Mountain-sized makeover: Hart Senate Building’s Calder sculpture getting newly restored mobile

descriptions off, selected

captions settings, opens captions settings dialog

captions off, selected

This is a modal window.

Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.

End of dialog window.

National Headlines- October 1 2026

National Headlines- October 1 2026

A mountain-sized sculpture inside the Hart Senate Office Building is getting a major — and moving — cutting-edge upgrade.

Mountains and Clouds, the massive installation by Alexander Calder that fills much of the building’s atrium, is undergoing a restoration effort that will include, for the first time, a mobile that will finally move in the way that the famed artist intended. The restoration project was announced Thursday by The Calder Foundation. 

Calder conceived the two-part “aesthetic equilibrium” sculpture shortly before his death in 1976. Mountain and Clouds made its debut inside Hart 10 years later.

The 51-foot-high grounded stabile is often viewed as the “mountains” of the sculpture, while the mobile, which spans 75 feet, is known as the “clouds.”

But according to Calder’s eponymous foundation, “due to the limits of engineering technology and available materials at that time,” the mobile component didn’t move how the sculptor originally had envisioned.

The mobile had frozen........

© The Hill