to remove many layers of paint that have not been taken off since 1960. We hope to re-prime and reseal and replace metal that is crying for replacement. We’ll probably have to recast some pieces at the highest level of the dome.

Q: What are you doing to restore the Botanic Garden?

A: The greenhouse, in fact, had to be torn down several years ago because of metal fatigue. It was built in 1934, I believe. The glass was falling out of the structure. That was years ago, but no funding was coming forward for the restoration of the building itself. I saw clearly that it was a safety issue when I first came. The blocks were tripping hazards. The glass was rattling in the wind. Again, the metal was really fatiguing, the doors didn’t even swing in the right direction. So I told Congress that it was an emergency, and I was going to, in fact, close it as of Labor Day of last year. They came up with some emergency funding for us to go out and do a full restoration of the building, which is what we’re bidding right now.

Q: Could you talk a bit about the effort that will go into restoring the frescoes inside the top of the dome. You’re trying to preserve history there. Have you found artists and artisans who deal with that period of time?

A: Constantino Brumidi--who did the frescoes--spent some 25 years here doing the scenes of Washington inside the Rotunda and corridors on the Senate side and some meeting rooms. He’s done wonderful frescoes. He was the first one really to use the fresco art in the United States. He worked on the Vatican and other church-related facilities until he came here.

We will hire people with expertise in restoration. We are doing some of that work in the Brumidi corridors right now, and it’s a multiyear program, where we will actually, painstakingly restore the artwork on the walls, and we’ll be starting on the vaults fairly soon.

Before electricity came in, there were oil lamps around the Capitol, and everybody also smoked very heavily. So all of the oils that came from the lamps and from the smoking deposited on the artwork. When people came to clean them up, what had started out as a beige was now yellow or turned green, and they began touching it up with green. So you can actually see in the corridors now areas that have been fully restored with wonderful light and vibrant colors, and right around the corner the area that has not yet been restored is in greens and dark, more somber tones.

Q: I know there are a lot of historical treasures in your control. Can you talk a little bit about some of them and the art collections?

A: We have an interesting program by law. People had been wanting to have statues brought into the nation’s Capitol and, I forget when the law was actually passed, but it was probably in the 1880s or ‘90s or so, each state was allowed to dedicate two statues in the building. Now we have 96 [statues] I think of that ilk.

That collection that goes back 100 years really talks about the favorite sons and daughters--not very many daughters quite frankly--of the states going back at that point, from statesmen to military personnel to inventors to doctors, attorneys. So we now have an astronaut, but we also have, you know, Civil War generals. So it’s an interesting time.

Q: Do you ever wander the buildings after hours?

A: I’ve come in on weekends and evenings to get something done. Just walking down the long main hall of the Capitol on the crypt level, down a level from the Rotunda, is a thrill. Just looking down that long corridor, seeing some of the statues, the Minton tiles on the floors, is a wonderful experience, and then you hear your footsteps echoing off the walls without the people thronging the halls, that’s great.

Q: Do you have a favorite building?

A: Clearly, it’s the Capitol. There is no other building that can possibly rival it--the sense of being the center of our government. Despite the fact it has grown over the years with additions, there still is a cohesiveness about it that really speaks to the growth and unity of our nation.

Q: I think I read that during the Civil War, President Lincoln insisted they continue to work on it even though our country was at war. Do you feel the same commitment nowadays from Congress, the president?

A: Well, I’ve been very pleased by the response that I’ve gotten from appropriations committees both on the House and the Senate side. I think the chairs of those committees feel very strongly about the heritage that we have here on Capitol Hill. Once they understand the need, they recognize that we’re being penny wise and pound foolish in not really trying to solve the problems before we have major replacements needed as opposed to patching and renovations.

Q: You are also responsible for the Library of Congress building, which is, I gather, running out of space. What are you going to do?

A: I forget how many millions of new articles they have on an annual basis coming in, but clearly, that kind of growth would be accommodated on a remote site rather than in the buildings in downtown Washington, and the same thing with the film storage facility, which we’re hoping to get going. But the more active segments of the library need to be here for people to study and see.

Clearly, putting it up on the Internet, on the Web, the technical ways of accessing that library, is really being expanded tremendously. They’re doing wonderful work on making the whole library accessible around the country really.

Q: I wonder what William Thornton, the first architect who designed the Capitol, would think today if he somehow suddenly walked under the Rotunda? What would really surprise [any of the first architects] coming back 100 or 200 years later?

A: Well, I would think that William Thornton would be very surprised because that was not the dome he designed. But if we have Thomas Walter coming in, who did design the dome, he would be delighted to look at those drawings and see the level of draftsmanship and the detail they put in. I’d like them to be coming back and saying, “Yeah, that’s the way we planned it. Looks pretty good.”