Mills' Design for Treasury: A Symbol of Power

The Treasury building was “to bring honor and benefit” to the nation, “to show to the European… that the american [sic] talent for architecture is not a whit inferior to the European’s.”

~Robert Mills

Treasury’s exterior was a bold move toward the Greek Revival with its thirty colossal Ionic columns three stories in height, creating a façade unlike any other in Washington. The colonnade rises high upon the ground story block that embraces 15th street, resulting in an appearance that Mills himself considered “both grand and imposing”. The choice of Ionic columns by Mills, who preferred the primitive simplicity of the plain Doric style, was an appropriate choice, lending increased formality and a more fitting proportion to the length of the repetitive colonnade.

Mills’ Treasury Building stands today as one of the finest examples of early Greek Revival Architecture in America. Although Mills traveled extensively throughout the East Coast to witness cities and their architecture, he never traveled beyond American soil. His worldly knowledge of Greek Classicism likely came from Benjamin Latrobe’s mentorship and from his use of Thomas Jefferson’s extensive architectural library. Mills’ use of the classical simplicity of the Greek Revival demonstrates his ability to create solemnity and grandeur that shaped Washington’s architectural landscape towards a vision of a new, gleaming white city.

Before the Treasury building, Greek Revival architectural was predominantly interpreted using a portico derived from Greek temples much like the famous Parthenon, often inaccurately covered by a large dome. Mills’ derivation from Greek Architecture was a new and different interpretation of the style. The Treasury’s long colonnade composed of thirty columns of the Ionic order marches down the 15th Street façade, recalling the unpedimented façades of its contemporary, Lafayette Terrace, the New York City townhouse residences. Mills himself cited the Bourse des Valeurs, the 1808 Stock Exchange in Paris as well the colonnaded addition to the eastern façade of the Louvre as precedents that inspired the Treasury’s original facade.

By the early 1830’s, a continuous, uninterrupted colonnade appeared in only a few buildings in America, never used before in governmental architecture. In Washington, Charles Bulfinch used recessed colonnades in his Capitol building design but pointedly interrupts the row with the large portico centered on the façade. In contrast, Mills’ simple, but powerful repetition recalls the robust quality of the peristyle colonnade of an ancient Greek temple. Along 15th street, the columns rise above the pedestrian in a bold manner without projecting out onto the curb, but skimming it in one strong horizontal face. The Treasury’s colonnade retains its repetitious impact, even after the pediments at each end of the colonnade were added with the extensions of the North and South wings.

In 1855, the project for the new South wing addition to the existing T-shaped plan was begun by Mills’ critic, Thomas U. Walter, followed by the work of Ammi Burnham Young, the official Federal Architect from 1852 to 1860, and Alexander Bowman, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. The wing was completed in 1864 with an aesthetic scheme that closely matched Mills’ façade. Even as succeeding architects added pedimented additions at the south and north ends of Mills’ 15th Street façade, the additional South, West, and North wings closely follow Mills’ precedent, maintaining the large scale and monumentality that is unique to the Treasury. The large size of Mills’ original plan and the large additions adding soon after its completion demonstrate the growth of the Treasury Department, the government, and the expanding nation. Upon completion, the Treasury was a robust symbol of America’s increasing economic stature while serving as a catalyst toward an aesthetic of austere formality of architecture in Washington.

For more information on the History of the Treasury building, 1800 until the present, Click here.

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For more information on governmental architecture in America, see Building a National Image: Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789-1912, by Bates Lowry, National Building Museum, ©1985, and also The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and National Design, by Lois A. Craig, MIT Press, ©1978.