- Today, we are pleased to
introduce Charles Quagliana
as part of the Wisconsin
Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In
lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are
those of the presenter and are
not necessarily those of the
Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
Mr. Quagliana has been a
practicing preservation
architect for over 30 years.
Currently, he is a
professor of practice
at UW-Madison College
of Engineering
and maintains his own
private practice focusing on
rehabilitation and restoration
projects around the state.
Charles was a principal with
Isthmus Architecture for 11
years, and, prior to that, he
was the preservation architect
and project manager for the
14-year Wisconsin State Capitol
Restoration and
Rehabilitation Project.
Some of his current
projects include:
the rehabilitation of the Madison Municipal Building,
Preservation of the artist Mary Nohl's property in Fox Point,
a historic structure report
for the Shake Rag Alley
Center for the Arts in Mineral
Point, and a roof replacement
for the First Unitarian
Meeting House in Madison.
Here today to discuss the
life of George B Post,
architect of the
Wisconsin State Capitol,
please join me in welcoming
Charles Quagliana.
[applause]
- Thanks. Well, thank you.
It was a little too long of an
introduction, but all right.
So we're going to talk
about George Post today, architect of the Capitol.
And what I want to talk about is
a little bit of an introduction,
kind of give you some of
my thoughts about it,
talk about his career, the
planning of the new Capitol,
which is the one we have,
and then a little bit about
the design of the Capitol.
So this is George Post.
And I think maybe just start
with, just to remind you,
I think what my point wants to
be today is that we're really
fortunate to have George
Post design our Capitol.
We really are.
He was really a preeminent
architect of the time.
One of those guys we don't study
in architecture school
enough probably.
What's really special about him,
he was one of the forerunners
of designing high-rise
buildings, skyscrapers.
And what he was really
concerned about
was the corrosion
of the structure.
We're building, you know,
100-foot, 200-foot, 300 feet,
he wanted to be sure parts
weren't going to fall off
the building, and so that
was really his focus.
And I think when you look
at our Capitol we have a
really great exterior.
It's held up for
a hundred years,
and that's sort of a
testament to his thoughts
about corrosion and
exterior enclosure.
The other key piece to Post was
he was really well connected with the art community.
Many of the most famous
artists of the time worked
in his buildings,
and in the Capitol,
they almost all worked in it.
It was really unique
that he got them all
to collaborate and
work together.
So those are kind
of the key points.

So post was born in Brooklyn,
and, at the time,
New York City was
about 300,000 people.
Most of the buildings were
three to five stories tall.
He went to a military school
up in the Hudson,
and then went to New York
University and got his degree in
civil engineering with a little
bent on architecture.

After that, he worked in the
studio of Richard Morris Hunt,
was probably the most famous
architect of the time,
and when he was there, his
collaboration with other men
who are going to be famous
architects was unique.
He was there for two years, and
I think getting to know these
other gentlemen was really a
major issue in his education
and his design later.
So, Frank Furness became a
really preeminent
architect in Philadelphia.
Van Brunt was a
graduate of Harvard
and then came to Hunt's studio,
and he became a really prominent
architect in Kansas City.
Ware was also a
graduate of Harvard
and came to work with Hunt,
and he went on to be a very
prominent architect in Boston.
And there was one other one,
Charles Gambrill, who I
don't have a photo of,
but he became a partner with
Post early in their careers
and then became a
partner with Richardson,
HH Richardson, later.
So Post was in a great spot.
He's got a great teacher, he's
working with really good people,
and it really helps him,
as he progresses
through his career.
So this is one of his first
buildings at Princeton, 1869.

Very picturesque building,
I would say.

And this is the first
building I think
we can consider an
early skyscraper.
Post was not the architect of
record for this building,
but he was the
supervising architect.
So he spent a lot of time
on-site during the construction
working out all the details.
It's not a huge building;
It's 142 feet tall, but it's pretty tall for the time.
There's a building in the
background here, but
that's a later building.
And so this is where Post
gets his hands-on education
about how buildings go together,
about the corrosion issues he's
concerned about his entire life.
This is his first sort of
high-rise building himself.
You can see that he's
sort of struggling with
what high-rise buildings
should look like.
It's a little bit
clunky perhaps,
but it's a pretty big building.
230 feet in 1875 is way--
dwarfs everything
else in the city.

It's a cage construction,
which means it has
the cast iron columns
and wrought iron girders
that support the floors
and the roof,
but the exterior walls
support themselves.
So they're masonry and they
support themselves.

He's also well-connected.
He's from a very
well-to-do family, and
they're well-connected.
And he does a lot of the
major houses in New York,
Vanderbilts and others.
This is just one of them.
Very lovely house.
And the interiors were,
by today's standards,
well over the top.

And then this was a very
famous building in New York,
the Produce Exchange,
out of red brick.
Kind of an almost normal
building for its time.
Not very tall, but what's unique
about this one is the main part
of the building is cage
construction but there was an
inner court and that was
skeletal construction where the
steel structure of the cast iron
and steel structure actually
supported the exterior wall,
held it in place.
That's where Post really
experimented with how he's going
to make these connections
and how we're going to do it
so we don't get corrosion
and parts fall off.
So this was the first known
use of skeletal construction in the US, in this building.
Although just in the courtyard,
not on the exterior.

This is the World Building
from 1890.
Depending on how you
count it, either it's 309
or it's 349 feet.
A very tall building and
some of the buildings you
see in the background
is because this photo was
taken well after it was built.
But at the time, it was the
tallest building in New York
for a couple of years.
Again, he's still trying to
figure out what should a
tall building look like.
Of course, again, the exterior
is a bearing wall,
so you can't have a lot
of openings in it.
You know, very extensive.
And the little gold dome.
It was actually a very
colorful building.
It had different
colors of brick,
and there was some criticism
about that from his peers.

Then, in 1892-1893,
he was selected
along with some of other
New York architects
to be one of the
designers of buildings
at the World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago, 1893.
And George Burnham,
shown there on the left,
was the supervising architect.
He selected the New York firms
and the Chicago firms
to do the work.
So you see Post; Van Brunt was
one of his schoolmates;
Frances Millet,
who was an artist,
was to work in the Wisconsin
Capitol but died on the Titanic;
the artist Saint-Gaudens,
who was an artist
who influenced almost
all the other artists,
a lot of them worked for
him or studied under him;
and then Charles McKim
of McKim and White.
This is just, again, some
of the architects.
So it was interesting
that Burnham selected
five New York firms and a few
Chicago firms to do this.
And it was a real, the Chicago
architects didn't like that.
They said, "We can handle this."
But I think he knew that there
was a lot of good things going
on in New York as far as design,
and he wanted to have the best.
So he assigned Post the
toughest building, I think,
the largest building
at the fair,
the Manufactures and
Liberal Arts Building.
This building was gigantic.
By today's standards even.

Here's just kind of an idea
of the people in here.
You can see the scale
of this building.
It's huge.
But Post was a good engineer
and a good architect,
and he designed the
structural system.
It gives you a better idea
of the scale here.
It's a huge building.
368 clear span.
Larger than the Hall
of Machines in Paris,
which was a couple
years before that.
And 30 acres and 30
football fields in floor.
That's a huge, huge building.
But Post handled the job well, and he actually included some murals in this building.
I'm not sure where
exactly he went,
but he used some of his artist
friends and they worked this.
From this particular event,
he became really good
friends with Burnham.
They were not that far
apart in age anyway,
but they became
really good friends.

This is the Havemeyer

Building in New York
a little bit later, 1895.
193 feet.
This is still a cage
construction,
but I think you can see
it's starting to look like
what we might think
skyscrapers look like,
especially if you're
familiar with some of the
Chicago skyscrapers.
This is starting
to look that way.
It's still bearing wall exterior
with a steel and
cast-iron interior,
but it's starting to look more
like a high-rise building
we might think of today.
But still, 193 feet,
that's not too bad.
That's pretty tall.
The Well Building a little
later, a little bit taller.
Same thing, this is
still cage construction.
A little bit more use
of terracotta ornament
on the exterior.
And I think all the
architects at this time
are still struggling with
what should these
buildings look like.
This one is sort of that
tripartite design.
It's got a top, a middle,
and a base.
They're still struggling
with what these things
should look like.
Some look kind of clunky.
This is Post's first building
that actually has
skeletal construction.
So the interior structure
actually supports
the exterior walls.
The exterior walls are
not bearing at all.
So it's a little bit of a
clunky design, I think,
but it's his first one.
315 feet.
This building was also the
tallest building in New York
for a couple years after
it was completed.
So you get an idea of
what Post is doing.
He's working on a lot
of engineering.
He's working on a
lot of details.
And many of these buildings had
lobbies that were graced with
all kinds of really fine
marbles and stones,
artwork from all the
artists he knew.

He did New York Stock
Exchange in 1903,
a building in which is
hard to photograph.
This is kind of a nice photo,
an early photograph of it.
And many of you I'm sure see
it on the nightly news.
It looks a little different
today on the inside
than it did when it was done.
But it was a gorgeous building.
The little railing on your left
is where you see the
bell gong today.
It's quite gorgeous.
Again, a lot of artwork,
a lot of decorative finishes.

In 1901, his two sons
joined the firm,
and in 1904 they actually
changed the name to
George Post & Sons, architects.
His sons were very
capable architects.
They took over the construction
of the Capitol here
when Post passed away.
But they were very
well-educated,
and I think their dad was a
very strong personality.
I mean, he wasn't a small man
at all in many ways.

1907 he got the commission to do
the city columns in New York
which is, again, a very
difficult structure.
These are not really
tall buildings,
but they're out of
terracotta and brick.
And the big issue with
terracotta is water getting in
behind the terracotta,
corroding the steel structure, and then pieces falling off.
We have that problem in many
buildings in Madison today.
This was a real concern of his,
and he tried to detail things
so that didn't happen.
And I think he, for the most
part, was pretty successful.

And he worked all over the
eastern United States,
St. Louis, Cleveland,
Pittsburgh, New York,
Philadelphia, all over.
I'm just showing you sort of the
New York ones for the post part.
But here's one
that still exists:
the Cleveland Trust from 1908.
It has a gorgeous lobby with
murals and big skylights.

Kind of the pride of part of
downtown Cleveland today.

So just as a little contrast,
what's happening in Chicago about the same time?
Got the Lieter Building,
which is considered to
be the first skyscraper.
But by New York standards
it's not very tall,
but it is the first
skeletal building.
So it's the building where the
structure supports the exterior
walls and are able to open
up the exterior walls
and have a lot more glass.
Clearly, you know,
the leader in that.
The next one, the Home
Insurance building,
a really tall building.
Actually, in this photo
it's got two extra floors.
Originally it didn't have
those two extra floors.
But 1884, you get an idea,
this is about 10 floors.
And then the Monadnock Building
in 1891 by Holabird and Root.
I believe this one is
nearing 200 feet,
perhaps 190 feet,
something like that.
But just as a contrast to what
Post was doing at the same time.
His buildings were taller
and much slenderer.
And that's a difficult
thing to do.
You have all these wind
loads to deal with when you're doing high-rise buildings.
These buildings in Chicago were
maybe a third of a block,
half of a block.
In New York he was dealing
with quarter block sizes.
So the buildings were
much more difficult
to build and construct.

And then, back to our Capitol.
Maybe before that just to
mention that Post was also
well-involved with
the profession.
He was the president of the AIA,
he was the president of
the New York Art League,
president of many other
organizations and clubs,
the Art Club in New York.
So he's well-connected in New
York, especially out east.

So here's our
Capitol about 1880.
So the first Capitol on
this site from the 1850s
was expanded and remodeled,
and this is what it looked
like when they were done.
They added a dome,
which was cast iron,
and they added these wings
of native limestone.

And this is what it looked
like after the 1882 additions
with a wing at each end,
a north and a south wing.
But, even as they
finished this,
by the late 1880s the
building was too small,
and they formed a
Capitol Commission
to look at what they should do.
Should they expand? Should they build a new building?
What were their options?

So this was just a couple
of photos of the interior
of that previous building.
It was nice.
It was simple.
Not really fireproof
construction, but, you know,
a lot of vaults and
brick and cast iron
and wrought iron beams.

The Assembly wasn't
a grand space,
but it was certainly
nice for that time.
The Supreme Court
was pretty nice.
The Supreme Court probably had
the most decoration of any room,
and there wasn't much but
it was a nice building.

And the grounds were
very nice too.
We had the Centennial Fountain
from the 1880s,
and then we had all the entrance
gates with the zinc statues,
the repoussé statues on top.

But, as I say, and I
don't say this lightly,
thank God we had a fire. Right?
Because we would be dealing
with this building today,
and it would be really tough.
I mean, this is what
some of the states,
like Michigan has a capitol
from this age or Kansas,
and they're really difficult
buildings to work with because
they have archaic materials and
some weren't built that well.
But anyway, we had
the fire in 1904.
It was pretty disastrous.
The north and the south wings
survived pretty much intact,
but the middle portion and
the east and the west wings
where the Senate and
the Assembly were
pretty much gutted.

So these are just some photos
of a couple days after.
It was pretty bad.
So, with that, they
realized, well,
maybe we shouldn't do any
remodeling or additions,
let's talk about a new building.
So they held a competition.
And I apologize for
this little rendering.
It's very bad, but I wasn't
able to find a good one.
They invited three firms.
I believe there was a
couple Milwaukee firms
and then Cass Gilbert
who was from New York.
And Gilbert had just finished
the capitol in Minnesota
and did a version of it,
pretty much, in this sketch.
This is what he looked at.
But the commission didn't
like any of the solutions.
They were all too costly.
They were way over budget.
And none of them really
responded to the guidelines
that the commission had set up.
So they scrapped that and
held another competition.
So the second competition
was in 1905.
Just happens that Daniel
Burnham is the juror,
the sole juror of
the competition.
There's five firms, including
a couple from Milwaukee
and a couple from New York.
And Post is selected.
Think about this:
he's 68 years old.
The life expectancy of a male
in 1900s is like 46.
He's 68 years old.
Burnham is 59 or 58.
So they're close.
Burnham, again, is
the sole judge.
Burnham loves his design.
He writes a really nice memo
about how great it is.
And the only thing he doesn't
like is the tourelles,
which are those little towers,
which are actually the air intakes for the building.
And Post did change those.
Of course you know that
from what you see.
But what's going on?
Here's Post thinking of what a
capitol should look like,
what architecture
should look like.
There's all these
other thoughts.
Here's Gaudi's work from 1904.
He's thinking something
really different
than George Post, right?
And Frank Lloyd Wright's in
his prairie school phase,
and a beautiful house here
from outside Chicago.
He's thinking something
really different too.
And the turbine factory by
Behrens in 1909 in Berlin,
that's really different, I mean
compared to what Post is doing.
And, of course, Picasso in 1907
with the first cubist painting.
So there's lots of
different thought going on
in architecture art,
but Post being a sort
of traditionalist.
He goes with the flow and
designs this Capitol for us.
So this is actually his
rendering from 1906.
And I forgot to mention but in
the photo of Post and his sons,
this rendering is
in the background.
That's why I think that photo
was kind of important to us
as we found out.

So it's a St. Andrew's
cross plan,
and the building itself
faces the cardinal point.
So my little arrow
there points north.
So we have north wing, south
wing, east wing, west wing,
and then a central portion.
And Post actually laid out a
plan for the Capitol park too,
which was very different than
the Capitol park that existed.
The one that was there was
designed, I believe,
by Horace Cleveland in the 1880s
and was very picturesque.
A lot of curvilinear paths
and stuff.
This one was more of
a formal setting
so that his formal building sat on a formal base, basically.
And it took up the whole square.
And it hasn't changed
dramatically.
I mean, we've changed the way
the sidewalks terminate
at the corners and
things like that,
but otherwise it was done pretty close to what Post envisioned.

And then our Capitol and most
other capitols have inspiration.
Post didn't dream this up.
He had inspiration.
Some of the capitols
were modeled
after St. Peter's in Rome.
So this is a few St. Peter's.
Ours is not one of those,
but here's some examples.
Minnesota's is clearly
after that.
Missouri and Pennsylvania.
And, by the way,
Pennsylvania is probably
one of the nicer
capitols in the US.
I think ours is maybe
the third best.
Pennsylvania is right
at the top,
maybe Providence is
the other one.
Really super capitols.
I think ours is in the
top three for sure.
So just one of the inspirations
was St. Peter's.
Ours is probably more
after St. Paul's.
We know that Post visited
London several times.
He was some kind of a liaison
between architects in the US
and architects in England
for a time.
And we think this
is his inspiration.
Or perhaps St. Isaac's
in St. Petersburg.
One of these two is definitely
where he got his main thrust,
his main ideas for the dome.
The portions and things, he
probably sketched these
when he was there
taking a look at them.
And you kind of see
some other states.
Mississippi, West Virginia,
and Idaho have similar domes.
So sort of the two ways that
capitols went from that period,
from the early part of
the turn of the century.
Of course today we have
many more modern ones,
but these were all from those
two sets of inspiration.
You can kind of see it there.
You can kind of see St. Paul's
there pretty much.
And Post did change the
angle of the dome itself
from his original concepts.
It was a little more squat
and a little more roundish.
He actually elongated
it a bit, and I think
that was a good thing
so that snow and water run off a
little faster and that's good.
It keeps the dome dry.
That's good.

So here's the, again,
here's the plan.
The Capitol was built in five
phases by five different
contractors who all seemed
to meet in the middle.
I'm not too sure we
could do that today
with the degree of
accuracy that they did.
So, 1906 to 1917.
And the reason it was built
this way is a couple reasons.
One, to spread that expenditure
of money out, $7 million.
To spread that out over
11 years was a good idea.
Remember, you know, at the
time this is being built,
although there's a lot of
political will to build it,
still money is an issue,
you got to have a good economy.
There's only two million people
living in the whole state,
and the average salary for a
worker is like $400 a year.
And they're spending
$7 million to build a capitol.
I think it was quite
an interesting thing
that the people at that
time were able to do it,
and I think the building is
really a tribute to them,
a legacy of the people
who built it.
I don't think we
could do it today.
I don't think the
political climate
would allow us to do this.
We'd probably put up
a metal building.
So multiple contractors.
They all met in the middle.
And they had to work around
the previous building
because, as I mentioned,
the north and the south wings
were still there.
So where numbers five
and three are,
there were still two
buildings there.
You'll see this in some
of the photos.
But where one, two,
and four are,
it was pretty much removed
and had burned.
So they were able to go west
wing, then east wing,
then south wing, then the
middle, and then the north.
And the coordination between
these contractors was fabulous
because it's hard to tell
the wings apart.
They're all a little different.
They have a little bit
of detailing difference
but pretty, very similar.
So here's just a couple images.
So the one on your right there,
the one that says
east and south,
the east wing and the south
wing of the new Capitol
and the dome going up.
On the far right,
that's the wing,
the old north wing of the
previous Capitol that hadn't
burned, so it's still there.
They're still using it, and
then they're going to tear it
down as they get to that.
Here's the framing of the dome.
Self-supporting steel structure,
which Post was really good at.
Clad in granite.
And we had very few issues with
this building in its first
hundred years from that kind of
point of view, from corrosion.
A little bit in the lantern on
the dome from late '70s,
but that was about it.
Interestingly enough, the
exterior wall is a bearing wall,
which is a little bit
of a surprise to us
knowing how Post wanted to work.
But he wanted this big,
massive thermal wall.
I think at the base the wall
is over two feet thick.
By the time you get up to
the fourth floor, it's only
like 16 inches thick.
But big, massive stone wall.
Here's some of the workers
working on the central
portion of the dome.
You can imagine what they saw
when they were working on the dome in 1912, 1913, and 1914.
Madison only goes maybe
to University Heights
and maybe out to Atwood Avenue; It's not very big.
They're looking at
the wilderness, basically.
It must have been
pretty exciting
to be working on
it at that time.
I'm not sure where even all
the workers came from.

So here's a little further
along, 1913, with the dome.
The steel is all up.
They're getting ready to clad
it, and in the summer of 1914
they lifted the statue
of Wisconsin up.
Daniel Chester French's
creation.
It's a wonderful,
wonderful sculpture.

Just a couple photos that
were taken by Post's office
after the building was complete.
We think it was
finished officially
somewhere in early 1917,
spring or summer.
The war got in the way
so there was never a dedication to make it official,
but from the records,
from the paper records
it appears when the last
finishes touches were put on.

And without question, this
building is built with the
finest architecture and
engineering of the time
and the finest materials
and craftsmanship
and the best artists
and designers.
Post brought all of his friends,
really, to work on this.
You know, all those
famous people.
And we wondered, given Post's
age, and given his distance,
how much could he
have been involved?
But clearly he was.
A woman in New York,
from New York University
named Sarah Landau,
wrote a book about
George Post's career.
He did something like 400
buildings in his career
while he was alive.
His firm carried on many years.
And she believes he was
very intimately involved
because she's got some photos,
she found some photos of him
at a terracotta plant
in New Jersey
looking at samples
for our capitol.
Things like that.
I mean, it's really cool.
And we found from the
correspondence that he was
in Madison about 20 times
from 1905 to 1913, his death.
Now, think about that, he's got to get on the train in New York,
take probably the
Pennsylvania/New York Central
to Chicago, change trains and
get here maybe the next day,
I assume it'd be a couple days,
and then go back.
And he's in his 70s.
I mean, that's pretty cool.
I think it's really neat.
He was very involved.
Again, he was a large man;
I think he had a presence
when he was in a room,
from what we've read.
He could command an
audience pretty well.
He got his way for a lot
of things, but they stayed
within their budget.
It was amazing.
But he had, you know,
Edwin Blashfield,
who was a very famous muralist,
did murals in the building.
Kenyon Cox did murals
and he did the mosaics.
Frances Millet was
supposed to do the murals
in this Supreme Court,
but Albert Herter ended
up doing those
when Millet passed away
in the Titanic.
And then he had several
sculptors help him,
several decorating companies,
including Elmer Garnsey,
so it was great.
He brought everybody he knew
to really focus on this.
And clearly this was his
greatest creation.

Just a couple images from that.

These are, up in the left there
is the mural by Kenyon Cox.
It's interesting, Cox
executed them in New York,
then had them brought here and
put up, and he never liked them.
He never wrote
anything about them.
He really didn't like
the way they turned out.
There was some issues
with their installation.
And he was even working in the
building on the murals in the
Senate, and he wouldn't even go
in there and look at them.
We find this from some letters
he wrote back and forth
with his wife at the time.
He wasn't happy with it.
I think they're great.
And then the statuary groups
replaced the tourelles.
And so the air intakes are
underneath those statues,
just below them.
And I think that was
probably a good choice.
The tourelles were a
little clunky perhaps.

And, of course, the whole
project included
the power plant,
for the $7 million,
which currently supplies part
of the electricity we need
and heating and cooling
to the building.
Back then it supplied
everything to the building
because originally the
building was DC powered
and I think in the late '50s, early '60s converted to AC.
Governor's conference room,
again this is one of those,
you know, rooms where his
artists just went crazy.
Did a, you know, gold leaf.
They got paintings
by Hugo Ballin,
decorative work by Mack,
Jenny & Tyler from New York.
Just a gorgeous space.

And I'm just going
to close with this.
This is obviously the rotunda.
Probably, I like to call it
the state's living room.
You know?
It is.
It's a wonderful space, and
think about how it's used.
The protest from a few years
ago sort of showed how
this Capitol belongs to everybody in the state.
It was kind of cool.
But what I wanted to show
you is the mural at the top.
This is the mural, a large
mural by Blashfield.
"Resources of Wisconsin."
It's a great piece.
It was conserved back when we
did the rotunda project.
But just to give you
an idea of the scale.
Here's actually the mural being
executed while it was done.
This is in New York City
in a studio.
I think, I'm not sure,
but I think
Blashfield is the gentleman sitting down in the photo.
Not sure.
This is two of his assistants.
So it came in multiple pieces.
Actually, it was more
pieces than this.
They had to cut it in
pieces to get it to fit the
curve, the concave curve.
But it's just a gorgeous piece,
and it shows you the scale
and the amount of decoration
and the art.
There was a lecture
a couple weeks ago
about the artwork
in the Capitol.
This is certainly one
of those pieces
that's unbelievably well done.
You know, you see it
from 200 feet away. Right?
If you lay down on the
rotunda floor and look up,
you're about 200 feet
from the painting,
and the detail is just great.
It's a really interesting piece.
So, again, we're fortunate that
Post was a good engineer,
good architect, and had all
these close relationships with
artists, and he brought it all
together in this building.
We're fortunate that
we had him do it.
So, I appreciate your time.
If I can answer any questions,
I'd be glad to.
We've got a few minutes left.
[applause]