cpc.state.pa.us

15 April 2025

Chairman’s Message:

On behalf of the Capitol Preservation Committee, I’d like to welcome you to the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building. For the past forty-three years, the Capitol Preservation Committee (CPC) has directed over 160 individual multi-year projects in one of the most successful and successive efforts to restore, conserve, and preserve the artwork, architecture, and history of the monumental, priceless, Pennsylvania State Capitol.

Our Capitol was designed by a thirty-six-year-old architect named Joseph Miller Huston. Constructed from 1902-1906, at a cost of $4,500,000, the building contains 640 rooms, outstanding and priceless murals by Edwin Austin Abbey, Violet Oakley, William Brantley Van Ingen, Vincent Maragliotti, and Donald MacGregor, sculpture by George Grey Barnard, Roland Hinton Perry, and Vincenzo Alfano and the famed Moravian Tile Floor by Henry Chapman Mercer. The building showcases stained glass windows, marble from around the world, 24-karat gold leafing, massive bronze doors, chandeliers, carpets, draperies, ornate woodwork and ornamental plaster.

Over the committee’s existence we have taken great pride in restoring the Capitol to its original 1906 grandeur. Some of our most prominent projects are the restoration of the Main Rotunda murals and marble, the conservation of the Commonwealth’s historic collection of civil war battle flags, the restoration of the Senate and House chambers, the completion of the Governor’s private office suite, and the removal and restoration of the statue, Commonwealth from atop the Capitol dome.

In large part due to the preservation committee’s ongoing campaign of restoration and sustained efforts at preservation maintenance, the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building is widely recognized as one of the most beautiful state capitols in the nation. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Main Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Additionally, the entire Capitol Complex was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 2013. As such the Preservation Committee looks forward to continuing restoration in the ornate spaces within the other Complex Buildings, such as the Forum Building’s Law Library (completed in 2017) and the North Office Building’s 104 Suite (completed in 2018).

I was first introduced to the work of the Capitol Preservation Committee while serving on the staff of Senator John Blake and it is truly an honor to be able to support the outstanding work and continued preservation of the committee as its chairman. I look forward to working with both returning and new members of the committee as we move forward in the preservation of Pennsylvania’s truly outstanding “Palace of Art.”

 

Representative Kyle Mullins

Chairman, Capitol Preservation Committee