Architect previews Capitol Campus master plan, outlines Rayburn approach and lessons from Cannon overruns
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Summary
At a House Administration hearing, Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin said the AOC is finalizing a multi-component Capitol Campus master plan and a swing-space study for a full Rayburn House Office Building renewal, and cited lessons from the Cannon House Office Building renewal that contributed to substantial cost growth.
Thomas Austin, the Architect of the Capitol, told the House Committee on House Administration that the AOC is advancing a long-delayed update to the Capitol Complex Master Plan and preparing a detailed approach to the Rayburn House Office Building renewal.
The master-plan update — described by Austin as a “capital campus blueprint” — focuses on four priorities: the House office building renewal program (including Rayburn), needs on the Senate side, a new U.S. Capitol Police headquarters, and utility resiliency. Austin said a swing-space study for Rayburn should be complete next month and will drive how the AOC sequences renovation work.
The plan matters because a full Rayburn renewal would displace offices and require explicit decisions about where members will work while construction proceeds. “That swing space study … is going to kind of drive where we’re going to go next in this program,” Austin told the committee.
Members raised the Cannon House Office Building renewal as a cautionary example. The Cannon program, which has proceeded in multiple phases since 2015, originally carried an initial cost estimate of $752,000,000 and is now estimated at $971,000,000 — roughly a $219 million, or 29 percent, increase over the original estimate. The project’s completion date moved from the end of 2024 to late 2025. Committee members emphasized the need for congressional oversight of similarly large projects.
Austin said the AOC has cataloged lessons from the Cannon program and runs after-action reviews after each phase. He said early Cannon cost estimates were prepared at a preliminary stage and included “a large factor of margin of error, about plus or minus 40 percent.” He added, “We want to get to a further stage of development in the design of [Rayburn] so we have a better program of requirements.”
Austin also told the committee that scope creep and late design decisions on Cannon contributed to cost growth; he said future large projects will aim to finalize design and program requirements before construction starts and to tighten change-management controls.
The AOC’s planning documents and the swing-space study will be shared with the committee, Austin said. Committee members asked for continued briefings as the AOC refines the Rayburn program and as the master-plan update progresses.
Looking ahead, the AOC intends to present the completed swing-space results and further development of the Rayburn program to the committee and appropriations stakeholders. The committee left the hearing asking for additional detail on how the AOC will limit cost growth on multi‑year, complex renovations.
