Structure
The nine-story structure provides offices for forty nine senators, as well as for three committees and several subcommittees. Two-story duplex suites allow a senator’s entire office staff to work in connecting rooms. Where solid walls limited the arrangement of office space in the two older buildings, movable partitions permit reconfiguration of offices in the Hart Building to meet changing needs. Designed for modern telecommunications, removable floor panels permit the laying of telephone lines and computer cables, further aiding the rearrangement of offices as computers rapidly alter staff functions. On the building's roof, microwave satellite dishes expand senators’ communication links with the news media in their home states.
The large Central Hearing Facility on the second floor of the Hart Building was designed for high-interest events attracting crowds that could not be accommodated in the regular hearing rooms. The facility offered more seating, better acoustics, and movable side panes where television cameras could operate without distracting the participants. Behind the dais where committee members sit, the Senate seal is affixed to a white and gray marble wall, which contrasts with the wood-paneled side walls. The room has become familiar to television viewers as the site of numerous Senate investigations and confirmation hearings.
Situated the farthest from the Capitol, the Hart Building was connected underground to an extension of the existing Capitol Subway to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. In 1994 a new train loop was installed that provided more cars and speedier service to handle the increased traffic between the buildings. With wider doors and trains at platform-level, the new system is also fully accessible to the handicapped. In addition, the Hart Building provides three floors of underground parking.
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Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“What is the structure of government that will best guard against the precipitate counsels and factious combinations for unjust purposes, without a sacrifice of the fundamental principle of republicanism?”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)