Eccles Building - The Architect and The Design

The Architect and The Design

Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), a naturalized U.S. citizen who had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons and Paris, won the 1935 invited, juried competition for the design of the new headquarters of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Cret first came to the United States in 1903 to establish a department of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He resigned from the faculty in 1907 to establish his own practice.

One of his earliest buildings, for which he was an associate architect, is the Pan American Union Building, in Washington, D.C. (1908), which is characterized by a quintessential Beaux-Arts style. Work on less lavishly decorated public buildings followed in other cities in the years preceding his Federal Reserve Board commission, including Detroit (1922), Hartford (1926), Indianapolis (1928), and Fort Worth (1932). In Philadelphia, he designed the Barnes Foundation (1923), the Rodin Museum (1928), and a new building for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (1930). In Washington, D.C., he completed the Folger Library (1929) and the D.C. Heating Plant (1933), as well as the Klingle Valley (1931) and Calvert Street (1933) bridges.

The École des Beaux-Arts movement in architecture, which was grounded in the study of Greek and Roman architectural traditions, called for the interrelationship of all the arts. An architectural firm practicing in this tradition would therefore have to have the skill and resources to engage in every aspect of the building: exterior, interior, structural, functional, technical, and aesthetic. To complete the project, Cret's firm made more than 300 drawings of every degree of finish: freehand sketches, measured plans, site plans, elevational studies, and perspective drawings. A single drawing could contain information as to a frontal view, a side view, a view from the top, and section details, if necessary.

True to the Beaux-Arts tradition, Cret oversaw every aspect of the building project and in some cases involved himself in the details. He himself put his hand to the design of the Board's new official seal, illustrating four variations on the placement of the eagle, the shield, and the inscriptions (under the Banking Act of 1935, the Board had just had a change in name, from the Federal Reserve Board to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System). The Board suggested that Cret's design for the seal should be circled with 48 stars representing the states. Cret also designed the bronze fireplace ornament in the Board Room, for which he proposed symbols of Productivity and Stability. Chester Morrill, Secretary to the Board, felt that Cret's choice of balance scales to symbolize Stability was more appropriate to a judicial setting; Cret substituted a column for the scales.

The four-story building, with an exterior of Georgia marble, is in the shape of the letter H, with the space on either side of the building's center (that is, on either side of the "crossbar" of the H) forming east and west courtyards. In the 1970s, a fifth story was added to the center section of the building.

The focal point of the interior space is a two-story atrium with dual staircases and a skylight with glass etched in the outline of an eagle. The atrium floor is of marble and its walls are of travertine marble. Arranged on the second floor of the atrium, on each of two sides, are six bays with office doorways; above each door is carved the name of one of the twelve Districts of the Federal Reserve System. The largest and most elaborately designed meeting space in the building is the two-story Board Room.