House of Stewart

To most Americans, the U.S. Capitol is at once symbol, museum, and house of government--the Parthenon of the American Republic. To engineers, it is a monumental nightmare.

When British lobsterbacks burned the original Capitol in 1814, negligent builders put it back on top of the old foundation, which was scarcely deep enough to support the original walls, let alone the new walls and the huge dome that was added half a century later. By 1958 the east front under the dome had deteriorated so badly that Congress voted $11 million for Capitol Architect J. George Stewart's plan to replace it in marble. To provide more office space and a new restaurant, the central section was pushed out 321 ft., distorting its proportions in many eyes.

Last summer, after surveying the crumbling west side, engineers urged that it, too, be rebuilt immediately. Architect Stewart, 75, a onetime Congressman and engineer who has neither an architectural degree nor a license, proposed that the whole length of the west wall be encased in marble, extended as much as 70 ft. to make room for a huge cafeteria overlooking the mall. Cost: $24 million to $31 million.

Stewart's critics, who are still fuming over the eastern extension and his grotesque, $129 million House Office Building, were horrified. "I think it's indefensible, a desecration of a fascinating piece of architecture," growled William Walton, chairman of Washington's Fine Arts Commission.

Wolf Von Eckardt, architectural critic for the Washington Post, complained that the extension would completely obliterate the soaring vision of the great dome, leave it sitting on a puffed-out base like a "wedding cake on a big buffet table." Von Eckardt noted that damaged walls have been repaired --without extension--in far older monuments such as London's St. Paul's Cathedral and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Despite such criticism, Congress appears taken with Stewart's idea, shortly before adjournment voted him $330,000 for detailed plans and a scale model of the "new" Capitol.

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