The Gold Dome on the Hill

The Iowa State Capitol sits on a hill east of downtown Des Moines, and its dome is covered in twenty-three-karat gold leaf. On a clear afternoon it catches the light from miles away, visible across the flat grid of the city like a beacon that the territorial framers intended to be exactly that.

Construction began in eighteen seventy-one and ran for fifteen years, finishing in eighteen eighty-six. The architect was John C. Cochrane, though the project changed hands and overseers multiple times across its fifteen-year build. The final cost was approximately two million nine hundred thousand dollars, a figure that alarmed Iowans at the time and prompted considerable legislative debate about whether the state truly needed all of this marble.

It does have a great deal of marble. The interior floors use imported tile and mosaic. The grand staircase is ornate in a way that was fashionable in the Gilded Age and that now reads as a specific cultural artifact of that era, a time when American state governments were making arguments, in stone and metal, about their own permanence and legitimacy.

The dome itself is actually five domes. A large central dome is surrounded by four smaller ones, a configuration unusual enough among American state capitols that architectural historians often note it specifically. The central dome rises about two hundred seventy-five feet above the ground floor. The lantern at the top holds a flagpole that has flown Iowa's flag continuously since the building opened for use.

The legislature and the governor's office both work here, and the building holds a Supreme Court chamber, though the court usually meets in the neighboring Iowa Supreme Court building. The building is open to the public on most weekdays. The view from the grounds looking west toward downtown tells you something about how Iowa's founders thought about geography and political symbolism, the government on the hill, the commerce below.