LATROBE'S COLLEAGUES IN THE FEDERAL PERIOD
FIGURES ONLY

[For a print-ready text-only version, click here]

FIGURE 1: Pierce House, Salem, Massachusetts (1782). Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s competitors in late-18th-century America were gentlemen architects such as Thomas Jefferson and craftsman-builders such as Samuel McIntire. A Massachusetts woodcarver, McIntire also provided design and construction services. His Peirce House was derived from a plate in Batty Langley’s Builder’s Treasury of 1740, but is comparable to many New England houses built before the Revolutionary War. In the 1790s, some of McIntire’s designs were Adamesque, following the lead of Charles Bulfinch in Boston. However, to the end of his career, McIntire continued to produce straightforward, old-fashioned, double-pile-plan residences.

It is against these continuing conservative traditions of local carpenters and Georgian house forms encrusted with architectural attachments from dormers to water tables and frontispieces that the revolutionary nature of Benjamin Latrobe’s work in America becomes most apparent. While Latrobe would have considered McIntire’s design work provincial and out of date, he would have admired him as an artisan.

FIGURE 2: Barrell House, Somerville, Massachusetts (1792-93). In 1818, Latrobe made face-to-face contact with Charles Bulfinch, when the Bostonian took over work at the U.S. Capitol. Some authorities argue that Charles Bulfinch, and not Latrobe, was the first professional architect in America. However, Bulfinch had no formal training, learning instead from travel and books, and opened an office only after he lost a large sum of money in an ill-fated speculation at the Tontine Crescent in Boston.

Bulfinch began with old-fashioned Anglo-Palladian models, following in particular the work of William Chambers; his earliest houses were no more advanced than McIntire’s, having central-hall plans and Georgian massing and details. While it has its awkward moments, the Barrell house goes well beyond these early efforts. It shows Bulfinch to have been aware of the marché or movement sequence and of enfilade door arrangements with rooms in a quasi-en-suite, quasi-transverse-hall arrangement. The Barrell House can be compared to Latrobe’s earliest designs in Virginia and even to French work of the 1780s such as the Hôtel Lakanal by Guslain Joseph Henry. Already apparent is Bulfinch’s personal interest in transverse circulation paths and his discomfort with monumentality, particularly monumental entry sequences.

FIGURE 3: Barrell House, Principal stair. Spindly columns, a gangling stair, random openings, irregular lighting, and claustrophobic proportions illustrate just how far Bulfinch had to go at this time in his career in the manipulation of complex interor spaces. His eventual domestic planning solution was to abandon such axial compositions in pursuit of a personal, self-effacing idiom that was distinctly his own. His use of degagement in the entry portended his subtle arrangement of principal rooms and servants' spaces at his mature houses of the first decade of the 19th century.

FIGURE 4: Swan House, Dorchester, Massachusetts (ca. 1796). Bulfinch admired the room geometries developed by Robert Adam and the even more complex planning models offered by the French hôtels. Unfortunately, the best that he could do with varied room shapes in plan was to extrude them, producing this awkward collision of architectural masses. The spaces in the French examples were more thoroughly integrated and French designers frequently made highly informed references to classical models drawn from the ruins of antiquity. At the Swan House, Bulfinch did address, with limited success, the problems of scale given so much attention in Paris. Like Jefferson’s also-French-inspired Monticello, the Swan House was a two-story building with its second story de-emphasized. However, the effect was compromised by the dominant rotunda, with its tall windows and large mural wall surfaces. The house’s Francophile placement on dramatically modified terrain was comparable to Latrobe’s manipulation of the ground plane at Ashdown House in Sussex.

FIGURE 5: Swan House. First floor plan. These plans show that Bulfinch organized the Swan house as an irregular grid into which he absorbed, none too elegantly, the circle of the rotunda. The technique he did not exploit was poché. In the French hôtels, relatively thin masonry walls and the use of dégagement (the absorption of ancillary spaces into potentially awkward areas between major rooms of various shapes) produced complex spatial sequences inside relatively plain and regular exterior walls. To accomplish the same ends but with greater efficiency in his American houses, Latrobe created thin-wall poché through the clever handling of thin wooden partition walls.

FIGURE 6: Swan House. Longitudinal section. The relationship of the Swan House to its site was quite similar to Latrobe’s placement of the Van Ness House on manipulated topography, where he was concerned with principal-story views out over the Potomac. However, Bulfinch’s limitations as a designer again become apparent when one examines his interiors. The building section illustrated here is made strange by the principal axis’s being transverse rather than longitudinal and by the transverse hall’s being so low and narrow. Consequently, the two principal rooms, one with a tray ceiling and one with a concealed dome, and the diminutive corridor have almost no proportional relationship to one another. The interior elevations also reveal that Bulfinch had made no personal innovations, with doors, door and window surrounds, chair rails, and ceiling moldings applied with no more originality than those of builders like McIntire and without the woodcarver’s high level of personal craftsmanship. Latrobe, on the other hand, always related all of these elements to one another and to room volumes in his interior system of architectural ordering.

FIGURE 7: Hotel Lakanal, Paris (1795). Here is an example of the French use of dégagement. Like Bulfinch, the architect Guslain Joseph Henry made his principal feature an embedded circular volume, in this case a garden room. Around it he arranged other rooms variously shaped as a basilica, an elongaged octagon, an elongated half-octagon, and a rectangle. At the house’s center, Henry developed a dense core filled with stairs and irregularly shaped minor spaces serving as dressing rooms, toilets, and circulation. The Hôtel Lakanal’s circulation patterns are comparable to Latrobe’s preferences: radial for servants and circumferential for family and guests.

FIGURE 8: Elias Hasket Derby House, Salem, Massachusetts (1795-99). First-floor plan. Once cut off from French and English sources and left to his own devices, Bulfinch began to develop a distinctive plan type of his own, here involving the use of a central, spatial cell at the intersection of cross axes. The spatial cell was a device also explored by Latrobe, who had seen it used by S. P. Cockerell in England. Bulfinch employed a central transverse corridor for service rather than for entry as he had at the Swan House, while his longitudinal entry axis leads to Derby’s library. The vaulted cell of space forms an anteroom for it and for the adjacent sitting room, the largest room in the house. The planning move that made all this possible was Bulfinch’s shifting of the principal stair to one side, allowing it to be approached tangentially. The resulting plan distribution possesses the elegant, sedate qualities that he would so fruitfully pursue in his mature domestic commissions such as the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House.

FIGURE 9: Morris Mansion, Philadelphia (1794-96). Exterior view. When he saw this pile, Latrobe was at a loss for words. He knew French emigré Pierre L’Enfant in the 1806 as a disheveled figure wandering about Washington in a state of disgrace and bitterness. L’Enfant had laid out the Federal City for George Washington, in whose army he had served during the Revolutionary War. He also had grand visions for the President’s House and Capitol, known to us only through his provocative but enigmatic plan diagrams on the engraved Ellicott plan for the city. However, his working methods alienated many local citizens and Washington had to sack him.

This residence that L’Enfant designed for Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris was architecturally incoherent. Its porches, with Corinthian columns supporting entablatures, appear out of nowhere; its hulking Mansard roofs were obviously drawn from L’Enfant’s French experience; its massing was perhaps French as well with end pavilions, but with an odd cavity at the center, where a subordinate pavilion might have been expected. The opposite facade had a central curving portico, like the embedded temple Latrobe used at Ashdown. Obviously L’Enfant did not know how to design a house.

FIGURE 10-11 Monticello. Plan and front (east) elevation of the first project (1768-85). Thomas Jefferson brought Latrobe to Washington in 1803 to work on the Capitol and other federal projects. Among America’s gentleman architects, Jefferson was the only one for whom Latrobe had admiration--albeit a grudging admiration. Latrobe saw the erudite Jefferson as someone who “fished” his designs out of books, which was certainly true for the beginning of Jefferson’s own house, Monticello. For his plan, he first relied on a variety of English sources, particularly James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture and Robert Morris’s Select Architecture. However, this design was only the beginning, and Jefferson would spend the rest of his life using Monticello as a kind of laboratory for his architectural experiments, no different really than America’s being used as a laboratory for the great democratic experiment.

For his initial entry facade composition, Jefferson drew quite directly on the work of Andrea Palladio. It was an old-fashioned design, Italian as interpreted by way of England. It would, in fact, appear old-fashioned to Jefferson himself once he had spent his years in Paris as minister, where he examined closely the most up-to-date Parisian domestic designs, so much so that upon his return to Monticello he had the facade razed and rebuilt in the form of a French hôtel.

FIGURE 12: Monticello. Overall plan of the first project at the first-floor level. Latrobe’s sketicism notwithstanding, Jefferson produced at Monticello one of 18th-century America’s most innovative domestic site plans. Inspired by the Palladian five-part scheme with forecourt, Jefferson suppressed a complete service floor below grade but left this floor accessible at the basement level on both flanks. In addition, rather than stretching his wings forward, he turned them to the rear, where they define a platform for viewing the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is an innovative synthesis of great architectural ideas, as brilliant in its own way as Jefferson’s celebrated synthesis of political ideas in the Declaration of Independence.

FIGURE 13: Monticello. Final first-floor plan (1789-1809). Jefferson’s radical alteration of Monticello after his return from Paris brought it up to date in terms of the French theories of la distribution or sophisticated room layout. His plan as built includes a wide variety of room shapes, cleverly and artfully united by means of a tightly developed collection of service spaces acting as poché and yielding a disciplined separation of public and private domains. In a design accomplishment no less profound than his site planning maneuvers, Jefferson, in effect, turned the typical French hôtel plan inside out. That is, instead of creating, through dégagement, a prominent but often-denied central-axis organization, with particularized spaces packed tightly around a central core, he maintained an open longitudinal core, surrounded first by spaces of greater particularity, including downplayed stairs, and second by light-entrapping semi-octagons.

FIGURE 14: Project for a House, Washington, D.C. (1798). First-floor plan. Latrobe thought highly enough of the professionally-trained Englishman George Hadfield, the brother of Maria Cosway whom Jefferson also admired, to employ him in his office. In fact, late in his career, at a time when Hadfield was experiencing financial difficulties, Latrobe obtained and returned to him the Royal Society medal with which he had been forced to part.

Little of Hadfield’s work remains intact, and most of what he did execute was institutional. The site for this domestic project is unknown and the plan is notable for its almost complete lack of poché. Hadfield organized it by means of a variable grid, with some grid lines dissolved into files of columns. The result is not unlike Bulfinch’s Barrell and Swan houses and is remarkably similar to Jefferson’s parti at Monticello, but with a monumental stair, which Jefferson would never have sanctioned. It is also similar to Latrobe’s work in its use of multiple classical prototypes: a rotunda with portico flanked by two, double-apsidal basilicas.

FIGURE 15: U.S. Capitol. Design for the west front (ca. 1793). William Thornton, to whom this sketch has sometimes been attributed, eventually became the nemesis of both Hadfield and Latrobe. A Tortolla plantation owner trained as a medical doctor in Scotland, he grew restless in the Caribbean. His next stop was Philadelphia in 1786 where he became an instant winner in architectural competitions, culminating with his circuitously premiated design for the U. S. Capitol. Latrobe reached such a level of animosity with Thornton that he filed and won a slander suit against him.

Thornton’s reputation as an architectural designer rests largely on three commissions: his designs for the national Capitol, the John Tayloe House in Washington, D. C., now known as The Octagon, and Tudor Place in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. All have the same parti, one which had appeared on the published plan for the Federal City as L’Enfant’s diagrammatic indication of the Capitol. It consists of a circular temple embedded in a rectangular block formed of receding masses. An interpretation of this configuration at the Capitol can be seen in this perspective sketch. The form is quite French, particularly in its monumentality and prominent use of the orders.

FIGURE 16: Tayloe House. First-floor plan (ca. 1797-99). While Latrobe made a proposal for the John Tayloe House, William Thornton received the commission. Given a triangular site, Thornton was faced with a design problem for which he could not expect to find appropriate precedents. In this case, he was up to the challenge, fitting multiple room shapes together without resorting to his “mandoline” and “harp” configurations that Latrobe ridiculed at the Capitol. After working through at least two prior schemes, Thornton settled on this one with lateral, symmetrically disposed principal rooms splayed astride a circular entry vestibule. Into the triangular spaces to the rear, he inserted a conventional stair, leaving smaller triangles of residual space to each side, one housing a service stair and the other a pantry.

FIGURE 17: McComb's design for a country house. First-floor plan (ca. 1798-1800). Latrobe once considered moving to New York, where he would have competed directly with John McComb. Like Hoban, McComb fashioned himself as more of a builder than an architect and Latrobe considered him to be a “New York City bricklayer.” McComb was seldom innovative in his residential designs, which typically exhibit a sameness enlivened only by his early and continued use of Adamesque features. This country house scheme is an exception. Like Bulfinch’s Swan House, it includes double entries and a transverse hall and an elliptical (Bulfinch’s was circular) garden room with an enveloping porch.

FIGURE 18: McComb's design for a country house. Front elevation.

FIGURE 19: Gardner-Pingree House, Salem, Massachusetts (1804-05). Exterior photograph of the front facade. In 1804-05 Samuel McIntire built this, one of his most celebrated residences. Gone on the interior are the oval rooms and elaborate stairs of his Bulfinch-inspired work from the decade before in favor of a traditional double-pile plan, modified slightly to include a service ell in one quadrant. The front facade is similar to Bulfinch’s urban residences of the same period in its economy of line and mass. McIntire’s proportions are much more horizontal, and so more Georgian, producing an elegant box for holding his splendid hand-carved wooden ornament, still inspired by Asher Benjamin’s Country Builder’s Assistant of 1796. By the time of this house’s construction, Latrobe had long-since abandoned its five-bay parti in favor of three.

FIGURE 20: Shadwell. First-floor plan (1803). Jefferson reserved his most distinctive Villa-Rotunda-like design for a scheme identified by some as a proposal for remodeling his childhood home, Shadwell. He eliminated the Villa Rotunda’s transverse porticoes, enabling him to employ, once again, a Monticello-like scheme: longitudinally linked major spaces with front and rear pedimented porches, transverse axes for horizontal and vertical circulation, and semi-octagonal lateral projections, in this case terminating the principal cross axis. Latrobe explored the rotunda form for a house while still living in Virginia; his investigations culminated with the Pope Villa in Lexington, Kentucky, where he suppressed the dome on the outside, probably feeling that such a form was only appropriate in America for public buildings.

FIGURE 21: Custis-Lee Mansion (1817). Exterior photograph. In 1817 Hadfield designed this house in Arlington, Virginia for George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of former President George Washington. The house’s northern wing was built first, apparently intended to serve as a banquet hall, then the wing to the south, which was divided into an office and a parlor. Finally, the central block was completed, including the portico of massive Doric columns. The building’s plan is remarkable only for its wide, shallow proportions, consisting as it does of a narrow central hall with orthogonal rooms to each side and in the wings. Its extraordinary width to depth ratio, together with the sculptural effect of the huge columns, makes it unusually prominent when viewed from the city below. Latrobe’s house for Ann Casanave, located south of the Mall, was similar in form, being shallow and wide, and for similar reasons; Latrobe wanted all of his “Capitol houses” to be monumental and impressive, befitting their location in the young nation’s capital city.

FIGURE 22: Second Bank of the U.S., Washington, D.C. (1824). Exterior Photograph of the streetfront. Long since demolished, this building is known through late-19th-century photographs, which show a two-story block (approaching a cube) covered by a pyramidal roof; presumably the cornice had been altered by the time this image was made. The fenestration on the ground floor represented a Regency interpretation of Ancient Roman thermal windows. The recessed entry was defined by a segmental arch, a popular motif in the Regency work of Sir John Soane in England and one used often, particularly in public buildings, by Latrobe. The walls were brick covered with stucco and were relieved only by recessed panels above the second-floor windows and a belt course. The deep mural wall surface between the two floors suggests the presence of masonry vaults on the interior. The building’s overall effect of uncluttered, well-proportioned, logical construction is more like Latrobe’s work than that of any other architect at work in America at the time.

FIGURE 23: Washington, D.C. City Hall (1820-26). Plan and front elevation as drawn by A.J. Davis. Hadfield offered up the most ambitious design of his career for this public building. While the rear wings and rotunda were never built, the scale of his proposal, seen here as drawn by A.J. Davis in 1832, suggests that he could have dealt quite successfully with a composition as large and complex as the Capitol. Hadfield constructed the city hall of brick covered with stucco struck like stone, but it was sheathed in a stone veneer in the early-20th century, at which time the original interiors were lost. The plan is remniscient of the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, combining multiple orthogonal temples and an embedded rotunda with an extended, trabeated entry porch; Latrobe used similar combinations of forms at a smaller scale in such domestic commissions as the Pope Villa.

FIGURE 24: Van Ness Mausoleum, Washington, D.C. (1826). Exterior photograph. Hadfield’s final project was the mausoleum he designed for the same John Peter Van Ness for whom Latrobe designed an urban residence. It was built on H Street adjacent to the orphan asylum long supported by Marcia Van Ness, but has been moved to Oak Hill Cemetary in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. It is Hadfield’s essay on the classical circular temple theme, which originated in antiquity, then obsessed Renaissance designers, and it can be compared to such canonical monuments as the Temple of Vesta in Rome, the form of which is quite similar, and Bramante’s Tempietto, which, like it, includes Doric columns and a crypt beneath the main floor. Latrobe used circular temples as "embedded" entry devices at Ashdown and the President’s House.

FIGURE 25: Tudor Place, Georgetown, Washington, D.C. (1805). Exterior photograph of the front facade. In 1805, William Thornton undertook the design of Tudor Place in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. As built, his two-story facade was quite modern, with an embedded garden-front temple, comparable to Hadfield’s mausoleum, and a three-bay central block with tripartite windows. The plan is less adventurous, completely orthogonal, including a conventional central hall. Thornton’s preliminary schemes were much more interesting, but demonstrate his inability to reconcile multiple room shapes, both rectilinear and curvilinear, within a simple, orthogonal building perimeter. For a comparable house by Latrobe, one would have to look back to the late-18th century and his Richmond, Virginia scheme for John Harvie.

FIGURE 26: St. Mary's Chapel, Baltimore (1806-08). Maximillian Godefroy executed no residential commissions in America. He conceived this facade as a painterly tableau and made his elevation drawing more a romantic landscape painting than an architectural rendering; the screen-like quality of the facade becomes obvious in the photograph taken at an oblique angle. As presented in full frontal view, the composition is an adroit one, as is the plan, which brings together the facade screen with a conventional nave, chancel, side aisles, and two unexecuted flanking chapels. Godefroy’s Neo-Classical compositions were no less accomplished, making it obvious why Latrobe valued him as a colleague as well as a friend until their falling out over the commission for the Baltimore Exchange. In fact, there seems to have been no Federal Period architect whom Latrobe considered more of a professional equal than Godefroy.

FIGURE 27: St. Mary's Chapel. Plan.

FIGURE 28: St. Mary's Chapel. Exterior photograph of the front and right-side facades.

FIGURE 29: First Presbyterian Churchyard, Baltimore (1813-15). Carriage entrance. For this modest but remarkable commission, Godefroy combined Egyptian with Greek forms--pylons and obelisks for the stone flanks, with fretwork for the iron gates--to create an evocative composition that makes clear his originality. Monumentally scaled even though diminutive, it must have been work that Latrobe could much admire. While Latrobe never incorporated such eccentricities into his domestic work, he did use comparable forms, including a pyramid, for his proposed monument to those who died in the Richmond (Virginia) Theater fire.

FIGURE 30: Battle Monument, Baltimore (1816). Engraved elevation. Monumentation offered Godefroy an opportunity to exploit his ability as a French-trained architect by expressing layers of meaning through rich iconographic content, an ability also exhibited by Latrobe, but predominantly in his public works. Atop a pylon-like, rusticated base, Godefroy placed a great shaft of bundled fasces. Around this shaft he arranged eagle-headed griffins, symbols of mortality, and, atop it, he placed a statue symbolizing Baltimore or the United States. He defined the precinct around the base with four, upturned cannon barrels. There is a level of precision to each element and of adroitness in combining them that few, if any, architects in America, other than Latrobe, could have reached.

FIGURE 31: Unitarian Church, Baltimore (1817-18). Plan. That Godefroy was capable of developing a sophisticated plan is demonstrated by his version of the much-investigated central-church scheme. Comparable to Latrobe’s Greek-cross-plan St. John’s Church in Washington, D. C., it is based upon a nine-part, irregular grid within which the front corners become stairs. Of the remaining seven grid units, the central one contains the dome on pendentives; the lateral ones--arms of the Greek cross--contain pews; the front arm becomes a second vestibule, with a column screen that supports the gallery above; and the rear arm, with its back wall pushed outward in a gentle curve, becomes the chancel. Unfortunately, these interiors have been much modified.

FIGURE 32: Place de la Prefecture, Laval, France (1831-34). Exterior photograph. Godefroy returned to Europe in 1810 but despite high hopes built few buildings. In 1831-34, he produced this headquarters complex in Laval, France for the Department of Mayenne. The scale differential between the tripartite, rusticated, triumphal-arch-like gateway and the diminutive flanking houses is jarring. Much more successful in elevation than in three dimensions, the composition’s problems are remiscient of those that Godefroy created at St. Mary’s Chapel, with its billboard-like facade. One has to wonder if his separation from Latrobe did not somehow diminish his powers, or perhaps they simply atrophied. Godefroy’s return to Europe also raises the interesting question: how would Latrobe’s career have progressed had he settled his financial difficulties in England and returned to practice in London?

FIGURE 33: Calverton (1815). Ramée's site plan. Like Latrobe, Joseph Ramée attempted to succeed in America as an architectural emigré. His sojourn lasted only from 1812 to 1815, however, and produced little constructed work. Ramée took much interest in landscape planning, as this beautifully rendered site plan documents. Produced for publication after his return to Europe, it and many others of comparable quality establish Ramée as the most adept landscape planner to work in America in the early-19th century. Calverton appears in the upper center of the drawing, in a setting where it would have had views out over lawns and along tree-lined winding paths. The spirit of the composition can be compared to Latrobe's sketch for the President's House site plan.

FIGURE 34: Calverton. Exterior photograph. Seen in isolation, Ramée's somewhat extruded massing for Calverton seems extreme, with its telescoping volumes, portico within portico, and sculpted figures. However, an examination of the many domestic compositions that he published reveals that Calverton was one among many related proposals. Alone on its site near Baltimore, however, it must have been a source of curiousity, even wonder, until it burned in 1874.

FIGURE 35: William Scarborough House, Savannah, Georgia (1818-19). First-floor plan. There is no evidence of contact between Latrobe and English immigrant architect William Jay, who made his mark on Savannah, Georgia between 1817 and 1825. Jay designed this house is to have a projecting porch with massive Doric columns in antis between square corner piers; the porch leads into a wide, skylit hall overlooked by a second-floor balcony that is supported by four, Doric columns. To either side of this hall, Jay placed basilican-form rooms with segmentally-curved endwalls. Behind these endwalls and the rear pair of columns, he arranged for circulation in a transverse enfilade, which includes the family and service stairs. Beyond this enfilade, he located a ballroom straddled symmetrically by piazzas. Finally, he terminated the composition with a long, narrow dining room. While there are some formal similarities to Latrobe’s work, such as the heavy Doric order and the segmental-curve apses, there is a very limited manipulation of thin-wall poché and very little attempt to separate servants’ spaces and traffic from the domains of family and guests.

FIGURE 36: Telfair House, Savannah (ca. 1815-20). Front elevation. This facade composition illustrates Jay’s mastery at an early age of Regency Period elegance. Unlike Latrobe’s work in its use of a multiply molded and denticulated belt course, an external, laterally-approached stairway, and a thermal window, it is still a composition of which he would likely have approved. Most obviously progressive is the three-bay facade and accompanying large areas of mural wall surface completely unlike anything seen in Savannah up until its time. While this tripartite composition was the one favored by Latrobe, the portico leads to a central hall of which he would never have approved. Unfortunately, Jay’s work had virtually no influence on the course of American architecture.

FIGURE 37: John Wickham House, Richmond, Virginia (1811). First-floor plan of the initial project. Alexander Parris began his career designing in the Adamesque Style popularized in New England by Charles Bulfinch. His initial design of a house for John Wickham included a central, colonnaded rotunda not unlike the work of Robert Adam or John Soane and quadrant-arc exterior stairs. Lacking confidence in Parris’s design, Wickham sent the plan to Latrobe for an evaluation. Never timid about showering a colleague’s work with criticism, Latrobe challenged the hierarchy of ornamentation, the stairs without landings, the lack of sun control, and the chimney locations. Parris responded by eliminating the exterior stair and rotunda, relocating the interior stair, modifying the fenestration and door openings, and additing a south-side porch. Ultimately, Parris settled on a design integrating some of Latrobe’s ideas with many of his own.

FIGURE 38: John Wickham House, Richmond, Virginia (1811). First floor plan of the final project.

FIGURE 39: The Grange, nr. New York City (1801-02). First-floor plan. John McComb designed this country house for the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Its imaginative, if stiff, plan of double, elongated octagons encised in squares and rectangles represents McComb at his most adventurous. However, by the time of its design, his career had evolved to the point that he did not have to concentrate on domestic commissions, and he never again explored such provocative themes. It was McComb’s collaboration with Frenchman Joseph Mangin in their design of the New York City Hall that has been most celebrated. With a section traceable to French work, a plan remniscient of William Kent, and decidedly Adamesque ornamentation, it was chosen in competition over a design submitted by Latrobe.

FIGURE 40: Ezekial Hersey Derby House, Salem, Massachusetts (ca.1800). Unbuilt first-floor plan. Charles Bulfinch’s plan illustrates his continuing high level of discomfort with a composition based upon an axial, central entry hall and the difficulty he had within such a configuration in coordinating major and minor spaces and primary and secondary paths of circulation.

FIGURE 41: Ezekial Hersey Derby House, Salem. First-floor plan as constructed. The Derby House as constructed shows the degree to which Bulfinch matured as a designer by pursuing those themes with which he was comfortable. This reserved, pragmatic plan has no pretensions to monumentality. Matters of orientation aside, it has a strong kinship to Latrobe’s fully developed rational house parti; its principal rooms occupy one side while stairs and support spaces occupy the other. The obvious difference between the work of the two men is Bulfinch's inclusion of a wide central hall for circulation, which Latrobe would have never accepted; but this hall is more like the transverse passage used by Bulfinch in his earlier Swan and Barrell houses than the ubiquitous central hall found in English and American domestic designs. The neatly separates major and minor spaces and allows for circulation adjacent to both the principal stair and the nearby servants’ stair, which serves as a transitional zone between the family rooms and kitchen. Like Bulfinch himself, the result is quite competent but self effacing.

FIGURE 42: Third Harrison Gray Otis House, Boston (1805-08). Second-floor plan. Bulfinch designed three houses for railroad magnate Harrison Gray Otis. The plan of this third iteration is not so successful or memorable as the Derby House, although much published, with the family stair reached only by a sidling movement from the vestibule on the first floor and positioned on the second floor such that none of the surrounding rooms can be approached axially from it. On the other hand, these rooms, a dining room and two drawing rooms--one of which once had a great bow window--offer splendid opportunities for entertaining and must have been even more dramatic before Bulfinch built a house for his daughter on the site to the east, embedding the bow window in it. The facade of the first Otis house was slightly anemic; the second brittle and somewhat ambivalent; but the third can be admired for the crisp, dignified planarity, which became emblematic of the best moments in Bulfinch’s oeuvre. Perhaps its understated confidence explains his long success as an elected official in Boston and subsequently as Surveyor of the Public Buildings when he assumed Latrobe’s duties at the U. S. Capitol. Willing to carry out the designs of others, except for his own interventions at the west portico and the rotunda and his building of an awkward, wooden dome, now fortunately replaced, and willing to forego an extensive private practice, Bulfinch worked amicably with the Congress--an extraordinary accomplishment in and of itself. Where the mercurial L’Enfant, intransigent Hallet, vulnerable Hadfield, and temperamental Latrobe failed, Bulfinch succeeded.

FIGURE 43: Third Harrison Gray Otis House, Boston (1805-08). Exterior photograph.