A Quest for Grandeur: Charles Moore and the Federal Triangle

One of America's most ambitious public buildings programs is Washington's Federal Triangle, a monumental grouping of federal office buildings between the White House and Capitol Hill, fulfilling the Beaux-Arts architectural vision for beautifying cities. This book, in over seventy duotone photographs, captures the neoclassical elegance and Art Deco details found in both the exteriors and interiors of the Federal Triangle complex.A Quest for Grandeur also reveals how Charles Moore, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts from 1915-37, laid the critical foundation for the Federal Triangle complex by forging a unique consensus of aesthetic and political thought rarely achieved before or since in American architecture. Moore involved many of the most important figures in American architecture in the complex's planning, design, and construction - among them Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Cass Gilbert, and John Russell Pope.Many major buildings - the National Archives, the Departments of Commerce and justice, and the Internal Revenue Service - were completed, but not the entire program. Toward the end of the 1930s, Moore's consensus faltered as a new generation of architects rejected Beaux-Arts style in favor of a new design aesthetic - modernism.