Atop the State Department, Democracy’s Treasures Can Complicate or Clarify Messages

In the 1960s, a distinguished guest showed up at the U.S. State Department and never left. It was the 18th century.

Until the ’60s, the State Department’s home, the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., which was completed in 1941 with more than a million square feet of floor space, was thoroughly modern in style and not in a good way. Boxy rooms displayed cut-rate furniture. Fluorescent lights cast their greenish glow on government officials and international dignitaries.

“I can’t tell you, they were so awful,” said Selwa Roosevelt, a former State Department chief of protocol, referring to the reception rooms used for meetings and meals with important visitors. Roosevelt, who is 93, was a young society journalist married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt when she first encountered those spaces during the Eisenhower administration.

“I remember a horrid green rug,” she said. “It was disgraceful. I felt so sorry that our country would have anything so awful.”

She was not alone. But in the late 1960s, the architect Edward Vason Jones began to bedazzle the State Department’s eighth floor with cornices, columns, coffers and gilding. Paintings, furnishings and decorative objects representing the period from 1740 to 1840 filled the rooms, eventually growing into a collection of more than 5,000 museum-quality items. The rarities included Francis Scott Key’s chairs, Dolley Madison’s coffee cup and the table on which the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War was signed in 1783.

In the 1980s, it was the seventh floor’s turn. Allan Greenberg, the architect who gave its conference rooms and office suites their glamorous neo-Classical-style makeovers, recalled that the original spaces had been aptly described as “out of a Sears, Roebuck catalog.” He brought the total number of Cinderella-ed rooms to 42. And as before, every art piece, every gold flake, every carpet thread was donated or paid for by private funders.