Florida State Capitol Tallahassee
— a low old house and a tall new tower, side by side.
Not only on a wall.
Florida State Capitol Tallahassee, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Two capitols on one block. The 1845 Old Capitol sits low and white, with its red-and-white striped awnings and a copper dome restored to its 1902 appearance. Behind it, the twenty-two-story New Capitol tower rises 345 feet, flanked by two round legislative chambers. The contrast is unsubtle and, once you've stood there, hard to forget. The Old Capitol now operates as a museum of Florida political history; the tower still runs the state. Open plaza between them, live oaks at the edges. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Florida State Capitol complex occupies the top of a low hill in downtown Tallahassee, the state's capital since 1824. The Old Capitol was completed in 1845, the year Florida entered the Union, and expanded with its distinctive copper dome and side wings in 1902. Behind it the New Capitol, designed by Edward Durell Stone and dedicated in 1977, rises twenty-two stories to 345 feet, flanked by two low circular chambers housing the Senate and the House of Representatives. The complex sits at the head of Apalachee Parkway, with views east toward Cascades Park and west toward the Florida State University campus.
The Old Capitol is brick and stucco, painted white, with its 1902-era red-and-white striped canvas awnings restored on the south facade. The copper dome was rebuilt during a 1978 to 1982 restoration after the building was nearly demolished to make way for the tower. The New Capitol is reinforced concrete clad in Italian Carrara marble and Travertine, in Stone's stripped late-modernist idiom. The two flanking legislative chambers are also marble-clad cylinders, deliberately low so as not to compete with the tower. Together the complex covers about twenty-two acres of formal plaza, plantings, and the surrounding state office grounds.
The Old Capitol now operates as the Florida Historic Capitol Museum and is open Monday through Saturday with free admission. The New Capitol's twenty-second-floor observation deck is also open to the public on weekdays, with a long view across the Panhandle on clear days. Both legislative chambers can be observed from public galleries when the Legislature is in session, typically January through March in odd years and a few weeks earlier in even years. Public tours start from the plaza level of the New Capitol. Photography is allowed throughout most public areas.
