Qualla: National Building Museum

National Building Museum: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Montgomery Meigs designed the Pension Building in the early 1880s, he had one job: house the bureaucrats who would process Civil War pension claims. The Pension Bureau staff had ballooned past 1,500 with each new round of legislation extending benefits to widows, orphans, and surviving veterans. Meigs - the Army quartermaster general who had supervised the Union's wartime supply chain and the construction of the Capitol dome's wings - was given the design brief. He could have built another marble Greco-Roman government building, like every other federal structure rising in Washington. Instead he built a brick Renaissance palace, modeled on Rome's Palazzo Farnese, fronted by a continuous frieze of Civil War soldiers running 1,200 feet around the exterior, and centered on a Great Hall so monumental that presidents would hold their inaugural balls inside it. Eight 75-foot Corinthian columns - among the largest in the world - rise around the central courtyard. The building required 15 million bricks. According to Washington wits, Meigs counted them all.

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Image: Gunnar Klack | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Building Museum: Pensions and Politics

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. The Civil War created a federal obligation that lasted longer than the war itself. Congress repeatedly expanded pension eligibility through the 1870s and 1880s - widening the categories of qualified veterans, widows, orphans, and dependents until the U.S. Pension Bureau had becom...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain

National Building Museum: Buberl's Frieze

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The exterior frieze, sculpted by Bohemian-American artist Caspar Buberl, stretches around the entire building and depicts Civil War military units in continuous procession - infantry, cavalry, artillery, naval forces, ambulance corps, supply teamsters. Buberl modeled the processi...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

National Building Museum: The Great Hall

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The White House, Public domain. Inside, the central courtyard measures 316 by 116 feet - one of the largest interior spaces in nineteenth-century America. Eight Corinthian columns 75 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter rise from the floor to support the upper galleries. The columns appear to be marble but are actu...

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Image: The White House | Public domain

National Building Museum: Saved by a Report

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1960s, the building had been used for various federal offices and was deteriorating. The District draft bureau occupied it during the Vietnam War. There were proposals to demolish the structure entirely - Meigs's anomaly was widely considered an architectural curiosity rat...

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Image: Lasthib | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Building Museum: Suspending a Campaign

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mthoma37, CC BY-SA 4.0. On June 7, 2008, Hillary Clinton stood in the Great Hall and ended her primary campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. She had narrowly lost the delegate count to Barack Obama. She had also won more raw primary votes than any presidential candidate of either par...

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Image: Mthoma37 | CC BY-SA 4.0