About 4 million people visited the United States Capitol campus in 2024, and every one of them encountered the handiwork of the Architect of the Capitol (AOC). This venerable legislative branch agency oversees the physical Capitol site, which includes the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Botanic Garden, among several other buildings and landscapes. The agency’s leader is also called the Architect of the Capitol, and the role’s newest inhabitant, Thomas E. Austin, took office in June 2024. Read on for a condensed version of our recent talk with Austin, an engineer and retired U.S. Army colonel.

The agency [of the AOC] was constituted in 1876. We have just over 2,500 permanent employees. We’re responsible for the entire Capitol campus, 570 acres of grounds. We have 18.5 million square feet of buildings that we maintain, thousands of works of art.

What role does preservation play in the mission of the AOC?

It’s codified into our mission statement to serve, preserve, and inspire. We serve Congress and the Supreme Court; we service their needs to make sure that they can do their constitutional duties. But we also preserve our historic architecture. We want to make sure that these institutions that we’re in charge of, these jewels of our nation, are preserved for future generations. So we have a curatorial team. We also have professional preservationists to help us plan our work, to develop the scopes of work for our contractors, to work with our tradespeople to make sure that when we restore something, we’re doing it in as close to the traditional historical method as possible.

And then our last piece would be “inspire.” We want to inspire memorable experiences. When you go inside the Capitol Rotunda and you look up, you see the painting that’s inside the dome. It’s called Apotheosis of Washington, by Constantino Brumidi. The Apotheosis is 4,664 square feet. It just takes your breath away. Whenever I have a [long] day, and I’m leaving the agency at night, I’ll go up into the Rotunda when all the tourists are gone, and I’ll sit there on one of the benches and look up and kind of draw inspiration from it.

Can you tell me about the Cannon Renewal Project?

The Cannon House Office Building was constructed back in the early 1900s. There were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. Everything from the HVAC system, the plumbing systems, the plaster on the walls, the marble on the floors. There were a lot of things that needed to be updated to make that building fully functional, things that we couldn’t just fix on a quick basis. And so it was put into our plan. The overall program is 10 years—five phases of two years each, tied to the congressional move cycle. We’re finishing up the last pieces now, [including] restoring the courtyard.

What are some other current projects?

We’re doing several projects for the Library of Congress. We’re renovating spaces inside the building so they can display some more of their treasures and better connect to visitors. … Also, the Supreme Court has four interior courtyards [with] a lot of stone [detailing] that had degraded over the years, partly because of the installation of a bird deterrent system in the 1960s. We’ve been doing hundreds of Dutchman repairs there, re-carving elements and reattaching them, fixing the problems. … I could keep going. There’s literally dozens of projects going on all the time.