About the Building

Located at 1733 Sixteenth Street, NW in the District of Columbia, this monumental building in the nation’s capital has been the national headquarters of the Supreme Council since 1915. The Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia laid the cornerstone in 1911, and the building was completed in 1915. Its architecture is an adaptation of the famous Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”

Steven McLeod Bedford, author of John Russell Pope: Architect of Empire, maintains that the Temple of the Scottish Rite would be the subject of constant praise for the next twenty years. The January 1916 issue of the London Architectural Review noted that “this monumental composition may surely be said to have reached the high-water mark of achievement in that newer interpretation of the Classic style with which modern American architecture is closely identified.”

The architect of the House of the Temple was John Russell Pope. Elliott Woods was chosen as an assistant and professional advisor. Pope is well known for his other works in the District of Columbia, including the National Gallery of Art, National Archives and the Jefferson Memorial. The House of the Temple was his first major commission in the District of Columbia. He was only 36 years old at the time he signed his contract for the building.

In 1917, Pope’s peers awarded him the Gold Medal of the Architectural League of New York for the design. French Architect Jacques Greber in his L'Architecture aux Etatis-Unis of 1920 described it as “a monument of remarkable sumptuousness …the ensemble is an admirable study of antique architecture stamped with a powerful dignity.”

Architectural progress photo taken by Harris and Ewing on April 7, 1913, during the construction of the House of the Temple.

In his book, American Architecture (1928), Fiske Kimball used this building and its “overwhelming simplicity and grandeur as an example of the triumph of classical form in America.” The project also earned Pope a place in the 1928 edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s monumental History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, and even the adamant modernist Lewis Mumford agreed that it was an excellent example of its type. In the late 1920s, a jury of Pope's peers selected and published measured drawings of the Temple as one of the three best public buildings in the United States, ranking it with Bertram Goodhue's Nebraska State Capitol (1920-32) in Lincoln and Paul Cret's Pan-American Union (1907-10) in Washington, D.C. A poll of federal government architect in 1932 still ranked it as one of the ten top buildings in America.

There have been few architectural alterations since the construction of the building. The House of the Temple has been open to the public for free guided tours since it opened in 1915. Join us for a tour to find out more and see this masterpiece on your next trip to Washington, D.C.