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 At the beginning of the twentieth century space shortages in the Capitol and mounting legislative work pointed to the necessity of providing the House of Representatives with its own office structure. The Superintendent of the Capitol, Elliott Woods, worked up preliminary designs for such a building to be located on several possible sites south of Capitol Square. Later, the New York firm of Carrère & Hastings was hired to refine Woods’s design while retaining the fundamental idea that the new structure would be a deferential backdrop to the Capitol: there would be no domes, pediments, or monumental sculpture. But it would also be a first-class structure, faced with marble and limestone, completely fireproof, and equipped with every modern comfort and convenience.
True to their Parisian training, the architects modeled the outside of the Cannon Building on the two landmark buildings that frame the Place de la Concorde: the Gardes Meubles (royal furniture warehouses) and the Hôtel de Crillon. End pavilions frame long colonnades raised high above the streets on rusticated first floors: in Paris the columns are Corinthian; in Washington they are Doric and paired.
Just inside is a three-story rotunda, with 18 marble columns supporting a coffered dome. This comes as a surprise, for no hint of a dome is visible from the outside. Straight ahead a pair of monumental marble stairs leads to the building’s most important destination: the Caucus Room. It was designed with a decorated ceiling and walls lined with large Corinthian pilasters. In size, scale, and classical detail it is similar to the East Room at the White House. The new office building included such state-of-the-art facilities as forced-air ventilation, steam heat, individual lavatories with hot and cold running water and ice water, telephones, and electricity. An underground pedestrian passage was built to connect it to the Capitol.
The building was designed in the form of a hollow trapezoid to admit light to inner offices. On each floor the offices were on both sides of a twelve-foot-wide corridor. Originally there were 397 offices and fourteen committee rooms.
Members first occupied the building during the 60th Congress in January 1908. By 1913, however, the House had outgrown the available office space, and fifty-one rooms were added to the original structure by raising the roof and constructing a fifth floor. A 1932 remodeling resulted in 85 two- or three-room suites, 10 single rooms, and 23 committee rooms. In 1962 the building was named for Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was Speaker of the House when its construction was authorized and when it was completed.
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