A Washington landmark fifty years in the making is about to shine again. Alexander Calder’s Mountains and Clouds, the monumental sculpture that fills the nine-story atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, is returning in full after a twelve-year absence.
This is no ordinary restoration. The work is Calder’s final masterpiece and the only one in which he combined a separate mobile and a standing sculpture, or “stabile.” Below, five black steel mountains rise 51 feet into the air; above them, four organically shaped clouds once drifted across a 75-foot span, in constant, gentle motion. It is one of the most significant works of public art in the U.S. Capitol — and the largest, second in scale only to the Washington Monument itself.
The clouds were lowered in 2014 over structural safety concerns and later removed entirely. Now, thanks to a $12 million restoration led by the Calder Foundation together with the U.S. Senate and generous private donors, they have been refabricated in modern carbon-fiber composite and are being reinstalled. Soon the mobile will rotate above the mountains for the first time in more than a decade — exactly as Calder dreamed it.
The timing is pure poetry. Calder spent his very last day alive in Washington, D.C., presenting a model of this work to congressional officials. Half a century later, his final gift to the city is whole again — and ready to lift the spirits of everyone who passes through the atrium.
Photo: Architect of the Capitol
