Monumental Change

This is the month when the U.S. motorist arranges his children in the back seat, puts a comic book in the hands of each, and joins the opening charge of the yearly 5,5000,000-tourist attack on Washington D.C. This season the visitors get to see a substantial change--the first in a century--in a major public shrine: the new east front of the Capitol, topped by the freshly sandblasted 200-ft. dome.

The central east front of the building between the house and Senate wings remained the same for every inaugural (except Taft's indoor ceremony) from Jackson to Eisenhower. But it did not wear well. The walls and columns, cut from a Virginia sandstone quarry owned by George Washington, crumbled in many places like stale cake.

Overshadowing the fac,ade was the high dome, 8,909,200 lbs. of cast-iron ribs and plates so big at the bottom perimeter that an arc of it overhung the main wall--an engineering oddity concealed by the pediment topping the colonnade in front of the wall. Some critics prized this set-out look of the dome for the "cascade" effect it gave to a viewer standing close and looking sharply up. Classicists, however objected that the style varied too much from Old World models, whose domes are, set well back so that walls and roof can buttress them against the tendency of masonry to thrust out at the bottom.*

One of the classicists, whether he knew or not, was House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who three years ago pushed through the proposal to "correct" the perspective by moving the east front wall 32 1/2 ft. forward. To end the crumbling, he wanted a new fac,ade of longlasting marble, and he rubbed his hands at the thought of additional space for congressional offices, a new restaurant, a tourist-free corridor. Cost for the overhaul: $17 million.

Seeing the new fac,ade, most architects and others who were critical of the change tend to accept it peaceably. The new marble, plus the creamy paint on the dome, undoubtedly are an improvement over the flaked-sandstone look. And the forward shift of the front is so comparatively slight that visitors hardly note a significant change in the relationship of dome and wall.

Another public art project, was put on view a fortnight ago with the dedication of a 32-ft.-long mural by Realistic Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, 72, for the library of fellow-Missourian Harry S. Truman in Independence. Worked up from a three-dimensional clay model and a miniature painting, the mural is, says Benton, whose eyes are tiring, his last major project. The crowded historical pageant, called Independence and the Opening of the West, shows Indians, hunters trappers, French explorers, settlers and adventurers--the men, says Benton, who gradually "changed Independence from a quiet backwoods settlement to the gateway of destiny."

*As this problem has arisen over the years : St. Peter's in Rome, as many as ten big chains have been stretched around the base of the dome.

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