Get your cameras out: Pretty soon, the dome on the state capitol will disappear for the rest of the year. The scaffolding required for the repair work announced earlier last December is now visible from the ground.
State Preservation Board spokesperson Julie Fields said, “I’m seeing it beautifully from the Sam Houston building,” but up until last week it was almost impossible to see from the ground floor.
The year-long project involves personnel from Austin-based construction managers Herndon, Stauch & Associates, local architects Flint, Powell and Carsons, and builders Flintco Constructive Solutions. The repaint job on the House chamber seems to be going well and a couple of windows have been removed on the Senate side. However, the big work will be the dome, which will be completely covered in and filled with scaffolding to allow for a full inspection (you can see a video of some of the weather damage to the building here.)
Until that’s done, the team won’t really know how big the problem is. So far, Fields said, the repair work has been exactly what the team expected (“A little rust, a little deterioration”.) As for the pace of work and construction of the scaffolding cover, she added, “If we can keep it dry and hot, they’ll really start cranking it up, but it will be another month before it goes all the way up.”
One thing that will visibly change is the color of the dome: The chemical stripper being used to take the paint back to the wood and metal is a mossy green, while the nearly black primer that is being applied will be hard to miss. The first experiments are already underway with the new surface paint: If it looks darker than what’s up there already, that’s because it is. What’s up there now has been bleached (the Texas Summer will do that to paint) but the restoration team is going back to the shade used during the last renovation in the ’90s. Fields said, “There are samples of the paint on various spots. Once you get an eye for it, if you look on the east side you’ll be able to see it at the base of some of the columns.”
The plan is still to get the work done before the end of December, but it’s early days yet. “A month of no rain would be helpful to us,” said Fields and, as long as this weather holds, “this could be a really wonderful project.”
This article appears in July 23 • 2010.