Courthouse Building
The Dubuque County Courthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was one of the first buildings in the Dubuque area so honored. Fridolin Heer - who designed several other notable buildings in Dubuque, including Sacred Heart Church - was chosen as the architect for this project. Heer decided to use Beaux-Arts architecture - a large and grand style with a great amount of detail, large columns, elaborate moldings, and free standing statuary in the design of the courthouse. The adjacent Dubuque County Jail is a National Historic Landmark.
The building is 88 feet (27 m) by 125 feet (38 m) in size. A 190-foot (58 m) high central tower is capped with a bronze statue of Lady Justice that is 14 feet (4.3 m) tall. Other pewter statues are also on the building. Several other statues were taken down during World War I and melted down to provide material for the war effort. The two circular architectural parts on top of the courthouse both contain pure gold roofs.
Read more about this topic: Dubuque County Courthouse
Famous quotes containing the words courthouse and/or building:
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—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)