Reinventing the old patent building: Washington's Old Patent Office Building is due for a complete overhaul after demolition work offered an unexpected glimpse of the building's former beauty

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 12, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

Changes can take place even in Washington. The original renovation plans for the capital city's Old Patent Office Building called for nothing more than a standard makeover: a cleaning of the building's facade and a renewal of its well-worn interior--things like that.

But those plans were altered after demolition uncovered an inner structure more beautiful than anyone had anticipated. Now the building, which houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), is slated for far more than a face-lift. It's "to be as fine a building as it can be" in the words of both SAAM Director Elizabeth Broun [see picture profile, July 7, 1997] and Marc Pachter, NPG's director [see picture profile, May 21, 2001]. It was Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small who gave the go-ahead to restore, as much as possible, the building's original elegance.

This fall, after the completion of the major demolition, INSIGHT toured the building with Broun and Pachter as guides. Mary Kay Lanzillotta, partner in charge of a team from Hartman-Cox Architects, came along, too--every one in hard hats and very sensible shoes. Debris and building materials lay all over. This was a gutted building, but a building whose stripped condition hinted strongly at the elegance and charm it had a century-and-a-half ago.

Visible now are the Patent Office's many windows, hidden during renovations done in the 1960s to protect paintings and other works of art from damaging sunlight. Thanks to advances in glass technology which make possible windows that don't allow infrared light to pass through, these windows no longer must be covered.

The full lengths of the halls now are apparent, too. From a corner of the building, it's possible to look down a hallway two blocks long, turn a right angle and see the building's blocklong width. And the demolition uncovered the old Patent Office's many fireplaces, which explain, says Broun, why a 19th-century "daguerreotype of the Patent Office shows a forest of chimneys on the roof."

Groundbreaking for the building took place on July 4, 1836. Robert Mills (1781-1855)--now widely regarded as America's first native-born architect of genius--chose the site on "the F Street Ridge," half way between the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

It was a spot set aside by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Washington's designer, for a national pantheon that would celebrate and honor America's heroes.

L'Enfant probably had generals and statesmen in mind. But a Patent Office honored a very different kind of hero: the man or woman who came up with a new invention or a new way of doing something that was an improvement on the way it had been done before.

"Venture was the symbol of the new nation," Pachter observes, and a Patent Office, more so even than a building commemorating the country's military and political heroes, represented the qualities that made America exceptional: its vitality and its reputation as a seedbed of progress.

The Declaration of Independence was housed there for a while. Patent models went on display. It was a showplace for American industrial and agricultural development. But in the 20th century, the building fell on bad days. Slated for destruction in the 1950s, the Patent Office was saved by the Eisenhower administration, then turned into the art galleries it once again will house when the present renovation is completed.

Mills left a major imprint on Washington. Born in Charleston, S.C., he studied architecture under Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe and designed buildings from New Orleans to New England.

In Washington, Mills designed the Treasury Building and the Post Office Building. He supervised the construction of the Patent Office Building from plans by two other architects, but the interior design was all the work of Mills--its stairwells, hallways and inner beauty. The Washington Monument, too, was made from his designs, but without the base he originally had planned.

Mills' genius is apparent today. But he had a difficult time in his own day. The jealousy of other architects was a hindrance. But politics was the major problem. A Jacksonian Democrat, Mills faced constant challenges from Whigs and, in 1851, during a Whig administration, he was removed from his architectural duties.

But his extraordinary influence on how the nation's capital was taking shape could not be removed. It was his work on the Treasury, Patent Office and Post Office buildings that "in the late 1830s established a new scale for federal offices," writes the architect's chief biographer, John M. Bryan, in America's First Architect: Robert Mills. Bryan concludes: "On these three buildings, like the pin of a hinge, turned the development of a monumental capital city."

Both Broun and Pachter say the renovated building won't be precisely like it was 150 years ago. "We don't want a bubble frozen in time," he says. "The Patent Office Building had 19th-century exuberance. The renovated building will have 21st-century exuberance."