Henry Hope Reed, who passed away last year, spoke to an audience a decade ago about the architecture of the U.S. Capitol at the National Building Museum in 2004, just before the publication of his excellent book on that building. He is here introduced by Nir Buras, a Washington architect and planner who was then the director of the Washington chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture – now the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art since its merger in 2002 with Classical America, which Henry founded in 1968.
Anyway, the late Henry Hope Reed is my greatest hero in the realm of architecture, and finding this video of classicism’s knight in shining armor (and modernism’s most vociferous detractor), after a pleasant conversation I had with Nir this evening, was a thrill. Despite his 89 years at the time, Henry as lecturer – courtesy of C-SPAN, the National Building Museum and the ICAA – comes across as a vivacious advocate of classicism. Of course classicism embodies the good, the true and the beautiful in the design of our built environment. So please enjoy this visitation from this great and fondly remembered man.
Architecture Here and There 