It is fervently hoped that when the 45th president takes the oath of office outside the Capitol on 20 January 2017, a $60m project to restore the building’s august cast-iron dome will have been completed. [...]

“There’s never been a major renovation of the dome. It’s important work and was long overdue. It apparently has a thousand cracks and pieces have been falling off for years but, once this work is done, it should be good for another 150 years. — theguardian.com

For those who assume Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the United States: Not so fast.

Drivers in Southern California spent a whopping 80 hours sitting in traffic in 2014, according to a new report by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and the traffic data company Inrix.

But the city with the dubious distinction of most time lost behind the wheel is Washington, D.C., researchers say, where commuters clocked 82 hours of delays in a single year.  — latimes.com

Architect Frank Gehry’s modified design for the National Eisenhower Memorial received final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission Thursday, the final step in the federal approval process that has dragged on since 2011.

The commission voted 9 to 1 to move forward with the design for a memorial park on a four-acre site along Independence Avenue in Southwest Washington. — washingtonpost.com

Instead, he lives on Buena Vista Terrace SE, a grim stretch of low-rise apartments pushed up against the Maryland border. And on Buena Vista Terrace, just standing outside can get you in trouble. [...]

The law is meant to fight disorderly conduct, but some lawyers and the people arrested for the “crime” say it’s routinely used to harass people seen as undesirable: protesters, the homeless, and black men. — washingtoncitypaper.com

It’s hard to find a landmark building in Washington more polarizing than the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Designed by legendary German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the city’s central library was never much loved by Washingtonians. If anything, its popularity has gone downhill since its 1972 opening. [...]

But now, as a four-year process wends its way toward a final design, it’s clear Washingtonians shouldn’t expect a major overhaul of Mies’s flawed design. — washingtonian.com

Many and baroque have been the scandals that have toppled Illinois politicians. Rod Blagojevich, the most recent governor to be sent to prison, is behind bars for trying to sell the remaining years of Barack Obama’s Senate term. But Aaron Schock, who announced his resignation on March 17th as Republican congressman for the state’s 18th district, is the first to be felled by an over-talkative interior designer. — the Economist

Using new international measurement standards and technology not available in the past, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey has calculated the official architectural height of the Washington Monument to be 554 feet 7 11/32 inches [...].

Although the newly established architectural height differs from the historical height of 555 feet 5⅛ inches, neither the starting point nor the so-called “standard deviation” used for the original 1884 measurement is known [...]. — noaa.gov

The neoclassical monument designed by Henry Bacon has become an iconic piece of architecture, but had one of the designs from the other competing architect been selected, the familiar Lincoln Memorial would have looked jarringly different—perhaps in the form of a ziggurat, Mayan temple or Egyptian pyramid. — history.com

The United States Olympic Committee seems ready to bid for the 2024 Summer Games. But the hard part is deciding which of the four finalists — Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco — has the best chance of being chosen by the International Olympic Committee. The U.S.O.C. could make its selection as soon as this week, so we asked New York Times reporters in each city to describe the view from each place. — nytimes.com