Architectural Alphabet

Across the street from the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, stands the original building of the Library of Congress, completed in 1897. The Thomas Jefferson Building, as it was named in 1980, is a landmark both in the nation's capital and in the nation's architectural heritage. Through the monumental bronze entrance doors, into the Great Hall, along the resplendent corridors and galleries, and deep into the building's incomparable study and exhibition spaces, the Library remains one of the most handsomely decorated structures in the United States. 'An Architectural Alphabet: The Library of Confress' opens doors into many of these spaces and explores out-of-the-way nooks and crannies to find and define many unusual architectural details, which often go unnoticed within the six hundred thousand square feet of space that the building's historic wall enclose. This charming book offers a delightful and captivating tour of the Library's art, architecture, and sculpture, created at the end of the nineteenth century by some fifty artists and artisans.
From A for arch to Z for zigzag, illustrations from colourful alphabets found among the Library's rare books and manuscripts are paired with images of egg-and-dart moldings, helixes, jambs, quoins, spandrels, tripods, vaults, and more. The Library of Congress endeavors to gather a record of human knowledge and to provide the broadest possible access to that information. Founded in 1800 for the use of members of the United States Congress, it has been open to the public since 1870. Today it is the world's largest library, comprising more than 120 million items.