“In the preparation of plans, I have been governed by the requirements of the various branches of the public business at each locality, and while avoiding any unnecessary expense or display, I have endeavored to render each building ample for the proper accommodation of the officers for whose use it was intended, and at the same time convenient, durable, and creditable to the government.”
–Alfred Bult Mullett, Supervising Architect for the mints at Carson City and San Francisco
THE BUILDINGS
The mint buildings designed by the Supervising Architect’s Office share some important similarities: each building is bilaterally symmetrical and free-standing; they are entered by way of a centrally placed door and hall; just beyond, a cross hall diverts traffic left and right, leading the visitor to various offices and work rooms. In the larger buildings at San Francisco and Denver, courtyards are employed to allow natural light and ventilation.
The first two of these buildings chronologically—those at Carson City and San Francisco—were designed in the 1860s, a period of stylistic eclecticism in American architecture. The facades and ornamental details used throughout these two buildings differ quite dramatically, despite their typological similarities and identical functions.
which recognizes the economy of space and the need for easy circulation through the building. (National Archives)
At Carson City, the formal program is dominated by the local building tradition, although the classical heritage is evoked by the overall distribution of elements and the pedimented entrance façade. The San Francisco Mint, on the other hand, is a Greek Revival building, calling to mind the imposing structures built in the previous three decades, when the nation’s architecture was dominated by an austere classicism derived from archeological work on ancient Greece.
A late Greek Revival building, the architecture expresses the symbolic strength and austerity of a government institution. (National Archives)
In the 1890s, when the mints at Denver and Philadelphia were designed, the architectural profession was dominated by a new sense of appropriate public architecture. The period from the 1880s through the 1910s, known as the American Renaissance because of the classical revival in the arts, is famed for the influence of the Parisian school, the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The school’s design philosophy had a profound effect on the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, known as the White City because of the dominance of pure white classical buildings. The exposition, in turn, set the tone for public buildings of its time, and the Philadelphia Mint is an example of this architecture.
which takes its strong formal cues from Renaissance palaces of Florence, Italy. (National Archives, HABS/HAER, Library of Congress)
What makes the plans of the mint buildings interesting are the typological similarities to each other and to the Treasury Building. Each plan is clearly concerned with the formal consistency of its arrangement. Function, then, was not an overwhelming determinant of spatial configurations, although the treatments of offices and public rooms versus manufacturing or industrial rooms is quite different. While it is clear that production rooms required more square footage, most of the rooms are interchangeable.
This not only accommodated changes during the buildings’ lifetimes as mints, but encouraged their preservation through adaptive reuse projects. Their typological affinities as public buildings in both plan and elevation allowed them to accommodate drastic changes in function. What was often lost in the process, however, was precisely this dichotomy of functions.
A reserved example of the Beaux Arts architectural style that dominated the end of the 20th century. (National Archives)
which recognizes the economy of space and the need for easy circulation through the building. (National Archives) 
