Episode 1 of 2
Design Simplification
- When
- April 11, 1848
- Where
- Washington National Monument Society
Due to funding issues, the society decided to build a simple obelisk instead of Mills's original design.
On April 11, 1848, the Washington National Monument Society decided to omit the proposed colonnade. The resulting design was a 500-foot tall obelisk, 55 feet square at the base. This decision followed earlier criticisms of the original plan.
Sources
- Washington Monument Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-30
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.