House of the Temple

The House of the Temple is a 1911 to 1915 erected Masonic Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington, DC

The massive neoclassical building by architect John Russell Pope, is modeled after the tomb of Mausolus in Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The inauguration took place after exactly four years of construction on 18 October 1915.

Fiske Kimball described the building in his book American Architecture in 1928 as an example of the triumph of classical form, several polls lined it in at the best public building in the United States. The adherents of modernism in architecture saw the admittedly different.

The House of the Temple was filming location in the movie " The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) and the scene of several key scenes in the novel The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.