Pic of the Week: Temple of Knowledge

John Adams Building at Night, South Side (11/27/2013).

With the end of Daylight Savings Time my walk home after work is in the dark. During one of these walks I was captivated by the beauty of the John Adams Building all aglow with its outdoor lights and had to capture it with a photograph, well actually my iPhone.

I like to refer to the John Adams Building as a Temple of Knowledge.  As you can see by this picture it resembles a structure from ancient times (replace the electric lights with oil lamps). In fact, the architecture of the Adams Building is modeled after a ziggurat with its receding levels and flat roof. Check out  Theodor Horydczak’s photograph of the Adams Building (Annex) taken from the roof of the Jefferson Building which shows the ziggurat influenced design.

 

Pics of the Week: Sequoyah

We have visited the topic of the images on the bronze doors of the Adams Building in several posts – Itzamna, Quetzalcoatl, and Brahma.  Today’s post  celebrates Native American Heritage Month by featuring two pictures from the Adams Building. One image is of Sequoyah from the building’s bronze doors done by Lee Lawrie, the other …

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The Terrific Twos!

INSIDE ADAMS IS TURNING TWO! When we launched Inside Adams on October 30, 2009 we became the second official Library of Congress blog- the first was the LC Blog (launched April 2007).  In the two years since we published our first post “…Never be afraid of a book,” the Library has added 5 more official blogs to …

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Pic of the Week: Itzamna

As we near the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are featuring Lee Lawrie’s bas-relief of the Mayan deity Itzamna from the Adams building bronze doors (back in September we featured the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl). The Maya occupied what are now the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador; and like the other …

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Quetzalcoatl

Artist Lee Lawrie’s figures on the Adams Building bronze doors provide us with an opportunity to highlight important mythical and heroic figures that helped promote the written word. For Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month we highlighted the figure of Brahma. It seems only fitting that for Hispanic Heritage Month we feature the bronze image of the …

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