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Fig. 11. Latrobe's use of tobacco leaves and flowers to deco- rate the columns of the rotunda outside the Senate chamber probably represented American merchants. Fig. 12. Jefferson wanted the dome atop the hippodrome- shaped first House chamber to be lit by long skylights to distinguish it as the "handsomest room in the world." LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION (BOTH) 28 of the agriculture and improvement of the states at the time of building the Chamber, all there furnish an exu- berant choice, strongly marking and distinguishing the States from one another. 22 Congress did not fund car ving the caryatids as a result of Pickering's criticisms and Law's reporting. Little visual evidence survives of these major contributions to Latrobe's iconographical program for the Capitol. Two of Latrobe's three American orders are associated with the Senate chamber. He designed the second to be floriated, a dwarf order for the visitors' gallery above the entrance of his first Senate chamber (fig. 10). It was based on magnolia flowers and may have represented American arts and sciences, because the Magnolia Grandiflora was the first native American tree consid- ered to be beautiful enough to be planted at Kew Gardens. e third order, the tobacco leaf rotunda (1816), was not in the Sen- ate's vestibule but located adjacent to it in a domed two-story space devised to light the central corridors of the north wing's two floors (fig. 11). Tobacco was America's second largest export product, and Latrobe probably intended its delicate tobacco flowers and broad leaves to represent American commerce in place of the traditional classical figure of Mercury that Hallet had proposed in 1792. Both of Latrobe's House chambers commanded his best architectural efforts. He designed and built his first House of Representatives (1805-1807) in close collaboration with Presi- dent Jefferson. It was intended to be a unique room where the directly elected representatives of the modern world's first system of government by and for the people assembled. Hallet selected the ancient hippodrome shape for the House of Representatives because of its associations with the seating organization at the Menu Plaisirs at Versailles. e French National Assembly met there in August 1789 to hammer out a peaceful transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy for America's princi- pal Revolutionary War ally. e central podium surrounded by tiered or stadium seats proved to be good acoustically and visually for a large assembly being addressed by individual orators. Con- trary to his own preference for a semi-circular Neoclassical audi- torium room, at Jefferson's behest Latrobe designed a "Grecian" version of the hippodrome based on semicircles rather than the half ellipses of Hallet's plan, because that general form had been sanctioned by George Washington in 1792. 23 (See figs. 1 & 2.) Although it existed for fully seven years before it was burned by the British, and given the room's uniqueness, it is strange that it did not elicit more private commentary. Apart from Latrobe's own renderings and descriptions, no known contemporary images and only two unofficial contemporary descriptions are known to exist. One appeared in a prominent Philadelphia magazine that drew upon Latrobe's reports, complained about the poor acous- tics, and described the room's remarkably three-dimensional character. Congressional officers and visitors were cleverly accom- modated within the monumental room dominated by the raised enclosure for the representatives. Aside from its serious acoustical faults, the author admitted the chamber's "magnificence and