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splendor [was] probably not equaled in America, and for any other purpose besides that of debate, it would be an excellent room." e other account, penned by Hannah Gallatin's nineteen-year- old niece Frances Few on 29 November 1808, is notable for describing the room's color scheme, which had never been known to modern scholars. Although Miss Few expressed herself "very much pleased with the room," she did not seem to comprehend how it was lit. 24 [I]t is of an oval form the roof is supported by twenty four white stone pillars of the Corinthian order which are very beautiful, the ceiling is painted but in my opinion is rather dashing and the speakers chair is very tawdry decorated with crimson and green velvet trimmed with yellow fringe and the wood painted lilach and yellow. Jefferson wanted Latrobe to build skylights over this unusual House chamber based on those lighting the Halle aux blés (1784) in Paris (fig. 12). Aer Latrobe argued against the inherent prob- lems of skylights—leaks and too much heat and light—the presi- dent opined that the House's skylights would make it the "hand- somest room in the world, without a single exception." Latrobe's modification was to light the chamber via one hundred skylights set in rows alternating with rows of coffers. Upper and lower panels of glass were enclosed in boxes of graduated sizes sunken the thickness of the double roof and solved all the problems of skylights (fig. 13). When arguing against skylights for the House chamber, Latrobe feared even his solution of panel lights would "destroy the solemnity that is appropriate to the object of the edifice." When Latrobe redesigned the House chamber as a semi- circular auditorium in 1815, the large vertical windows of the cupola set on its half-dome flooded the chamber with the kind of light Latrobe preferred, a "Large Mass of Central light." 25 Jefferson and Latrobe were also at odds about the choice of the ancient architectural order for the House chamber. Members of the House were elected directly by the people, and thus in Jef- ferson's view their meeting room was the Capitol's most impor- tant chamber, deserving of the stateliest of the classical orders. He preferred the Corinthian of the Temple of Pollux and Castor; three of its elaborate columns were still standing in the Roman Forum. Perhaps his choice was not just their beauty but the fact that the brothers Pollux and Castor were the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus, Helen of Troy their sister. Because the Dioscuri were part of Rome's foundation myths the president may well have considered their temple's order an appropriate link to America's founding era, its success expressed most potently by the House of Repre- sentatives, government by and for the people. In 1804 Latrobe preferred that Roman Doric columns be used for the House chamber but his next choice was the order of the Tower of the Winds, the Attic order, located in the Roman Agora near the Athenian Acropolis. By October 1804 he aban- doned the tower's order in favor of a more elaborate Greek one. By November 7 when Latrobe wrote Jefferson, the president had accepted his architect's suggestion of the Corinthian order used on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, the most Fig. 13. Latrobe's response to Jefferson was 100 skylights set with the double roof, a spectacular architectural effect for which no known description survives. Fig. 15. Brilliant light once poured om its cupola into the two-story House vestibule, with its four upper walls decorated with Tower of the Winds columns. Fig. 14. e columns of the Athenian Tower of Winds—that represented the entire world—were Latrobe's choice for the columns in the vestibule between the House and Rotunda. AUTHOR LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION 29