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Constitution Hall was designed by prominent architect, John Russell Pope, and is a monumental Neoclassical design constructed of Alabama limestone. The building houses the largest auditorium in the District and was finished in 1929. It was built by the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), to accommodate their annual Continental Congress and other activities but also served as an unofficial cultural center for more than forty years.
The building was center of a Civil Rights crisis when use of the hall was denied to African American singer Marion Anderson in 1939. In 1902, the DAR commissioned New York architect Edward Pearse Casey to design an appropriate headquarters building and assembly hall in the Nation's Capital at 1776 D Street, NW. The Georgian Revival building of Vermont marble with monumental Ionic porticos was built between 1904-10. The meeting place for DAR conferences, it was the site of the Washington Arms Limitation Conference in 1921-22, one of the most significant international attempts to reduce global tension through disarmament and mutual pledges of arbitration. |
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