viii foreword
tual death a half-century later, was both remarkable and widespread.
Some of the buildings the office built are icons in American archi-
tecture. In Carson City, Nevada, Ammi B. Young s United States Mint
stands on the desert, a beacon whose Italianate light shines in the sub-
sequent Nevada State Capitol up the street. The State, War, and Navy
Building, Supervising Architect Alfred B. Mullet s mighty granite pile
west of the White House, is perhaps America s best expression of the
French Second Empire mode.
Supervising Architect William Appleton Potter gave us the high-
towered Post Office and Courthouse in Nashville following his
Gothic ideas. Under Supervising Architect James Knox Taylor, Cass
Gilbert designed and built New York City s superbly neo-Renaissance
customhouse, an ideal of Beaux-Arts civic beauty, with its elliptical
rotunda and sumptuous art program. Potter s was a traditional
Treasury product designed in-house, while Gilbert won his commis-
sion under new rules, in a competition among private firms.
In addition to monuments, the supervising architect of the
Treasury enriched the American landscape with hundreds of lesser
buildings post offices, custom houses, courthouses, and marine
hospitals. These buildings form a vernacular of public architecture
for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that cast long
shadows regionally. A few were even  restorations, such as the re-
modeling of the early seventeenth-century adobe Palace of the
Governors at Santa Fe for federal use, and the transformation of the
eighteenth-century Spanish Governor s Palace at St. Augustine into a
post office. Still it was the new construction that made the most pro-
found imprint. Distributed from Washington, D.C., as neat, detailed
drawings on oiled linen, these buildings rose in brick or stone and an-
nounced the federal government, often in far-flung places. They were
likely to be the best buildings in town. For the strength of their pres-
ence today, many are the objects of historic preservation.
Design forms the spine of Lee s study. Did the Office produce
great architecture? Was that its objective in fact, or simply to build
useful and permanent housing for governmental functions? Cer-
tainly the supervising architect could take credit for the rapid trans-
fer of style over the nation. Since then The Fountainhead and the idea
of the architect-as-hero has come to pervade our architectural histo-
ries. The institution of the supervising architect has not heretofore
been well remembered.
Founded in the early stages of the development of the architec-
tural profession in the United States, the Office of the Supervising