Existing comment:
National Building Museum; Great Hall
Now we're inside the building. For the longest time, I had admired the frieze outside without venturing inside. It wasn't until a book and someone had recommended it that I explored it. Unfortunately, the first day I went in (which was when this picture was taken), the Great Hall was being prepped for a charity event scheduled for that weekend. Instead of an empty hall, there were clothes racks and junk like that. It's a tribute to the size of this place that all of that stuff can be in the Hall and it doesn't jump out at you in this photograph taken from the third floor.
Shown here is the main feature of the interior; the Great Hall with its columns. The hall is 116 feet by 316 feet. Four Corinthian columns divide up the hall and support the central roof. Each column is 75 feet tall and is constructed of 70,000 bricks. The base of each is 8 feet in diameter. They are covered with terra-cotta bases. The tops has a molded plaster capital with a 3,200-pound cast-iron abacus.
Due to monetary concerns, the columns were painted white when the building first opened. It wasn't under 1895, three years after Meigs' death, that they were painted to resemble Siena marble. Sometime before 1950, they were repainted to be a single color again. The marbleizing of the columns was recreated in 1984.
There's a fountain in the middle of the Great Hall. It was covered by a wooden floor to make the room more suitable as an office building. The cover was removed in 1980. |