Louisiana State Capitol

The Louisiana State Capitol is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1928 by Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth, and built between 1930 and 1932, for a reported $5.00 million dollars, in Louisiana, LA.

Its precise street address is 900 North Third Street, Louisiana, LA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Louisiana State Capitol is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Louisiana and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Louisiana State Capitol was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 10^th 1978.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1998 and 2018.

Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Louisiana State Capitol a reality:

• George A. Fuller Company as the Main Contractor
• Governor Huey P. Long as the Main Developer
• Ulric Ellerhusen, Angela Gregory, Albert Reiker, John Lachin, Rudolph Parducci,Lorado Taft, and Lee Lawrie as the collaborating Artist

The Louisiana State Capitol can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Louisiana State Capitol was completed in 1932, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Louisiana State Capitol uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features the central tower rising from two staggered and symmetrical lower wings, with four colossal figures marking the setbacks.

Access to the building is via a huge staircase of 49 granite steps, flanked by cast stone sculptures. The wrought iron main door with a large glass window framed with the same material is located in the central body of the base, and is surrounded by a low-relief frieze and a tall, narrow window on each side. The other two side wings that form the base, slightly lower than the central one, each have four windows, in the same style.

Other materials found at the Louisiana State Capitol include, bronze, used in grills, chandeliers, entrance to the two legislative chambres and solid bronze elevator doors, Italian marble, found in diferent colors in pilastras, columns and walls, Brocatelle Violet marble, found in walls and columns at the Senate Chamber, and acoustical Celotex, used in the ceiling of Senate chambers.