Seat of government of Minnesota, in its capital city of Saint Paul
General Information
How to Get There
Overview
The Minnesota State Capitol is the seat of government of Minnesota, in its capital city of Saint Paul. It houses the Minnesota Senate, Minnesota House of Representatives, the office of the Attorney General and the office of the Governor.
There have been three State Capitol buildings. The present building was designed by architect Cass Gilbert and completed in 1905. Its Beaux-Arts/American Renaissance design was influenced by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and by McKim, Mead & White's Rhode Island State House.
The building is set in a landscaped campus with the Capitol Mall on its south front, Leif Erikson Park on its west, and Judicial Plaza to its east. Various monuments and memorials are located in these green spaces.
The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The Minnesota Capitol is usually described as "Beaux-Arts", a modern term not in use when the Capitol was built, but a style made popular in part by the architecture at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
The building's structure is consists of a steel and cast iron frame on rough limestone foundation walls resting on concrete footings. Guastavino tile vaulting forms the ceilings on both the ground and first floor. The structural elements of a building primarily consist of load-bearing brick and stone masonry walls and piers supporting steel-framed floor and roof systems.
The Minnesota State Capitol dome is the second largest self-supported marble dome in the world, behind Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome of which Gilbert based the design of his dome on. The dome itself is actually made up of three domes or layers. The outer layer is a self-supporting dome made of Georgia marble blocks resting upon their own weight. Hidden inside is a brick and steel cone that supports the lantern and golden sphere at the top of the dome and provides an internal water drainage system which help avoid the heaving problem created by the freezing and thawing of Minnesota winters. Below that is the decorative masonry dome that can be seen from the inside, looking up from the rotunda. At the dome's base are 12 marble eagles paired with the columns surrounding the drum of the dome. At the dome's top is a columned stone lantern which is then topped by a finial globe covered in gold leaf.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Minnesota State Capitol", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
