US Capitol

The camera stands on the paved rim of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, at the foot of the Capitol's west lawn and the eastern end of the National Mall. Directly ahead, across about three hundred feet of still water, is the west front of the United States Capitol, floodlit against a late blue-hour sky and repeated upside down in the pool. The bronze equestrian group on the near shore, to the right of the dome, is the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial. Turn south and the long glasshouse with the domed roof is the United States Botanic Garden Conservatory; turn north and the treeline gives way to the offices along Pennsylvania Avenue. This panorama covers a half circle rather than a full turn, from the Botanic Garden round to the north side of the pool. It does not face back down the Mall, so the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial are behind the camera and are not in shot.

The dome that dominates the view is not stone. It is cast iron - close to nine million pounds of it, painted to match the marble below - and it replaced a smaller wooden and copper dome that had begun to look undersized once the building was extended. Work on it carried on right through the Civil War, which was a deliberate decision: continuing was read at the time as a statement that the Union expected to still be there when it was finished. The bronze figure on top is the Statue of Freedom, nineteen and a half feet tall, hoisted into place in December 1863.

The pool and the ground it sits in are much younger than the building above them. The Capitol's west grounds were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1870s, and the reflecting pool itself only arrived in the 1970s, as part of the scheme that tidied away the roads that used to run across this end of the Mall. The sightline it creates - dome, water, dome again - is the reason almost every photograph of the Capitol's west front is taken from within a few feet of where this panorama was shot.