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Underneath Capitol Dome? A Second Dome!
Lawson Newman, architect for the repair and restoration project underway at the Mississippi State Capitol, wrote the following piece for an exhibit on the building’s domes that is on display at the site and that was funded by the Mississippi Legislature. It is reprinted here with permission.
When Theodore Link was selected to design Mississippi’s new State Capitol at the turn of the twentieth century, he joined a relatively small group of architects who designed state capitols around the country and helped Americans better understand the function of government and the role it plays in our society.
During that era, as our nation’s westward expansion slowed and its borders became more established, people began to identify more readily as Americans, as citizens not only of a state, but of a nation. The architecture of civic buildings came to be recognized as an important representation of this common identity, and American architects seemed to unanimously agree that its appropriate expression lay in a new application of the classical style of ancient Greece and Rome.
In neoclassical design, a building’s form expresses, and even celebrates, its functional organization. The design of the Mississippi State Capitol expresses important ideas about the relationship of the branches of government to themselves and to the people they serve. When it was built, all three branches of state government (legislative, executive and judicial) as well as many departments were housed inside the capitol. In order to avoid implying that one branch was more powerful than another, each was given a space in the building designed to adequately serve its needs and appropriately express the dignity of its role.
Linking the capitol’s various functions and serving as a grand, open, public space is the impressive central rotunda topped by the main dome. From outside and inside, the main dome draws attention to the rotunda and signifies the central role that the people of Mississippi play in their government.
With the construction of the dome at our nation’s Capitol in 1863, large central domes came to be considered the defining architectural elements of civic buildings, especially state capitols. In his design for the Mississippi State Capitol’s main dome, Link employed a strategy dating back to the Renaissance that utilizes what is often called
a “double shell” design to solve two problems inherent to the design of large domes.
“Double shell” refers to two layers, or shells, that compose the dome, one visible from inside and one from outside. The two
proportions for the dome’s interior space and its exterior form. A drum also provides an ideal location for windows, which would be very difficult to incorporate in the surface of the dome itself. When the drum is surrounded
The exterior of the Mississippi State Capitol (above) shows the main dome, but the interior dome seen from the rotunda is actually a lower, second dome as illustrated by the cutaway drawing at right.
shells can be designed to help support each other, solving a structural challenge. The two shells also help resolve the conflict that arises from a need for different proportions on the dome’s interior and exterior. In order to achieve the height necessary for viewing from a distance, a dome should rise high above the body of the building. When viewed from inside, though, a dome proportioned for exterior viewing would appear much too high. Conversely, a dome appropriately proportioned for interior viewing would appear too short and squat on the exterior. The double shell design allows the lower shell to be properly proportioned to the interior space it covers, while the outer shell can be properly proportioned for exterior viewing.
The Mississippi Capitol’s main dome shares another characteristic with many other capitol domes: it sits on top of a cylindrical element called a drum. The drum provides the height needed to achieve the appropriate
by a colonnade like the one at the Mississippi Capitol, these windows allow natural light to filter into the rotunda.
Steel trusses support both shells of the Mississippi Capitol’s dome. An ornamental plaster ceiling, suspended from the trusses above, forms the interior shell visible from the rotunda below. Interlocking glazed terra cotta units, connected to the steel trusses below, form the visible surface of the dome’s exterior shell.
As Theodore Link intended, the Mississippi State Capitol’s main dome stands as its most impressive and memorable architectural element. The rotunda beneath links the various functions and spaces housed in the capitol and serves as its center of activity. As the building’s chief public space, the rotunda symbolizes the central role Mississippi’s citizens play in their government and its main dome reinforces this symbolism as it towers over the rest of the building.