The founders of this country, conscious that they were creating a new form of government, leaned heavily on the available ancient precedents. They dressed their new republic in the architecture of Greece and Rome, asserting its legitimacy with pillars and pediments.

Now the United States is nearly 250 years old; it no longer needs to wear borrowed clothes. And modern federal buildings rightly reflect the diversity of this great nation, from the wavy blue glass of the federal courthouse in Miami to the salvaged timber planks in a federal office building in Seattle to the vertiginous white facade of a courthouse annex in Salt Lake City.