Capitol Clinker

If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, then the latest addition to the Capitol Hill skyline is a resounding clinker. The Rayburn House Office Building, otherwise known as the new New House Office Building to distinguish it from the old New House Office Building, and the old Old House Office Building, was formally opened for business. Lady Bird Johnson last week dedicated a somewhat idealized, larger-and leaner-than-life bronze statue of the late Mr. Sam in the main-stair hall. Said Representative Wright Patman, recalling his fellow Texan: "This edifice is made, like Rayburn's toughly achieved reputation, to last for the next thousand years."

To most Washingtonians, that was an unsettling prospect. The Washington Post labeled the building's style Aggressive Eclectic, "because it has a surfeit of everything." A more apt description might be Mussolini Modern. It squats, like a huge, somber, white-marbled mausoleum, on an 8.3-acre plot, 700 ft. distant from the House wing of the Capitol. Four stories high, it is H-shaped, flat-roofed, contains three-room office suites for 169 Congressmen and their staffs (the other 266 Congressmen are housed in the old New House and the old Old Buildings), as well as nine standing-committee rooms, plus 19 committee anterooms, 18 small conference rooms, 51 committee staff rooms, 16 subcommittee rooms, a swimming pool, a gymnasium whose walls as well as floor are made of hardwood, tennis courts, a TV studio, and an underground garage with space for 1,600 cars.

The cost is a matter of some dispute. When Speaker Rayburn proposed the building in 1955, he requested an appropriation of $2,000,000, plus "such additional sums as may be necessary." By the time the architects, builders and congressional members of the building commission were through with it--three years behind schedule--the "additional sums" came to more than $86 million.

In addition, a subway running between the building and the Capitol, as well as renovations and additions in the vicinity, will hike the total cost to something like $122 million. But according to Patman's calculations, it was "a bargain of the first magnitude"--$36.56 per sq. ft. as against $90.94 for the 1935 Supreme Court Building.

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