A look behind the scenes at what it takes to keep the historic buildings of the Capitol intact

At nearly 250 years, the United States is no longer a new republic. The buildings housing the congressional branch are long in tooth. They take a lot of care and maintenance all under the Architect of the Capitol, and office dating back to 1790. For a glimpse into its preservation work, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turn to the Historic Preservation Officer, Donna Klee.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin
And just to clarify, the Architect of the Capitol is concerned with the congressional branch buildings, and you leave the rest of it to the [General Services Administration (GSA)].

Donna Klee
Actually, we also take care of the Botanical Gardens, the Library Congress, the Supreme Court as well. And all of the outside cultural resources around them as well.

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Tom Temin
OK. So it’s not the executive branch, but it’s everything else, essentially.

Donna Klee
Basically, up on the hill. We have a campus that’s about 270 acres of building and grounds that we take care of here.

Tom Temin
All right. And well, the old ones are old, as we mentioned. The Capitol goes back to early in the 18th century, and the Library of Congress is quite old too. Maybe distinguished for us between maintenance and preservation, because I think of preservation as preventing encroaching of to modern of a decoration or that kind of thing.

Donna Klee
Well, preservation takes care of both the maintenance and any new utilities or needs that the building may be requested from the occupants. It’s a living museum is what our buildings are. They’re occupied by the members that need to get their work done. So it’s just like an office, like you’re in. So if they need a new outlet, if the printers not working, the heat’s not working, those things need to be adjusted by our maintenance staff and our caregivers on a daily basis. But then we also obviously have to take care of our buildings for long term roof repairs, the things that you have to do, just like on your house to keep them for lasting your lifetime. We have to do these to preserve our buildings through for the next 100 years. So stone repairs, roof repairs, those types of projects are planned and ongoing.

Tom Temin
And I wanted to focus a little bit, again, on the Capitol building itself, because it is such a fascinating piece of architecture. And having been through there a few times, through the basement and some of the side, hidden places, back when it was easier to do that kind of thing, I’ve always wondered what holds it up after all these years. All that stone, all that traffic and all those statues in the rotunda. Each one of which probably weighs a ton. It’s like having a parking lot in there, only it’s made of stone. How do you keep the whole thing from just going kaput after all those centuries?

Donna Klee
Well the building is made of stone itself too. It’s solid masonry construction with brick. So it’s a hardy building. It can withstand the wear and tear that it’s being put through. But it does take maintenance and thought, when we are doing projects like putting life safety elements in sprinklers, getting those data cables through. You can’t drill holes anywhere. You have to be very thoughtful and careful to make sure you preserve that historic structure.

Tom Temin
And in all of these buildings, again, aging ones. Library of Congress is not exactly erected last year, either. That goes back some. Do you do engineering studies or stress studies or wear and tear studies deeply to make sure that the essential bones are still good?

Donna Klee
Yes. We do facilities assessments on our historic structures reports. If we do see any areas of concern, we will hire consultants that are specialized in those types of buildings, and be able to go and monitor any evidence we may see. But as you said, they are old buildings, and they do age, and part of that preservation is not to try to make them look perfect and like new, but to weather gracefully and be able to stand the test of time. So that’s the balance that we’re trying to do.

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Tom Temin
And just getting to the executive branch buildings, which are the executive branch’s concern. There are some pretty old buildings on that end of things, too. The Treasury Building, the old executive office building, whatever they call it now, dates back to the middle or late 19th century. Anyhow, do you collaborate or compare best practices with other people in the business of keeping old buildings operative?

Donna Klee
So yes, the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 gave standards for federal agencies and how they should take care of their buildings. But yeah, we as geeks in our world, just like everybody else, get together and we compare how we’ve restored particular aspects of our building class, or would those types of things we share our resources. But as you can imagine, you’re going to try to use the methods in which, as best as you can they used back then. So we’re still carving sculptures by hand. We haven’t gone digitally, I know that some places have, they’re going to laser carving, but we still do all of that by hand, and those dying arts we try to keep alive here.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Donna Klee, she’s the Historic Preservation Officer of the Architect of the Capitol. And tell us about yourself. You’ve been at the architect office now for about a decade

Donna Klee
Almost 10 years.

Tom Temin
What draws you to this work? And how did you come to it?

Donna Klee
I actually started with the agency working on the Cannon Renewal Project, which is one of the congressional buildings that was built in 1908. It’s going through a complete restoration, new mechanical, plumbing, electrical, but also restoring the historic elements, plaster windows. And that also had a new design component with a fifth floor that they were replacing. And so that was a really nice combination for me of preservation and architecture with my background. And then I’ve always loved the magic that Capitol Hill has. And so really, that ability to serve and preserve our history has always drawn me.

Tom Temin
I imagine a lot of the challenge is maintaining a workforce, both of employees and contractors that can handle this type of work. When you look at some of the congressional office buildings, for example, they don’t have rubber wainscoting glued on like modern office buildings. It’s made of stone and cut to fit this kind of little detail of really made forever materials. Tell us about the human capital and contracting challenge.

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Donna Klee
We actually have a very strong, robust workforce of those dying arts, as you said, the plasterers, the historic painter, artisan painting, the stone masons that do our daily kind of work. We also contract out. But even with some of our larger projects, finding, for instance, enough plasters to be able to work on a project the size of cannon was very difficult to do, because there’s just not those resources for those arts out there anymore.

Tom Temin
Right. It’s not sheet rock and gum, or whatever they put in, spackle, that’s really plaster.

Donna Klee
And with preservation, you’re not going to substitute those materials. You’re going to put it back in the way that it was done originally. So a three coat plaster system.

Tom Temin
And I imagine there’s probably industrial base, for lack of a better word, that makes things like window frames and so on, balustrades that are historic in the way they’re made. Other words, you don’t want to put an Anderson window or Mick window, whatever it is, in to a place like that. You want the window to look like it did.

Donna Klee
We actually salvage as much historic material as possible. So it takes a lot of degradation for us to take out an entire window. We will put in new pieces of wood called Dutchman. We will put new glass in. We will do a lot of work before we buy a new window to put in there. That’s part of it. Preservation really is about keeping as much historic material in place for as long as you possibly can.

Tom Temin
And do you in your job management, basically. Do you make it a point to walk through some of these buildings, you have access to them, and take a look at what’s going on and say, Hmm, that might be a good project, or that looks like it’s going to need some work down the line. Do you physically get in to these structures?

Donna Klee
Yeah. So I have a really interesting job where I could be doing the planning portion of it in the morning, and then walking out on to the scaffolding and looking at Stone repairs in the afternoon, and then meeting with the congressman to hopefully get project support. So, yes. And that’s the beauty of it, being able to get out there and really seeing the artisans do their work and also teach other people about how to do it. Being able to educate people on the proper treatments for these buildings, the repair types, when to kind of draw the line on how much to take out and how much to save, it really has to be a hands on experience to find that line.

Tom Temin
Maybe briefly review the status of repairs, I imagine they’re all finished, and the extent of what you actually had to do following what happened on Jan. 6.

Donna Klee
Well, our team here was really fabulous in going in, cleaning up, salvaging any pieces that they could of historic material and getting it back in place. As I said, we have a tremendous team of skilled artisans here, plasters, window repairs, stone all of that. So it was taken care of in house and done very quickly afterwards, because it needed to be open for business. And so we repaired it as fast as we could and got everyone back in their offices.

Tom Temin
Fair to say, that’s a labor of love.

Donna Klee
I will have to say I’d be hard pressed to find an employee here that didn’t love where they worked.

Tom Temin
And a couple of detail questions. In the Capitol, having walked it yourself, probably many, many times, it’s full of secrets. What do you find is your most favorite little anecdote or secret or work about the Capitol building.

Donna Klee
I just think it’s kind of funny how easily I can get lost in the basement of it. It is a maze. There are secrets around every corner, and I think that it’s those little nooks or that you find when you’re not really looking for them.

Tom Temin
Kind of spooky down there sometimes, isn’t it?

Donna Klee
It is kind of spooky down there, especially if its late in the day or early in the morning, and you’re there by yourself.

Tom Temin
And my other question is, where have you stored away the spittoons that used to be in the Capitol? And what happened to the little brass inserts in the men’s lavatories’ that they used to use to put their cigars while they were doing their business?

Donna Klee
Well we all have those junk drawers in our house. Our junk drawers just bigger. I’m sure we have it somewhere in a warehouse just waiting to be discovered again.

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