A Pictorial Tour of America’s State Capitols

Eclectic architecture, often overlooked, depicted in a new portfolio of photographs.

A few weeks ago, I heard about the unusual work of two photographers from New Haven, Robert Lisak and David Ottenstein. They’ve gone around the country photographing the capitols in every state, preparing a book of their work. It’s not especially stimulated by any current event — the buildings date from 1772 to 1969 — but the country’s 250th birthday is, after all, coming in a few short years. The artists were drawn by the architectural diversity of these buildings. They were enormous points of local pride when they were created, often in the newly designated capitals of just-admitted states.

An exhibition of these photographs is running through the summer at the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Conn. It’s a lovely house museum built in 1720 near Miss Porter’s School. Connecticut’s majestic capitol is nearby. So is the Wadsworth Atheneum. The New Britain Museum of American Art is in the next town.

It’s got a superb collection of American art. Hill-Stead, another house museum, is also in Farmington. It’s fun to experience how it felt to live with a Whistler and some very impressive Impressionists.

And this is the Fourth of July weekend, so let’s celebrate America by looking at their work. I like profiling artists such as Lisak and Ottenstein. They’re working on unconventional subject matter. Capitol buildings loom in the centers of 40 nice American cities. Vermont’s in Montpelier, with 9,000 people, is hardly a city, but loom the capitol does. Prominence notwithstanding, as a genre, these buildings are often overlooked.

I see Ottenstein’s and Lisak’s photographs as both very good art and also a tribute to a niche of civic architecture that’s self-aggrandizing and aspirational. First of all, the show salutes American eclecticism. There are only a handful of masterpieces among these buildings, but they’re homespun, ambitious, and, in their time, almost always the zenith of regional architecture. They’re also nationalistic. “Nationalism,” pride in home and love and loyalty of home, are intensely felt in these regions, too.

Sometimes, the views are poetic, showing how magical pure Classicism can be. A photograph of a sweeping staircase in Alabama’s 1851 capitol, in crisp Federal style, is magical.

To begin, the style of Maryland’s capitol is what I’d call Provincial Baroque. Its capitol in Annapolis is the oldest, first occupied in 1772 but unfinished until 1792. The legislature vacillated between stinginess and impecunity, and it’s hard to get good help during a revolution. All the while, legislators labored in a construction site with a leaky roof.

It was, and still is, a building that makes a splendid statement. An architectural detail is in the show, a muscular, broken molding that’s almost flamboyantly Baroque. An octagonal tower tops the building. A visitor looking at it felt authority and stability. A visitor looking from it saw a sweep of land and sea and believed the future was a promising one.

Georgian Revival is an American style staple for over 200 years, almost the go-to taste of first resort for important civic buildings and emulating the Capitol in Washington, but lawmakers in many states picked domed Georgian Revival long before the pile in D.C. was finished. Legislators, mostly lawyers and farmers from what we’d call the provinces, were shockingly big on High Victorian, with all the trimmings.

Art Deco is an outlier and counterintuitive but, in Oregon’s, Nebraska’s, and Louisiana’s capitols, it is both handsome and effective. Hawaii’s capitol, finished in 1969, is in the sleek International Style. At its dedication, the governor said it reflects Hawaii’s “open sea, open air, open doors, open arms, open hearts” zeitgeist, and it does.

Not only is Connecticut’s capitol building in nearby Hartford, it’s a Gilded Age movie palace of a place. I worked for the Connecticut State Senate for eight years in the 1980s as what I called “the leader of the hacks,” still, as far as I can tell, a unique credential among today’s art historians. My actual title was “assistant to the President Pro Tempore,” and I liked it that way. Power flows to those who seem not to want it.

I know the Connecticut capitol building intimately. I policed the division of work between Republican- and Democratic-linked contractors so “all the boys got taken care of,” an essential but tangential project. Still, I saw the pile transformed.

The capitol in Hartford opened in 1879, designed, sort of, by Richard Upjohn, America’s preeminent designer of churches. This was a counterintuitive choice, since sleaze in state politics runs like a mighty river, but, that said, sleaze in the lofty heights of the Episcopal Church is a thing at which to marvel. I say “sort of,” because Upjohn’s competitor for the design, James Batterson, might have lost that job but was hired as the general contractor. In construction, the building began to look more and more like Batterson’s proposal.

It’s Second Empire, if I were to tag it with a style, with a dash of Eastlake and Moorish Revival, and complete with an exterior profuse in carving and arches but flat and simple enough to seem restrained, even decorous. The interior’s a feast of marble, fake and real, with diaper and running style stencils in deep yellow, blue, green, and red. The forms aren’t boisterous but flat, another concession to Yankee austerity that, even in the Gilded Age, was broadly felt. Ceilings in both public spaces and the House and Senate chambers soar, as if legislators sought space to ventilate their lofty rhetoric. That there were two competing architectural visions didn’t create a mishmash. Rather, it made a gorgeous eccentricity.

Ottenstein’s and Lisak’s photographs are peopleless, except for sculptures here and there, and that’s good. This helps viewers focus on the architecture and removes us from prattle about temples to democracy. It’s best not to be reminded that these buildings are temples to many things, among them to avarice and mediocrity. What they’re definitely not are shrines to complacency.

Thomas Jefferson designed the capitol in Richmond. He wasn’t an architect and had, then, never been to Europe. He borrowed the look from the Maison Carree in Nimes, France. Built around a.d. 3, it’s still the best-preserved Roman temple anywhere. Jefferson, revering the Roman virtues of loyalty to the state, devotion to the family, probity, and restraint, picked the look from a portfolio of prints based on old Greek and Roman buildings. It’s a Southern reverence for the past. Jefferson wanted to create the look of the Acropolis, with a collection of civic buildings. He got the feel of grandeur if not the entire complex.

Without people in the photographs, the artists present architecture as a silent witness, a witness to compelling, dramatic history. Lincoln visited the Richmond capitol days after the fall of the Confederacy. The Annapolis building was the nation’s capitol for a few months in 1783. Huey Long was killed in the capitol in Baton Rouge, and bullet holes still pock the walls. The Confederate constitution was adopted in Alabama’s then-new capitol. Classicism meant different things to different people, and the North and South each tried to co-opt the style as expressing its values, as both did with the Bible.

At the same time Virginia’s capitol was built, Thomas Bulfinch, another amateur architect, went contemporary on his design of Boston’s capitol, picking as his model Somerset House in London, designed in 1776. During the Revolution, much of Boston’s ruling class, largely Loyalist and Anglican, fled. The new order drew from artisans and businessmen, especially the newly rich. But however much it drew from Classicism, the building was done in a modern style, which resonated more with a new commercial elite.

It’s not that history worship is invisible in Boston’s statehouse. These capitols are living buildings, however elegant, and almost all were originally conceived to house the entire state government, becoming very crammed very quickly. Lisak and Ottenstein are after aesthetic purity, so we see no dropped ceilings, no desks packed in hallways, and no empty bottles of booze.

Lisak’s and Ottenstein’s photographs are studies in domes. Connecticut’s is celestial, sparkling, and remote. Illinois’s is grand, soaring, to be sure, but heavy and very much of the here and now.

In the past 30 years or so, almost all U.S. capitol buildings have been renovated and restored to their original look. Over the decades, almost all have had additions. Vast parts of the government were moved to new buildings. Many were augmented with features that reflect new styles. Boston’s House Chamber, still in Georgian style, was decorated with big history paintings in the 1930s. Colonial Revival was the rage, and the country had just observed the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. These scenes, in a sleek, sculptural Art Deco style, look comfortable in Bulfinch’s space.

I think one revelation in the show surrounds the Art Deco capitols built from the Teens into the 1930s. Nebraska’s is a standout, and Lisak’s and Ottenstein’s spare, frank aesthetic serves it well. Architect Bertram Goodhue, best known for Mission Revival work in California, produced a 450-foot-wide base building capped in the middle with a 350-foot tower, both in minimalist vertical and horizontal planes. Goodhue was inspired by Scandinavian contemporary architecture, spare and clean.

Goodhue was hired following a nationwide competition that directed no specific style. Architects had to establish that they could assemble a team of sculptors, ceramicists, and painters, and submissions were judged without architect names attached. This was brilliant and in itself a sign of confidence and curiosity. I think the selection committee in Lincoln wanted a building of its time, not a throwback.

The capitols in Oregon and Washington were built at the same time, and not far from each other. The building in Olympia, done in the 1920s, is very much City Beautiful and in Classical style. Down the road, Salem’s is Art Deco, with lots of clean rectangles. It’s got the formality of a tuxedoed Fred Astaire. It doesn’t pretend to extol Roman virtue.

Lisak and Ottenstein have a nose for capturing a building’s essence. For Kansas, rather than dwell on the structure — a version of the D.C. Capitol only with an even taller dome — we see a massive mural by American Regionalist John Steuart Curry from the late ’30s depicting John Brown, looking rabid, with a Bible open to the Book of Revelation in one hand and a rifle in the other. It’s called Tragic Prelude and predicts the Bleeding Kansas epic of the mid 1850s. State capitol architecture and decoration evoke history, and not all of it is comforting.

For pure ostentation, it’s hard to beat the capitols in New York, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. All three became more and more elaborate as planning and construction unfolded. Not to be outdone by Washington, Iowa got not one dome but five, as well as a gorgeous, richly patterned Victorian interior. New York’s a temple to the Romanesque Revival, Henry Hobson Richardson style. Boss Tweed was thick into the project, which is still the most expensive public building in New York history. In ornament, and often in cost, they “just growed,” as Topsy said in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The artists picked some of the most elaborate architectural details. Pennsylvania’s capitol was graft-ridden, too, with the architect and some of the contractors eventually going to jail for their crimes. Its grand staircase and House chamber are inspired by the Palais Garner in Paris. These capitols represent civic pride, democracy, probity, and decorum as well as good old American bluster.

Politics is performance art. Lisak and Ottenstein give us a great sense of 50 distinctive stages, and I can’t wait for their book.

We’re a nation of 50 states, united by a Constitution that, on paper at least, reserves to each state a hefty measure of power. It’s always a good idea to remind people who’ve forgotten, or to inform the badly educated, that state governments, not the behemoth swamp in Washington, are best suited to advance the public welfare. That is, in those cases where we can’t solve our own problems.