A museum with a patented history

When the National Portrait Gallery reopens a year from now after a six-year, $216-million renovation, the new space will represent a triumph for preservationists, for artists, for historians -- and for Robert Mills.

Mills, the original architect, was taken off the project after a rival designer convinced Congress that Mills’ 1836 plan for a fireproof building -- a major preoccupation for a city in which the British had burned the White House 22 years earlier -- would not work. Although Mills designed other landmark buildings in the nation’s capital during the same period -- the Washington Monument, the Treasury Department and the original Post Office, now the Hotel Monaco -- he went home to South Carolina devastated that politicians had stripped him of the commission midway through construction for what was to be the U.S. Patent Office, the third-oldest federal building in Washington, after the White House and the Capitol.

Now restorers have painstakingly peeled away 170 years of history and found that Mills was right.

“Mills’ basic insight into both the nature and shapes of the materials resulted in a simple but elegant solution,” said Stephen di Girolamo, project director. “It was about the shapes of the vault, and the brick in the vault, and the granite, sandstone and marble in the supporting elements. All relatively fireproof compared to iron.”

As a result of the political intervention, the museum in downtown Washington -- near the International Spy Museum and the MCI Center -- is a marriage of styles. The south side, the Mills wing, is Greek Revival in design and visionary in its understanding of technology. The rest, completed by his nemesis Thomas U. Walter, has the more basic look of a monumental block building.

Ironically, a 21st century attempt to bridge the wings with an undulating glass ceiling above the courtyard that separates them has run into politics, if different in nature than the politics that bifurcated the building in the first place.

The National Capital Planning Commission -- guardian of Washington’s public space -- has rejected plans for a canopy by Sir Norman Foster, who designed a similar construct for the British Museum. Preservationists objected, arguing that the canopy’s height would violate the character of the building. Disappointed officials at the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees the museum, said they hope a compromise design, to be completed in the next few months, will ease preservationists’ fears and win approval from the commission.

In the meantime, the building is revealing its secrets to construction crews working to finish the project for its grand reopening on July 4, 2006, exactly 170 years after President Andrew Jackson laid the cornerstone for a building that opened in pieces -- the Mills wing in 1842, the rest in 1865.

On a recent day, Marc Pachter, the fourth director of the National Portrait Gallery and the only man in Smithsonian history to head two museums at once (he was acting director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History for more than a year after the Sept. 11 terror attacks), donned hard hat and goggles to give The Times a walk-through. He wanted to share what he sees on walls now stripped of plaster and floors taken down to their foundation.

“We feel that the building is our greatest artifact,” Pachter said. “Always keep in mind the concept of grandeur.”

To demonstrate, he pointed out that each floor has a higher ceiling than the one below. On the first floor, the ceiling rises to 12.3 feet; on the second, 16.1 feet; and on the third the ceiling at times reaches 39 feet. Everywhere, vaults and arches and abundant light -- the building has 588 windows and 15,000 panes of glass -- give witness to the genius of Mills’ design. And exposed columns show clearly the extra and unneeded columns that subsequent architects installed to buttress the original design. “The problem for Mills is that nobody believed in his principles,” Pachter said. “They allowed him to build essentially one wing, and then they convinced Congress that his ideas were dangerous.”

A graduate of UC Berkeley, Pachter walked through the building like a knowing parent, marveling at the evolution of its development.

Pierre L’Enfant, who designed Washington from a swamp, intended the site first for a cathedral, what Pachter called “a Greek temple in a mudflat.” Ultimately, having put the legislators on Capitol Hill and the president three miles to the south at the White House, L’Enfant earmarked this space in between them as a pantheon to the heroes of the young republic, with porticoes modeled after the Parthenon in Athens. But Congress chafed at the notion of a tribute to religion or national pride, deciding in a burst of pragmatism to use the two-block site for the first U.S. Patent Office.

“This is something I often refer to as brilliant, but some might consider it bizarre,” Pachter said. “It’s amazing. They anticipated before America became the most inventive society on the face of the earth that the spiritual anchor of this nation was a temple to invention.”

Through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, officials who ruled on patent applications worked in the building. During the Civil War, it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers. One of them carved his initials into the wall near his bed, a piece of historic graffiti discovered during the renovation. Restorers encased the carving -- it says “C.H.F., 1864, August 8th” -- in glass, where visitors will be able to see it.

Walt Whitman, whom Pachter described as “conceivably the worst civil servant in history,” worked in the patent office but was “never at his desk, and the republic benefited from that.” Instead, Whitman, who once called his workplace “the noblest of Washington buildings,” visited the wounded, which may have led to his cycle of war poems. Clara Barton, the nation’s first full-time civil servant, also worked at the patent office, and it is perhaps no accident, said Pachter, that she became a nurse and founded the American Red Cross.

For most of its life, the building housed various federal agencies, and bureaucrats often boarded up its windows and carved up little warrens of offices. By 1953, the government had decreed that the building was no longer suitable for bureaucratic offices and suggested razing it for what Pachter called “that great monument to the American 1950s -- the parking lot.” Objections from leaders such as President Eisenhower and Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota dulled those plans. “The modern American preservation movement dates to saving this building,” Pachter said. “And they said, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve saved the building. What do we do with it?’ And then they remembered Pierre L’Enfant’s original idea of a cathedral to American heroes.”

The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened in 1968. The two have shared the space ever since -- the portraits of presidents and other American icons largely in the Mills wing, the art consigned to the Walter wing. In the renovation, the museums, both under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, plan to share the space differently.

Tell it with portraits or with art

Recognizing the multi-tasking imperative of the Internet age, Pachter, 62, considers consumer choice key to the modern museum experience. “You can choose your portal, you can mix and match as you want,” he said. In a first-floor corner, for example, an exhibition will portray how the nation was formed, with a painting of Benjamin Franklin -- the one used on the $100 bill -- watching over the space. “We tell the beginning of the republic here in terms of the portraiture, and upstairs they will tell it with art,” he said. “You can fight the Civil War over there in portraits or go upstairs and fight it with art.”

In short, Pachter said, both museums have decided “to tell the emotional history of America.”

Other novel features in the planning stages include a new Luce Foundation Center for American Art, where more than 3,800 objects not on formal display will be available to the public. To make room for this open attic, museum officials agreed to move their offices to a nearby building. A Daguerreian gallery will show how Americans viewed presidents and other notables via the early photographic process. A 346-seat auditorium beneath the courtyard -- endowed by Nan Tucker McEvoy, whose grandfather M.H. de Young founded the San Francisco Chronicle with his two brothers and a $20 gold piece -- will be used for music and performance art.

“This is a museum of portrayal, not just portraits,” Pachter said. “In my mind, Hal Holbrook is a great portraitist.”

Then there is a new Lunder Conservation Center, where conservators repairing various surfaces will be on view behind glass, to “help people understand the value of maintaining culture.”

At its core, the National Portrait Gallery will still be a paean to the presidents, and the newly renovated space will feature the Gilbert Stuart Lansdowne portrait of George Washington as its anchor. Pachter led a campaign in 2001 to raise $30 million to keep the painting at the gallery. (The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas came to the rescue after the British owner had threatened to put it up for auction.)

Of the new gallery space Pachter said, “Since people can’t get to the White House, this is where they will experience their presidents.”

Every so often, throughout the museum, the workers -- who now number 368 and may soon increase to a cadre of 400 -- are leaving columns exposed or textures unpainted to showcase the building’s history. And for future restorers they are leaving their own footprints -- yellow bricks placed next to the original red ones, so preservationists will know which came from the 21st century workers.

During its original construction, the building used craftsmen from the various states, eager to demonstrate their skill at installing marble floors or glass panes. These days, such skills are rare in this country, and Pachter praised both Congress and Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small for understanding the need to use only the finest materials, no matter their origin. Pointing to glass blown in Poland, Pachter said that when Small was named in 2000 “he understood this building as more than just plumbing -- although it was clear that after 170 years the plumbing was obviously a problem. He understood this building as something that could be restored to magnificence.”

Congress originally gave $66 million, but that was largely spent on the basic masonry and infrastructure repairs. Later, Congress added $100 million more. Individual contributors -- such as Washington developer Melvin Lenkin and his wife, Thelma, who are paying for a commissioned piece by San Francisco artist David Beck (best known for miniaturized mixed-media works such as his three-dimensional “L’Opera”) -- added $40 million to $50 million. Pachter is hoping for more, to enable the museum to award endowed curatorships.

In one center corridor, an earlier generation has left four large sculptures of the muses of American invention -- Ben Franklin (lightning rod), Thomas Jefferson (pasta machine), Eli Whitney (cotton gin) and Robert Fulton (steamboat). Asked why Microsoft’s Bill Gates was not among those honored, Pachter said: “Not yet. But should Mr. Gates find a way to sponsor this hall.... He deserves it anyway.”