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THE CAPITOL DOME 28 Although an architect of the Enlightenment, Latrobe had a deep respect for historical resources. Antiquities of Athens, published in London in 1762, was a detailed and extensive archaeological record of ancient Greek architecture by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. A copy of Antiquities was in the collection of the Philadelphia Library Company at the time Latrobe lived in Philadelphia, and as a self-proclaimed "bigot - ted Greek," he borrowed from it. e ancient Greek buildings detailed in this tome are refreshingly simple and strong, like Latrobe's architecture, and Latrobe preferred this language for its adaptability to invention. Greek elements appear in Latrobe's designs as graceful adaptations that met his particu - lar aesthetic. For the twenty-four principal support columns in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Latrobe used his own version of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. Latrobe, like Jefferson, was curiously afoot in both the Romantic world of nature and human imagination and the Classical world of reason. Latrobe's letters suggest a man who could swing from melancholic and desperate in the travails of his life, to powerfully opti - mistic and self-assured in his successes; he could be savagely satirical and wickedly funny when describing the absurdities of life he en- countered. But he was also intensely analyti- cal. He could write extemporaneously on the sciences—structure, geology, hydrology, navi- gation—and also could ruminate tirelessly on music, art, people, and current events. He's even credited with writing the first description of jazz music, which he had heard in New Orleans late in his life. T h e D e s i g n o f t h e S o u t h W i n g Latrobe's first task as surveyor of public build- ings was to build out the Capitol's South Wing as prescribed by the plan. In the early spring of 1803, the South Wing's foundation had risen to about ground level, and the large, ellipti- cal, brick bake oven built by Hoban in 1801 rested on the footprint of what was scheduled to become a great elliptical chamber. is pro- to-chamber was woefully under-designed and within a year began to tilt and crack. Latrobe's initial report of design and construction, issued within months of taking office, found the South Wing to be so insufficient that he recommended removing the foundations and the oven and starting over. Starting over gave Latrobe the chance he needed to bring his superior ideas to bear. In designing the chamber, Latrobe proposed to Jefferson to raise the level of the Hall to the sec - ond story or the piano nobile. He created a detailed program, designed offices to accommodate the program, devised an entry sequence and ensured that structural and mechanical systems were in place. He also understood the inefficiency and difficulty of building an elliptical room, and therefore rede - signed the chamber as two half circles connected with a cen- tral span, effectively making a hippodrome. Latrobe knew that in the carving of an elliptical entablature, every stone of each quarter ellipse would have a slightly different curvature based on the ellipse's major and minor axes. As a hippodrome, all curved stones in the entablature would be of the same radius, thus streamlining the stone-carving process. Additionally, the Fig. 4. Watercolor portrait of Maria Cosway, by Richard Cosway, 1785.