John Russell Pope, Architect of the National Archives

John Russell Pope. Library of Congress / Bain News Service.

Designing the National Archives called for an architect who understood classical design and how buildings can express a nation's identity. That architect was John Russell Pope. This profile draws on the building's National Historic Landmark nomination, as summarized by the National Park Service.

Training in Rome and Paris

Pope was born in 1873, the son of two painters, John and Mary Pope. He entered the City College of New York in 1888 and in 1891 transferred to the architecture program at the School of Mines at Columbia College. While assisting William Robert Ware, who founded Columbia's architecture school, he won the Charles McKim Traveling Fellowship, awarded for exceptional studio work — and at the same time became the first architect to win the Rome Prize, which let architecture students study at the American Academy in Rome.

After 18 months in Rome and touring Italy, Pope spent three years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning to New York in 1900. The École trained many prominent American architects. Beaux-Arts design moved beyond strict French classicism and neoclassicism to draw on medieval and Renaissance examples; it became popular in the United States in the late 1800s and shaped American monumental architecture into the 1920s. Pope's neoclassical approach to the National Archives and his other monuments came straight from this training.

The Boston Public Library, an example of Beaux-Arts style, around 1900. Library of Congress / Detroit Publishing Co.

Building a practice

From 1900 Pope worked in New York with architect Bruce Price, and in 1903 he opened his own firm. His connection with the renowned architect Charles McKim brought commissions for summer houses in Newport, Rhode Island, and homes in Washington, D.C., and entry to elite design competitions. He became known for a spare, restrained approach to classical and eclectic styles such as Tudor revival and French Renaissance. Beginning with the McLean House in 1907, he designed a series of houses in Washington's fashionable neighborhoods, alongside major country houses on Long Island.

He lost his first competition, for the Agriculture Building in Washington, but won those for the Freedmen's Hospital in Washington and the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial in Hodgenville, Kentucky. His spare neoclassical Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington (1910–1917) brought him national acclaim.

At the top of his field

• In 1917 he drew classical revival sketches for a remodeling, never carried out, of the State, War, and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building).
• By 1925 he had won competitions for a city hall, a train station, memorials, mausoleums and a museum — including two memorials to Theodore Roosevelt, one built in New York in 1925 and one beside Washington's Tidal Basin that was never built.
• He drew campus plans for Yale, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Syracuse, Hartwick College and Hunter College.

In 1925 the influential art dealer Joseph Duveen telegraphed railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington that Pope was the "greatest architect [of] modern times and only man for you." By 1927, when the Board of Architectural Consultants began work on the Federal Triangle, Pope's firm was at its most productive; he was designing the Baltimore Museum of Art and was a clear contender for the National Archives.

His greatest works

After his daughter's death in 1930, Pope concentrated on the most important buildings of his career:

• the National Archives;
• two wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York;
• the Modern Sculpture Wing at London's Tate Gallery and the Elgin Marble Wing at the British Museum;
• the conversion of the Frick residence in New York into a museum;
• the National Gallery of Art in Washington;
• early designs for the Jefferson Memorial.

By his death in 1937, Pope had designed more buildings on the National Mall than any other architect, and his monumental classical architecture still defines the heart of the capital.

The National Archives being constructed, c. 1920. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / THEODOR HORYDCZAK.

Sources

• National Park Service: "John Russell Pope: Architect," from the series The National Archives as a National Historic Landmark.
• Bedford, Steven. National Archives Building, National Historic Landmark Nomination Form (National Park Service, 2022); The Architectural Career of John Russell Pope (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1994); John Russell Pope: Architect of Empire (Rizzoli, 1998). McCoy, Donald R. The National Archives: America's Ministry of Documents (1978). Prologue 16(2), 1984. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.