LIKE BUT UNLIKE -
THE PATENT OFFICE
& GENERAL POST OFFICE

At the General Post Office, Mills created what has been considered by some to be his masterpiece. Like the Treasury Department, the General Post Office is primarily a complex of offices. Unlike the Treasury Department, however, the General Post Office was extremely elaborate, inside and out. The exterior of the building was in the Italianate style, one of the first buildings in this country to use an Italian palace as a model, and was much more ornate than the somewhat restrained Greek Revival style that Mills used at the Treasury Department and the Patent Office. The interior of the General Post Office matched the exterior. The interior spaces were lavishly decorated, leading to a much richer impression than the crisp and spare lines of the spaces at the Treasury Department, for which Mills is much better known. With the construction of these three major buildings, and in his capacity as the "Architect of Public Buildings," Mills created, or helped to create, a national style for public buildings, and influenced, in one way or another, the form of space in future building in the nation's capital.

Photograph of the major space in the General Post Office Building, a vaulted and domed room on the top floor of the south side most recently used as a library.

An early twentieth-century photograph of workers filing documents in the Model Hall of the Patent Office Building.

A corridor in the General Post Office; compare this photograph to the earlier photograph of a similar corridor in the Treasury Department.

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