The entablature above the second-story windows distinguishes this level as most important its frieze is composed of three narrow bands (used with Ionic and Corinthian orders) upon which Hunt superimposed a plain raised circular disk above each pilaster, a Doric feature. Doric pilasters used to divide and frame the windows are plain but recognizable. Classical details alternate between very reduced to totally abstract. The tower walls are battered, with solid corners erected of rock-faced marble, but belt courses, central tripartite window frames, entablature, and balustrade are smooth, sawn marble. The metal transit telescope shed is most distinct, visually linked to the rest of the complex only by rusticated stone foundations. With each form Hunt expressed a different aspect of structure, varying its geometry, treatment of material, and architectural decoration. Hunt balanced the necessary western shed and tower with the library rotunda on the east, articulating each form to emphasize its distinct function in a sophisticated, albeit sober, architectural idiom. The two sections containing telescopes had to have separate foundations to ensure structural stability as well as to accommodate separate heating systems that would maintain the temperature of the outside air on the roof in order to minimize local atmospheric interference when the telescopes were in use. Yet Hunt's planning was highly rational, an enlargement of the operational dictates of the observatory. Certainly its plainness and irregular planning do not initially suggest the style of America's leading exponent of French Beaux-Arts architecture, renowned for his lavish mansions. ![]() The simple geometries, severe architectural treatment, and disjointed nature of the Gilliss Building's design led Washington architect and critic Glenn Brown, writing in the American Architect and Building News in November 1892, to express disappointment with Hunt's building. To the west of the tower is a single-story gabled utilitarian looking building that was designed to house a transit telescope (which observes only stars that pass overhead along the meridian). A circular library with a low conical roof is attached at the east end on the west a three-story tower rising above the main block is topped by a revolving dome housing a 12-inch Clark refractor telescope. ![]() Its central portion, a long two-story rectangle intersected by three projecting wings, contains administrative offices. The scientific buildings include a circular observatory for a 26-inch telescope and a multi-functional, four-part structure (the James Melville Gilliss Building) that appears to have been built in stages but was in fact designed as a unit and completed in 1892. ![]() Some were purely utilitarian in nature, including a boiler house, dynamo building, and stables. All of the large group of buildings designed by Richard Morris Hunt for the observatory survive. When Massachusetts Avenue was extended during the 1890s, it curved around the circle's northern perimeter. A circle 1,000 feet in diameter was laid out so that vibrations from future road traffic would not disturb delicate timekeeping and astronomical instruments. In 1881 the navy selected the present 73-acre site for a new naval observatory, a large, high tract of ground outside the developed parts of the city.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |