The Washington State Capitol: Tallest Masonry Dome in North America
Near Olympia, Washington
The dome you can see from Olympia rises two hundred eighty-seven feet above the city, making the Washington State Capitol Legislative Building's dome the tallest masonry dome in North America, and the fifth tallest in the world. It is an improbable monument for a relatively young state, and its construction stretched across decades of fits, starts, and competing ambitions.
Washington achieved statehood in eighteen eighty-nine, but the capitol story begins well before that. A first statehouse was built in Olympia in the eighteen sixties, followed by years of debate about whether to build a permanent one and, if so, where. A design competition held in nineteen eleven drew entries from around the country. The winning proposal came from New York architects Walter Wilder and Harry White, who designed a building in the Beaux-Arts tradition with Roman temple fronts, a colonnade of Corinthian columns, and a dome that loosely recalled Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Construction began in nineteen twelve but proceeded slowly, paused by funding constraints and the disruptions of World War One. The Legislative Building was finally completed in nineteen twenty-eight at a total cost of seven and a half million dollars. The dome itself required over fourteen hundred individually cut stones, the last of which was set on October thirteenth, nineteen twenty-six.
The campus around the building was developed over subsequent decades. In nineteen fifty-three, Olympia Brewing Company president Peter Schmidt donated a replica of a fountain from Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which became a beloved feature of the Capitol grounds. The Legislative Building itself survived the devastating Nisqually earthquake of two thousand one, though the disaster caused significant damage and required years of restoration work on the stonework and the dome's interior.
Today the campus is among the most architecturally distinguished state capitol complexes in the country, a deliberate statement by a state that had only a few decades in which to build it.
