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The fire of 23 April 1879 and the dome that crowned the rebuilding stand at full size in the university fragment of this record (the fire, the rebuild in one summer, and the name; the dome and the statue on it — finished 1882, gilded from 1886, regilded on its fifteen-to-twenty-year cycle since, the statue's height carried there as an open conflict). They are pointed to here and not retold. What this article carries is the part the fame leaves out: the building itself, as a workplace, from the summer it rose to the present day.
The construction is the first fact of its working life, because the speed was the point. With the second Main Building (1865) in ashes and the university's whole operation — classrooms, dormitories, refectory, offices, library — destroyed with it in about three hours, the Congregation resolved to reopen in the fall. A national design competition chose the 30-year-old Chicago architect Willoughby J. Edbrooke; ground was broken on 17 May 1879, the first stone laid on the 19th, and some 300 laborers — 56 bricklayers among them, laying a building of 4,350,000 bricks — had three of its five stories up by the Fourth of July. Classes for 1879–80 began on 8 September with 344 students walking through its doors. The building they entered was, for its place and time, modern plant: gas illumination, steam heat, running hot and cold water in the lavatories. It was not finished — the dome's iron framework and panels came in the summer of 1882, and the east and west wings followed in 1884, bringing the building to its present 144,000 square feet — but it was open, and it has been open, in the same use, ever since.
For its first seventy years the Main Building was not an office building; it was the university, indoors. The university's own 125th-anniversary history lists what it housed from construction until the mid-1900s: residence halls, classrooms, art studios, administrative and faculty offices, a ticket office, dining halls, a faculty apartment complex, a museum, study halls — and, until 1917, the university library. The Gregori Columbus murals in its corridors belong to that era's ambition: the building was built to be lived in, studied in, eaten in and governed from, all at once. The change came with the postwar university's growth: from the 1950s the building settled into its modern role, primarily administrative offices and classrooms, as residence, dining and library functions moved to buildings of their own. The offices it holds in the contemporary record are the university's center of government: the president's and provost's offices, the Graduate School, admissions, financial aid, the registrar, finance, business operations, student affairs, university relations and public affairs — the whole administrative spine under one (gilded) roof.
Its fabric has had two modern rescues. A yearlong exterior repair project began in 1995; then, from July 1997 to July 1999, the building closed entirely for a comprehensive interior restoration — a $58 million project, funded by more than a dozen benefactors and tax-exempt bonds, that returned the public areas to their nineteenth-century Victorian character while bringing the office areas to contemporary standards. The building that reopened in 1999 is therefore a working artifact in the strict sense: a 1879 envelope, an 1882 crown (at pointer, above), a Victorian public interior recovered in the 1990s, and a modern office building inside. Its present state in November 2026 is unchanged in kind — the university's Main Administration Building, in daily administrative and classroom use, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and still, 147 years after its one-summer raising, the building the institution is governed from. The fame article in the landmarks fragment gives its silhouette to the world; the working record gives it back its tenants: first everyone, then the government.
Sources: Notre Dame News, "Main Building turns 125 years old" (7 Sept. 2004) (construction May–September 1879 after the 23 Apr. fire; Edbrooke, age 30, by competition; ground broken 17 May; three of five stories by 4 July; classes began 8 Sept. with 344 students; gas light, steam heat, hot and cold running water; dome added 1882; wings 1884; 144,000 square feet; contents to the mid-1900s; library until 1917; administrative-and-classroom use since the 1950s; exterior repairs from 1995; interior restoration July 1997–July 1999, $58 million; offices list). University of Notre Dame Archives, Main Building exhibit (ground broken Saturday 17 May, first stone Monday 19 May; 4,350,000 bricks; 56 bricklayers; second story complete 28 June). Main Building reference entries (construction 17 May–1 Sept. 1879; status as administration and class building; NRHP listing; Columbus murals). The university fragment and landmarks fragment of this record (the fire, the dome and statue, the regilding cycle — pointer).