Handbook of the new Library of Congress

by Unknown

In the meantime many detailed plans of stonework for the exterior walls, foundations, etc., had been prepared, and the working up of the details of design and construction in general had been actively going on in the drafting room, so that all was in readiness for the prompt and vigorous commencement of operations, which took place on the ground as soon as Congress had passed the act of March 2, 1889.

In the execution of the work General Casey had the entire responsible charge under Congress from October 2, 1888, until his death, on March 25, 1896, and he also disbursed the funds during that period. He held general supervision, gave general direction to all principal proceedings, and maintained an intimate knowledge of the work at all times, while performing the duties of his more absorbing and important office of Chief of Engineers of the Army at the War Department, to which he succeeded a few months before he was placed in charge of the Library building by Congress. General Casey had been connected with some of the most important pieces of construction ever undertaken by the Government, including the erection of the State, War and Navy Building and the completion of the Washington Monument. The last was an especially difficult task, as it had been necessary to strengthen the old foundations of the shaft before it was possible to proceed with the work. In this delicate and hazardous undertaking, as well as in the erection of the State, War and Navy Building, and other works, General Casey had been assisted by Mr. Bernard R. Green, C. E., whom he now appointed to be superintendent and engineer of the construction of the new Library building, and put in full local charge of the entire work.

To aid in designing the artistic features of the architecture—that is, exclusive of arrangement, construction, utility, apparatus, and the management of the business—Mr. Paul J. Pelz was employed under the immediate direction of General Casey and Mr. Green. Mr. Pelz had been in partnership with Mr. Smithmeyer in the production of the original general plan and design. In this way the design of the building, as it now appears in the main in the exterior and court walls, the dome, the approaches to the west front, was evolved, Mr. Pelz thereby fixing the plan and main proportions of the building. In the spring of 1892 Mr. Pelz’s connection with the work ceased. At that time the building had reached but little more than one-half its height.

In the fall of that year Mr. Edward Pearce Casey, of New York City, was employed as architect and also as adviser and supervisor in matters of art. His designs principally include all of the most important interior architecture and enrichment in relief and color. Mr. Casey continued as architect until the completion of the building. On the death of General Casey, in March, 1896, he was immediately succeeded by Mr. Green, under whose charge the building was completed, in February, 1897, within the limit of time set by Congress in 1888, and about $140,000 below the limit of cost—or, in round numbers, for $6,360,000.

General Decoration: Mr. Garnsey and Mr. Weinert.—In addition to those whose work has been described in the preceding paragraphs, two other men remain to be mentioned in giving any general account of the construction of the new building: Mr. Elmer E. Garnsey, who was in charge, under the general supervision of the architect, of the conventional color decoration of the interior, and Mr. Albert Weinert, who, in the same way, was in charge of the stucco ornamentation. Mr. Weinert was put at the head of a staff of modellers, who executed on the spot the great variety of relief arabesque and minor sculpture required in the comprehensive scheme of stucco ornament adopted by Mr. Casey as a chief factor in the decoration of the main halls and galleries throughout the building. For the general color decoration of the building—which extends into every room in the building, and includes the many elaborate and beautiful arabesques which decorate the vaulting of the main halls—Mr. Elmer E. Garnsey, who had been concerned in similar work at the World’s Fair, the Boston Public Library, and the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, was engaged. A large studio was fitted up in the building and a staff of designers and fresco-painters was organized. Mr. Edward J. Holslag was appointed foreman; Mr. William A. Mackay and Mr. Frederick C. Martin were employed to carry out on the walls the finer portions of the designs; and Mr. W. Mills Thompson and Mr. Charles Caffin to make the finished cartoons from the original sketches for the use of the fresco-painters. The latter numbered about twenty-five, and the larger portion of them were kept constantly busy for nearly a year and a half.

The General Character of the Building.—Of the splendid and monumental building itself, it may be stated, before entering upon a detailed description—and stated, too, with hardly any fear of contradiction—that it is the most perfectly adapted for the convenient use and storage of books of any large library in the world. It is the largest, the costliest, and the safest. It is absolutely fire-proof, not through any ingenious arrangement or contrivance, but by the very quality of the materials of which it is built—granite, brick, marble, iron, steel, and terra-cotta. Wood floors are used in many of the rooms, but they are merely a carpet of boards laid upon terra-cotta or brick vaults. It would be impossible for the Library to burn down; a fire would nowhere have an opportunity to spread. The great size of the building is perhaps best appreciated from a statement of the amount of some of the materials used in it: 409,000 cubic feet of granite, 500,000 enamelled brick, 22,000,000 red brick, 3,800 tons of steel and iron, and 73,000 barrels of cement. The draughting office turned out, during the eight years that the Library was under construction, 1,600 plans and drawings. Exclusive of the cellar, the total floor-space is 326,195 square feet, or nearly eight acres; and the whole number of windows is about 2,165.

As a matter of “library economy,” the arrangement of the building is of great interest. The problems to be solved were mostly new ones. In a paper on the Library, read before the American Library Association, Mr. Green said: “Its design was preceded by few or no good examples of library architecture, and was therefore the outcome of theory and deduction rather than the application of established principles.” This task was not undertaken in any dogmatic way, however; “the effort was,” as Mr. Green went on to say, “to plan on general rather than particular principles, and afford the largest latitude for expansion and re-arrangement in the use of the spaces.”

So far, however, as general interest is concerned, it is the magnificent series of mural and sculptural decorations with which the architecture is enriched that has contributed most to give the Library its notable position among American public buildings. Although a similarly comprehensive scheme of decoration was carried out at the World’s Fair in Chicago, and afterwards in the new Public Library in Boston, the Government itself had never before called upon a representative number of American painters and sculptors to help decorate, broadly and thoroughly, one of its great public monuments. Commissions were here given to nearly fifty sculptors and painters—all Americans—and their work, as shown throughout the building, forms the most interesting record possible of the scope and capabilities of American art.

It may be noted here, also, that, both inside and out, the Library is, in the main, in the style of the Italian Renaissance—derived, that is to say, from the architecture of the buildings erected in Italy during the period (roughly speaking, the fifteenth century or earlier) when the elements of classic art were revived and re-combined in a Renascence, or New Birth, of the long-neglected models of Greece and Rome.