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worthy level, and in 1803 he appointed Latrobe as surveyor of public buildings. Nevertheless, the following ten years would prove a brutal ordeal for Latrobe in his service to Jefferson (and later Presi- dent Madison), akin to Michelangelo's service to Julius II at the Sistine Chapel. e South Wing of the Capitol rose where the oven stood, and the North Wing, in large part, was rebuilt. As the United States' inchoate constitutional form of government emerged as a political idea, its physical and symbolic represen - tation rose simultaneously from the promontory of the Hill, truly an unusual moment in the course of any political his- tory. 3 L a t r o b e ' s N e o c l a s s i c i s m B. Henry Latrobe was born in 1764 in Fulneck, England, of English, French, and American ancestry. Latrobe was a prod- uct of his hometown's Moravian educational system and later, a Moravian school in Saxony. After his education, through which he gained fluency in many languages and toured the continent, he returned to England and began to practice architecture by about 1784. In 1791 he embarked on his own as a seasoned architect and engineer, with a developed aesthetic involving public works, engineering works, and large masonry structures. American architecture in 1800 was largely based on tradi - tional engineering, pattern book examples, and drawings that could be cobbled together by craftsmen and journeymen— usually without a unified vision. In fact, ornton's winning design for the Capitol was largely based on ideas from William Chambers's Treatise on Civil Architecture, first published in 1759. ornton's exteriors of the North and South Wings, his principal contribution to the finished Capitol, have the distinct flavor of the English Baroque style. Coming to America in 1795, Latrobe embodied the mod - ern, formally trained European architect, qualities most cer- tainly admired by Jefferson. Latrobe's architecture was charac- terized by the strength and simplicity of volumes and forms, the expression of structure, and the use of "determinate" or unified light sources: "As all the Architecture (in the Hall) is solid and projected, its whole Effect will be lost by the destruc- tion of deter minate shadows, on which it depends." 4 Latrobe reduced his surfaces and elements to simple, graceful forms, shunning superfluous ornament, even mocking churches of the "dark ages" ornamented with the "heads of monkies [sic] and cats and every possible distortion of the human body and countenance:" Nothing is so easy as to ornament walls with foliage, with wreathes, festoons . . . especially if it be not required that these things should have the remotest relation to the pur - pose of the building upon which they are carved, or that they should contribute to the real or apparent strength or convenience of the structure. . . . And on this account we find ornaments increase in proportion as art declines, or as ignorance abounds. 5 He indicated explicitly to Jefferson that he chose an archi- tectural solution based on its function rather than its form (presaging Louis Sullivan's form follows function dogma by ninety years). In a letter to Jefferson during a heated debate Latrobe wrote, "It is not the ornament, it is the use that I want." 6 Glossary DETERMINATE SHADOWS was the phrase Latrobe used to describe the passage of light over time throughout a room. ENTABLATURE refers to the superstructure of mold- ings and bands which lie horizontally above columns, rest- ing on their capitals. HIPPODROME, meaning a space consisting of two half- circles linked by a central span, is derived from the Greek and Roman stadiums for horse and chariot racing. LANTERN or LANTHERN in architectural terms re- fers to the rooftop structure, often a cupola, designed to admit daylight into the space below. METOPE is a rectangular architectural element that fills the space between two triglyphs (vertically channeled tab- lets) in a Doric frieze, which is a decorative band of al- ternating triglyphs and metopes above the architrave (the lintel or beam resting on capitals of columns). PIANO NOBILE is an Italian term literally meaning the "noble floor." It is the level of the major public spaces with- in a building, and in classical architecture the piano nobile is usually referenced or projected into design elements on the façade. POCHÉ is a French term literally meaning "pocket," but in architecture it refers to either the structural material or the secondary spaces that shape figural rooms. THE CAPITOL DOME 27