Bowling Green and the four continents on their pedestals, the granite palace of the old Custom House, then the oval rotunda: a tile dome that floats with no columns, the murals of the harbor, the works in the collector's offices.
Cass Gilbert designed the Custom House at Bowling Green, built between 1902 and 1907, with Daniel Chester French's four seated figures of the continents at the entrance. The oval rotunda has a Guastavino tile dome and murals by Reginald Marsh painted in 1937. Since 1994 the building has housed the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
Source · National Museum of the American Indian ↗
The Beaux Arts granite front with its giant columns and the four seated continents, the elliptical rotunda with a Guastavino tile dome and skylight, the harbor murals in the dome's spandrels, the old collector's counters in marble and bronze. Mood: harbor light through the skylight. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.