Pension Building

972 Words2 Pages

The Pension building or the National Building Museum as it is known as today is a monumental building which served as a great technological advancement at its time with its use of ornamental terra cotta, and as a tribute to those who served in the Civil War. It occupies the entire city block it rests on in downtown Washington, D.C.
The red-brick building, massive in size and scale, was designed by the war general, architect and engineer, Montgomery C. Meigs in the style of the Neo-Renaissance or Renaissance Revival. Like Italian Renaissance palaces, the Pension Building was designed with a single layer of rooms around the building's perimeter, each of which faced an interior courtyard; unlike its Italian models, the Pension Building's courtyard …show more content…

It was initially designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and then was modified by Michelangelo. The Palazzo Farnese in Rome, the largest and most famous of all Renaissance palaces, provided the model for the exterior massing and articulation of the Pension Building. Meigs's initial design called for a building on the same scale as the Palazzo Farnese, but eventually he doubled its size. Other major changes were in the roofing of the courtyard and the introduction of a frieze depicting the Union Army on the march. Similarities to the Italian model are the horizontal organization of the building into three nearly equal stories, duplication of the main-story fenestration pattern of alternating segmental and triangular pediments, development of a full third story rather than an attic, and imitation of the details of its entablature. On the interior the brick staircases composed of deep treads and shallow risers, which are canted down, were derived from Palazzo Farnese …show more content…

The exterior walls are of load-bearing brick masonry construction and are composed of common brick faced with pressed brick, decorative brick, and ornamental terra cotta. This was an early use of ornamental terra cotta which was a less expensive substitute for carved stone or iron. Each facade has an entrance in the center. The facades which vary on each level are characterized by pedimented windows, richly ornamented in decorative brick and terra cotta, and separated by belt courses.
Meigs’s sketches for the Pension Building’s cornice reveal that its basic form was directly based on that of the Palazzo Farnese, detailed drawings of which were accessible in a widely circulated book by Paul Latarouilly depicting Renaissance architecture in Rome. Here again, however, Meigs put his own stamp on the design. In lieu of the decorative acanthus leaves and fleurs-de-lis that lined the Farnese cornice, Meigs used cannons and bursting bombs, further tying the Pension Building to the military origins of the agency for which it was

Open Document