The North Carolina State Legislative Building is the current meeting place of the North Carolina General Assembly, the state legislature of the U.S. state of North Carolina. It was opened in 1963, replacing the North Carolina State Capitol as the home of the legislature since 1840. It is located across from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Bicentennial Mall and one block north of the Capitol in Raleigh.
The building and furnishings cost $5.5 million, or $1.24 for each citizen of North Carolina. Construction required 10,500 cubic yards (8,000 m3) of concrete, 145,000 masonary blocks, and 192,000 square feet (17,800 m2) of terrazzo
Architectural details include a 22-foot-wide (6.7 m), red-carpeted stair that leads from the front entrance to the third floor galleries for the House and Senate, roof gardens and garden courts at the four interior corners. Each pair of brass doors that leads to the House and Senate chambers weighs 1,700 pounds (770 kg). A 12-foot-diameter brass chandelier (3.7 m) in the rotunda weighs 750 pounds (340 kg). Brass chandeliers in the chambers and the main stair are 8 ft in diameter (2.4 m) and weigh 625 pounds (283 kg) each. The building entrance features a 28 feet (8.5 m) diameter terrazzo mosaic of the Great Seal of the State of North Carolina.
The building is open to the public seven days a week and tours are available.
Famous quotes containing the words north, carolina, state, legislative and/or building:
“The English were very backward to explore and settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America ... and in their first permanent settlement ... And the right of possession, naturally enough, was the one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain, of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“The legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, ... thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)