Hall of Columns

Over the course of four years, our craftspeople worked to restore the scagliola and faux marble walls in the U.S. Capitol Hall of columns and vestibule. The U.S. Capitol Building contains both true scagliola and marezzo scagliola. Marezzo scagliola is a strictly Anglo-American variation where patterns could be created more quickly using raw silk as a patterning material. This process better suited the large public spaces where it was used; in the U.S. Capitol, U.S. patent office, and a dozen other state capitols.

A section of the scagliola walls in the vestibule had been damaged when elevators were added to the building in the 1950s. Conservators determined that the surface of eight scagliola panels had blurred and discolored due to multiple layers of non-original surface coatings. EverGreene restored these scagliola panels by removing overpaint and other coatings, stabilizing and consolidating delaminated plaster, and infilling areas of loss to match the original.