Modernity's hammer chips away at icon

Over time, the United States Capitol has taken on two very different faces.

What was once deemed the back side of the building — facing the Mall — became a grand, ceremonial front, with the addition of dramatic stairs, terraces and landscaping that emphasised its prominence on a hill.

To the east, the old "front" of the Capitol became, by contrast, more modest, accessible and pastoral.

Before ground was broken for the new Capitol Visitor Centre in 2000, you could stand on the east side and imagine cows and sheep grazing, as if in the foreground of a romantic landscape painting.

This duality — grandeur and authority versus simplicity and openness — also expressed an ideal of government.

To survive, a republic must have authority, tradition and ceremonies. But it must also have its yeoman side, which allows the people to wander the halls of power as equals with their legislators.

The "truth to power" side of the Capitol, the east face, has been demolished by the new Visitor Centre, a tragically misconceived and overscale addition, which opened recently.

The east face has become something entirely new, with a false and slick pomposity created by an impressive promenade over an imposing bridge, which seems to cross a kind of moat.

It is a historical and aesthetic jumble, a gross disfigurement of one of America's most iconic buildings.

Since the 1998 killing of two Capitol policemen, when long-standing plans for a visitor facility were jump-started by security concerns, the Visitor Centre has ballooned in size and cost.

The September 11 attacks led to major revisions, as did demands from Congress for new office space and other add-ons.

A budget pegged at $265 million in 2000 grew to $621 million and the building swelled to a colossal 580,000 square feet.

In an unsuccessful effort to limit the visual impact of the new space, it was placed underground.

Entry for most visitors is down two sloping walkways on either side of the old East Capitol Street alignment, which is now elevated on a bridge-like structure.

Elevators for handicap access have been placed on either side of the bridge, rather like guard towers. The power of the old landscaping — an 1874 masterpiece of design by Frederick Law Olmsted — is lost amid the visual clutter.

The lesson that Washington never seems to learn is that there is no such thing as an underground building. The need for access and egress, elevators and skylights means that even below-grade buildings intrude on the landscape.

The intrusion of the new Visitor Centre is extreme and creates a cacophony of historical suggestions.

Where Olmsted once had a loosely aligned allee of tulip poplars, there are now formal lines of spindly trees leading to the underground entrance.

Where Olmsted's allee framed and obscured the view of the East front — an elaborate peekaboo with the Capitol that made it seem farther away — the new bridge makes the entrance rigid and formal.

The effect is French, more Versailles than Washington: a tightly controlled procession down a linear axis, now framed by the elevator-guard towers.

The "moat", the below-grade well where visitors enter, adds to the weird historical cacophony. Is this a grand baroque avenue? Or a medieval defence device?

For those who don't remember the old landscaping, this grandiloquent new view of the Capitol might not seem so bad.

And anyone who has visited the Capitol during the dog days of summer, or the cold of winter, will be grateful for the chance to wait indoors for a tour.

But the loss of green space, the loss of old trees, the loss of the gentle, democratic approach to the Capitol is huge. The East front feels as if it has been chewed up by ramps and walkways and bridges, like the entrance to a badly designed airport.

The building itself, designed by RTKL architects, a huge international design firm, is a perfect exemplar of bureaucratically conceived and executed architecture.

It grew by fits and starts, reflecting the two prevailing political impulses of the past decade: fear of terrorism and growth of government. Eventually, the dog (the visitor centre) was being wagged by the tail (everything else).

Your experience likely will be almost indistinguishable from a trip to the Newseum, Mount Vernon or many other of our increasingly homogenised historical sites.

The Rolodex of contractors for these kinds of facilities has grown far too small.

Ralph Appelbaum Associates has designed the exhibitions — "they're considered the rock stars of the museum world", said Visitor Centre official Tom Fontana — which includes interactive touch screens and a "Wall of Aspirations", by now a familiar and kitschy tic from this New York-based firm.

Defenders of this addition, the ninth and by far the largest in the history of the building, can point to the obvious fact that the Capitol has always been a work in progress.

The original masonry wings of the first Capitol were as appropriate to the late 18th century as the iron-supported dome was to increasingly industrialised 19th century, when it was finished in 1866.

Just as we have gone from an agrarian country to an industrial one, now we are a service economy and the Capitol is defined by a huge new service wing: clean and efficient, with a huge cafeteria.

And one might argue that the old duality of the building, the grandeur on one side, the rural approachability on the other, has been replaced by a new duality, more appropriate to the internet-television-virtual reality age.

We now have a Capitol, and a HyperCapitol, where everything is better presented, cleaner, more dramatically framed.

Popular enthusiasm for the new HyperCapitol might well dispel the long years of grumbling about its cost and delays. Changes to the Capitol have always been controversial.

Even the dome, which is now its iconic feature, was deemed by some critics as too overbearing when it was designed in the mid-19th century.

A country that for more than two centuries has swung between Left and Right, radical and reactionary, has always been fundamentally — and properly — conservative in relation to this enduring symbol of government.

Despite delays, you can't but think that a grand and essential building was changed too quickly, too radically, with little real understanding of how much was at stake. The loss is enormous.

Who knows whether the US will ever again be rich enough, or smart enough, to undo the damage.