States selected the finest architects of their day to design their capitols about as often as they selected their finest citizens to be governors—not very frequently. The vast majority of these buildings were the work of architects of lesser-to-vanishing renown. There are a few works by eminent American architects, one by McKim Mead and White, two by Cass Gilbert, and one partially to Henry Hobson Richardson’s credit. And yet the first three of those are obvious experiments on familiar models, all looking far more like the national and state peers than anything else. [...]
Skyscrapers and state capitols are America’s unique contribution to monumental architecture. The skyscraper is a product of function and structure; the state capitol owes its special character to symbolism. To most Americans today architectural symbolism means church design—the steeple and the pointed Gothic arch. Yet far more significant to the United States are earlier, Classically inspired architectural features, first built by colonial legislatures long before the opening guns of the Revolution. Their creators were legislators who saw in the dramatic possibilities of architecture a means of expressing the spirit of liberty. The vision was an accurate one: Those architectural features developed into symbols for the young nation, eventually taking on an abstract authority in the architecture of state capitols. Since the second decade of the nineteenth century the symbols have dominated every legislative building erected in the United States. Their story through two centuries of American building is a chronicle more continuous than any other, even that of the church and private house. [...]
Competitions limited to in-state architects were fairly common: Pennsylvania’s capitol, designed by a Philadelphia firm, would seem to vindicate nativist approaches, others may not. Nationally-prominent architects entered other competitions—and often lost to competitors savvier in cultivating design commissions and local taste. As Hitchcock wrote, “Architects with less training learned more readily that radical architectural concoctions must be made palatable with familiar spices.”
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