Who designed the White House and the US Capitol: James Hoban, William Thornton, the competition of 1792 and the history of the Capitol dome

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The White House was designed by James Hoban, an Irish-born builder from Charleston who won a public competition in July 1792 with a plan based on Leinster House in Dublin, and the United States Capitol was designed by William Thornton, a doctor from the West Indies with no architectural training, whose late entry to the parallel competition George Washington chose in 1793. Both were competitions with a $500 prize advertised by Thomas Jefferson, both buildings were burned by the British in 1814 and rebuilt, and both have been rebuilt so often since that what stands is as much the work of Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, Thomas U. Walter and the engineers of 1950 as of the men who won. Below: the competitions, Hoban and Thornton, what was built and by whom, the fire, the porticoes and wings, the two domes, and the disputed stories, with both buildings in the Buildings by style collection.

The competitions of 1792

The Residence Act of 1790 fixed the capital on the Potomac, and Pierre Charles L'Enfant laid out the city in 1791 with the "Congress House" on Jenkins Hill and the "President's House" a mile away on the ridge above the river, linked by Pennsylvania Avenue. L'Enfant expected to design both, refused to produce drawings and was dismissed in February 1792; in March Jefferson, as Secretary of State and an amateur architect, advertised two competitions with a prize of $500 or a gold medal and a deadline of 15 July. Nine entries came for the President's House, including one signed "A.Z." that was Jefferson's own, a Palladian villa with a dome; the commissioners and Washington chose Hoban's, and Washington, who wanted something grander, had it enlarged by a fifth and the stone carved with garlands. Seventeen entries came for the Capitol, and none satisfied; the commissioners were about to award it to Stephen Hallet, a French architect who had trained, when Thornton asked for permission to submit late, and his design, delivered in January 1793, was taken by Washington for "grandeur, simplicity and convenience" and by Jefferson because it was "simple, noble, beautiful". Hallet was hired to build it and paid the prize as consolation. United States Capitol.

James Hoban and the White House

Hoban (about 1755–1831) was born in County Kilkenny, trained as a carpenter and draughtsman in Dublin at the Society of Artists' drawing school under Thomas Ivory, and emigrated after the Revolution, first to Philadelphia and by 1787 to Charleston, where he built the county courthouse; Washington met him there in 1791. His White House is a Georgian country house of Aquia Creek sandstone painted white, its north front, with a central pediment on four pilasters and alternating window heads, taken from the garden front of Leinster House, the Duke of Leinster's Dublin palace of 1745, now the Irish parliament; the design was reduced from three storeys to two to save money. The cornerstone was laid on 13 October 1792 and the house was ready enough for John Adams in November 1800, built by Scottish stonemasons brought from Edinburgh, Irish and Italian craftsmen, and enslaved and free Black labourers hired from local owners, whose names survive in the payrolls. Hoban rebuilt it after the fire of 1814, added the South Portico in 1824 and the North Portico in 1829, and built the executive office buildings on either side; he stayed in Washington the rest of his life. James Hoban.

William Thornton and the Capitol that was built by others

Thornton (1759–1828) was born on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, trained in medicine at Edinburgh, and came to the United States in 1786; he had already won the competition for the Library Company of Philadelphia's building in 1789 with no training beyond books. His Capitol was a low dome on a central rotunda between two wings for the Senate and the House, in the Roman manner Jefferson wanted; he could not draw it to be built, and the men who could kept changing it. Hallet started the foundations and was fired for altering the plan; George Hadfield followed and was fired; Hoban supervised until 1803, when Jefferson, now president, appointed Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the first professional architect in America, who built the House wing with its columns of corn cobs and tobacco leaves and rebuilt after the British burned the unfinished building on 24 August 1814. Charles Bulfinch of Boston completed the two wings, the rotunda and the first dome, of wood sheathed in copper, in 1826. Thornton, made head of the Patent Office in 1802, quarrelled with all of them and never built anything himself. Washington laid the cornerstone on 18 September 1793 with a silver trowel; it has never been found.

The Capitol dome, 1855–1866

By 1850 the country had thirty states and the Capitol was too small; Thomas Ustick Walter of Philadelphia won a competition for extensions that doubled the building's length with new marble wings for the Senate and House, opened in 1859 and 1857, and left Bulfinch's dome absurdly small over the middle. In 1855 Congress voted for a new dome, and Walter designed it in cast iron, nearly nine million pounds, on the model of St Isaac's in St Petersburg and the Panthéon in Paris, with an inner and outer shell, 288 feet to the top of the statue. Construction went on through the Civil War, with Lincoln insisting it continue as "a sign we intend the Union shall go on"; the Statue of Freedom, 19.5 feet of bronze by Thomas Crawford, was raised on 2 December 1863, cast in a foundry where the work was directed by an enslaved man, Philip Reid, who was freed by the emancipation of the District in 1862 before it was finished. Constantino Brumidi painted the "Apotheosis of Washington" on the canopy in 1865 and the dome was finished in 1866. The old Senate and Supreme Court chambers survive inside; the East Front was extended in 1958–62 and the Visitor Center dug under the plaza in 2008; the dome was last restored in 2014–16. Capitol dome.

The White House since Hoban

• 1814. Burned by the British under Admiral Cockburn after the Battle of Bladensburg; Dolley Madison had the Stuart portrait of Washington taken down first. The walls stood and Hoban rebuilt inside them by 1817.
• 1824–29. The South Portico's curved colonnade and the North Portico's temple front, both by Hoban from Latrobe's earlier sketches.
• 1902. Theodore Roosevelt's rebuilding by McKim, Mead & White: the greenhouses cleared, the West Wing built for offices, the interior redone in Beaux-Arts; "White House" made the official name.
• 1909 and 1934. The Oval Office, first in the centre of the West Wing under Taft, moved to the south-east corner under Franklin Roosevelt.
• 1948–52. Truman found the building about to collapse, with the second floor "staying up purely from habit", and had the whole interior gutted and rebuilt on a steel frame inside the original walls, adding the Truman Balcony in 1948.
• 1961–63. Jacqueline Kennedy's restoration of the state rooms with period furniture and the founding of the White House Historical Association.

The house is 168 feet long with 132 rooms; the style, and the American Federal and Greek Revival houses that copied it, is in Neoclassical architecture, and Jefferson's own Monticello, the villa he really wanted, is in the collection.

Versions and theories

• "White because it was painted over the burn marks." No: the sandstone was whitewashed from 1798 to protect it from frost, and the name "White House" is in use by 1811, before the fire; Roosevelt made it official in 1901.
• Was the design stolen from Leinster House? Copied, not stolen: Hoban knew the building, borrowed the facade and adapted it, as every architect of the day did; the resemblance is obvious to any Dubliner.
• Jefferson's secret entry. The "A.Z." drawings in the Maryland Historical Society are in Jefferson's hand and match his Monticello studies; historians accept the attribution, and Jefferson, a commissioner in all but name, never admitted it.
• Who built them? The commissioners' records show enslaved Africans hired from Maryland and Virginia owners quarrying, hauling, sawing and laying brick on both sites, alongside free Black and white workers and immigrant masons; a plaque acknowledging them was placed in the Capitol in 2012 and Michelle Obama spoke of it in 2016.
• The lost cornerstones. Neither the White House's nor the Capitol's cornerstone has been found, despite searches with metal detectors in the 1990s; the Capitol's is thought to lie under the south-east corner of the old north wing.
• The dome as Kremlin propaganda. Walter's iron dome was copied by state capitols from Texas to California, and the resemblance to St Isaac's in Russia is real and openly borrowed, not a secret.

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