Goodhue Elsewhere: National Academy of Sciences

If the Nebraska Capitol is the rabbit hole, the **National Academy of Sciences Building** in Washington, D.C. is the tunnel that keeps going after you think you've finished.

Same architect: **Bertram Goodhue**. Same sculptor: **Lee Lawrie**. Mosaic / mural circle including **Hildreth Meière**. Add painter **Albert Herter**. Nebraska's dream team, east-coast encore.

The Nebraska Capitol Commission lists the NAS building among Goodhue's major works right next to Lincoln and the Los Angeles Public Library. This page exists so Local Lore can say the quiet part out loud: **Lincoln was not a fluke.**

Darwin & Lyell in bronze

Lawrie's **Parade of Scientists** panels put history-of-science celebrities on the NAS entrance. Smithsonian records describe **Charles Darwin** seated with scholarly props and **Sir Charles Lyell** examining a specimen — names cast into the metal so you cannot miss them.

If a phone photo of a DARWIN panel showed up in a Nebraska group chat labeled "Capitol doors," this is the correction without the scold: **Goodhue + Lawrie did that in D.C.** Bring the awe back to Lincoln's own doors (bison, hunters, prairie bronze) and then keep clicking.

Herter's Prometheus / Helios mural

On the Great Hall's north wall, **Albert Herter** painted Prometheus — aided by Athena — stealing divine fire from the chariot of **Helios**, the sun god, to bring humankind the flame of knowledge. National Academies arts materials describe it that way. A later auditorium addition put the mural in conversation with mid-century building changes — the painting is Goodhue-era myth; the room around it has layers.

Lawrie's sun chariot (the "real star")

Architecture nerds will tell you the mural is gorgeous and the **bronze sun / chariot hardware** is the flex. Lawrie's NAS interior program includes a sun-chariot motif among medallions, locks, lamps, and zodiac gates — sculpture treated as building systems, not gift-shop add-ons. That is the same philosophy as The Sower: metal with a job.

Angels & lecterns (curiosity, not sworn affidavit)

Visitor lore around Goodhue great halls talks about **bronze angels** flanking doors — sometimes said to be salvaged from a discarded Goodhue lectern in the 1960s. We want a primary source before we pound the table. Until then: mid-century institutions really did trash custom Goodhue furniture (Nebraska's own Capitol Commission still hunts missing 1920s pieces sold at auction). Treat the angel salvage story as **labeled curiosity** while we chase citations.

Why this belongs on a Lincoln site

Because discovery is the product.

You walk Nebraska's tower. You learn Goodhue's name. You learn Lawrie and Meière. Then you find out the same people built a temple of American science on Constitution Avenue with Darwin on the door and Helios on the wall. Suddenly Lincoln feels less like "flyover Art Deco" and more like **chapter one of a national collaboration**.

Come back to the Capitol afterward. The Sower hits harder when you know the résumé.

Image credit

Hero image hosted on LNK from an official National Academies Bynder asset (not hotlinked). Credit: **National Academy of Sciences / National Academies** — [nationalacademies.org](https://www.nationalacademies.org/). We do **not** use scraped DuckDuckGo / Blogger “angels” photos. If National Academies terms later block redistribution, swap this file; residual reuse risk is noted for Samantha’s final OK.