Existing comment:
"I want to make this the most perfect and complete monumental building possible, it must... have all the beauty, charm and dignity of the Lincoln Memorial, and all the practical qualities of a first-rate office building -- a combination rather difficult to achieve, but nevertheless possible."
-- Architect Cass Gilbert, January 1929
"The place is almost bombastically pretentious, and thus seems to me wholly inappropriate for a quiet group of old boys such as the Supreme Court of the United States."
-- Justice Harlan F. Stone, May 1935
An Architect's Perspective:
"The new Supreme Court Building makes me think of ice cubes -- millions and millions of them. To me the building is cold, very, very, cold."
-- Harry Francis Cunningham, AIA
A Layman's Perspective:
"I have just visited the Parthenon of America's Acropolis -- the new Supreme Court building. Even in the gray light of a raw Autumn day, the building's yards and yards of white marble blaze like a plain of February snow."
-- Unattributed
"They don't call it the palace of justice in this country, but the Supreme Court's nearly completed new building is just that -- a $10,000,000 palace of gleaming white marble, gold leaf, carved oak and chrome-fitted baths."
-- Burlington (IA) Hawkeye, May 1935
"That building is beautiful. But it will isolate the court from the people even more than it is isolated now. Only a few will even get a peek at them, and on such a setting they will be portrayed as supermen."
-- Rep. Eugene B. Crowe (D-IN), June 1935
"Thus opens a new chapter in my career and at 70 years of age I am now to undertake to carry through the most important and notable work of my life..."
-- Cass Gilbert, December 1929 |