The Thomas Jefferson Building is the oldest of the four United States Library of Congress buildings. Built between 1890 and 1897, it was originally known as the Library of Congress Building. It is now named for Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and the third U.S. president whose own book collection became part of the library in 1815. The building is located on First Street, S.E. between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street in Washington, D.C. across from the U.S. Capitol. The Beaux-Arts style building is known for its classicizing facade and elaborately decorated interior. The building's main architect was Paul J. Pelz, initially in partnership with John L. Smithmeyer, and succeeded by Edward Pearce Casey during the last few years of construction. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Design John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz won the competition for the architectural plans of the library in 1873. The start of the project was delayed by congressional debates until a vote in 1886. In 1888, Smithmeyer was dismissed and Pelz became the lead architect. Pelz was himself dismissed in 1892 and replaced by Edward Pearce Casey, the son of Brig. Gen. Thomas Lincoln Casey, Chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who at the time was in charge of the building's construction. While Smithmeyer was instrumental in securing the commission, Pelz appears to have been the main designer of the building and oversaw most of the exterior work. Bernard Green, the superintendent of construction, and Casey are credited for the completion of the interiors and the artistic supervision of the building's unique decorative program. The Library opened to the public in 1897 and the finishing work was completed in 1898. The Thomas Jefferson Building, containing some of the richest public interiors in the United States, is a compendium of the work of classically trained American sculptors and painters of the "American Renaissance", in programs of symbolic content that exhibited the progress of civilization, personified in Great Men and culminating in the American official culture of the Gilded Age; the programs were in many cases set out by the Librarian of Congress, Ainsworth Rand Spofford. The central block is broadly comparable to the Palais Garnier in Paris, a similarly ambitious expression of triumphant cultural nationalism in the Beaux-Arts style that had triumphed at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. On the exterior, sculptured portrait heads