Mountains & Clouds by Alexander Calder, as seen before the mobile section was removed
After over a decade, a monumental Alexander Calder sculpture on Capitol Hill will be restored.
The Hart Senate Office Building first opened in 1982. During construction in the 1970s, Alexander Calder was selected as part of a competition to create a sculpture for the building’s central atrium. The resulting work was Mountains & Clouds, the final scale model for which Calder presented in Washington the day before his death on November 11, 1976. Mountain & Clouds is, therefore, Calder’s final work, completed in November 1986.
The sculpture is made from aircraft aluminum painted black to contrast against the polished marble of the atrium’s interior. It is composed of two main parts: the mountains, made from four large metal plates forming five peaks; and the clouds, four pieces suspended overhead, similar to the artist’s earlier mobile sculptures. It is the only work Calder created made from both stationary and mobile components. However, while Calder’s other mobiles relied on airflow to move them, drafts and breezes in the Hart Building were limited. The cloud component moved thanks to small motors controlled by computers that generated random patterns. The entire work was 51 feet tall, with the clouds covering an area 75 feet wide.
Staffers in the Hart Building can walk around the sculpture up close and even walk through the arch in one of the mountains. The building’s atrium is also lined with walkways leading to the offices, meaning that viewers can, in a way, scale the mountains as they ascend from one floor to the next. However, the mountains and the clouds became separated at one point and have never been reunited.
In 2014, analysis revealed that the 4,300-pound cloud segment may have been structurally compromised, prompting its removal from the atrium. Since then, only the mountains have remained, with promises to restore the complete sculpture contingent on when funding becomes available. After over a decade, the money to finance this restoration has been secured through private donations solicited by the Calder Foundation. The Architect of the Capitol, the agency responsible for maintenance of the Capitol grounds, has stated that it will collaborate with the Calder Foundation to completely reconstruct the mobile portion for Mountains & Clouds in accordance with Calder’s original designs.
Mountains & Clouds is scheduled to be fully restored later this year.