The Library of Congress, 1873-1897: The building, its architects, and the politics of nineteenth-century architectural practic

This dissertation documents the genesis, design development and construction of the Library of Congress and positions the building in the architectural politics of the late-nineteenth-century Eastern Seaboard. Documented by hundreds of architectural drawings, government documents and private papers, this study endeavors to establish an accurate chronology for the drawings, correct the historical record of the building's design and determine how the Library's public role and the aspirations of the Librarian, the United States Congress and the twenty-seven architects who submitted designs to the 1873 competition were expressed in those original architectural drawings.;The Premier Prize was awarded in 1873 to two previously unknown German-speaking immigrant architects, John Smithmeyer and Paul Pelz, for their Italian Renaissance Revival design. For the next twenty years, the Congressional Committee on the Library retained them, and others as well, to redesign the building in nearly every style of the latter nineteenth-century, including the Thirteenth-Century Gothic, Victorian Gothic, French Renaissance, German Renaissance, Modern Renaissance, Romanesque and Italian Renaissance Revival styles. These drawings document the Library's design development and the progress of eclecticism.;Although historians have linked the Library of Congress to the lavish Beaux-Arts manner of Charles Garnier's Paris Opera and identified it as the most grandiose surviving Baroque Revival Style public building in the United States, it is better understood in the context of broader contemporary European trends. Informed by Carroll L. V. Meeks's identification of the early influence of German immigrant architects on the Romanesque style in the United States, Peter Collins's assessment of Renaissance Revivalism and Eclecticism and Barbara Miller Lane's analysis of European government architecture, this inquiry offers fresh documentation on the impact of nineteenth-century immigration and widens our knowledge of the genesis of an American professional architectural elite.;A widespread and profound xenophobia, which precluded fair consideration of the building by its nineteenth-century contemporaries, is part of this history. As perhaps the most multifarious and well-documented example of nineteenth-century eclectic architecture in the United States, the Library of Congress warrants this effort to properly situate the building and its architects inside our cultural history.