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.ÿþviii forewordtual 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 Mintstands on the desert, a beacon whose Italianate light shines in the sub-sequent Nevada State Capitol up the street.The State, War, and NavyBuilding, Supervising Architect Alfred B.Mullet s mighty granite pilewest of the White House, is perhaps America s best expression of theFrench Second Empire mode.Supervising Architect William Appleton Potter gave us the high-towered Post Office and Courthouse in Nashville following hisGothic ideas.Under Supervising Architect James Knox Taylor, CassGilbert designed and built New York City s superbly neo-Renaissancecustomhouse, an ideal of Beaux-Arts civic beauty, with its ellipticalrotunda and sumptuous art program.Potter s was a traditionalTreasury 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 theTreasury enriched the American landscape with hundreds of lesserbuildings post offices, custom houses, courthouses, and marinehospitals.These buildings form a vernacular of public architecturefor the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that cast longshadows regionally.A few were even restorations, such as the re-modeling of the early seventeenth-century adobe Palace of theGovernors at Santa Fe for federal use, and the transformation of theeighteenth-century Spanish Governor s Palace at St.Augustine into apost office.Still it was the new construction that made the most pro-found imprint.Distributed from Washington, D.C., as neat, detaileddrawings on oiled linen, these buildings rose in brick or stone and an-nounced the federal government, often in far-flung places.They werelikely 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 producegreat architecture? Was that its objective in fact, or simply to builduseful 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 ideaof the architect-as-hero has come to pervade our architectural histo-ries.The institution of the supervising architect has not heretoforebeen well remembered.Founded in the early stages of the development of the architec-tural profession in the United States, the Office of the Supervising
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