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The Period 1784-1799
In
1784, Benjamin Latrobe returned to London and soon began
his architectural and engineering training and subsequent practice,
which lasted until his emigration in 1795-96. During this period
in America, the defining architectural events were the planning
of Washington, D. C. by Pierre Charles L'Enfant in 1789-91 and the
design competitions for the President's House and Capitol in 1792
and their subsequent erratic phases of design development and construction.
These projects attracted an international cast of design professionals
with varying degrees of talent, including James Hoban from Ireland,
George Hadfield from England, and Stephen Hallet from France. When
Latrobe disembarked from the ship Eliza in 1796 and took his first
look at American architecture in Norfolk, Virginia he had little
knowledge of the status of the design arts in his new country, some
5000 miles from London in physical distance and even farther removed
in maturity of architectural taste and respect for professional
abilities. He would soon discover that his adopted land was dominated
by gentlemen amateurs, such as Thomas Jefferson and William Thornton,
and carpenter builders, such as Samuel McIntire, and he would find
both groups unacceptable if not reprehensible.1 Latrobe's
denigration not withstanding, no American was more capable of making
craftsmanship into art than Samuel McIntire, builder and woodcarver
of Salem, Massachusetts.2
With better than a decade of design and construction behind him
and with an ability to make architectural drawings of a much higher
quality than his peers, McIntire was at work in 1795 on his fourth
house for the Salem merchant Elias Derby, tolerantly adapting designs
already provided by Charles Bulfinch. His earlier Jerathmeel Peirce
House in Salem (Figure
1) of 1782, with its details drawn from Batty
Langley's Builder's Treasury first published in 1740,
is a memorial to structures built in Massachusetts before the
Revolutionary War such as the Vassall-Longfellow House (1759)
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its highly textured clapboard walls
with stout, front-corner pilasters, dramatically moulded window
lintels, and sculpted frontispiece demonstrate that McIntire
had acquired a keen, if heavy, sense of proportion and an appreciation
for classical correctness of Renaissance derivation attributable
both to his knowledge of architectural publications and his own
measured experimentation. Influenced
as early as 1793 by the work of Robert Adam as interpreted by
Charles Bulfinch, McIntire designed the Lyman House in Waltham,
Massachusetts to include an elegant Bramantesque palazzo facade
translated into wood. On the interior, he followed Bulfinch in
his use of cove ceilings and an oval garden room inserted into
an otherwise orthogonal composition. This configuration may well
have been inspired specifically by Bulfinch's Barrell House (1792),
which McIntire had visited and sketched.3 However,
even in the 1790s, when not pressed by clients for novelty, McIntire
produced straightforward, double-pile plan houses such as the Nathan
Reed House (1796) in Danversport, Massachusetts. In
his lifetime, Bostonian Charles Bulfinch influenced not only
McIntire but the architecture of an entire region.4 He
would probably never have done so had his bankruptcy in 1795 not
forced him to abandon his dilettante status for that of a full-time
professional. Bulfinch developed a largely urban, ultimately laconic
domestic style by first drawing upon both European and Colonial
American sources, then upon a modicum of original thought regulated
by his natural reticence and accommodating manner.
Latrobe's
contact with Bulfinch came late, in 1818, when Bulfinch replaced
him as surveyor of the public buildings in charge of the Capitol's
construction. There is no evidence that Latrobe knew Bulfinch's
work in Boston. Not surprisingly he was unimpressed with Bulfinch's
proposals for the Capitol, saying that his new elevation was "detestable" and
questioning his knowledge of structural engineering.5
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FIGURE 1: Peirce House, Salem, Massachusetts (1782), Exterior Photograph
(Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA) Benjamin 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 Latrobe’s work
in America becomes most apparent. While he would have considered
McIntire’s designs provincial and out of date, he would have
admired him as an artisan. back
1
Latrobe
wrote: "The profession of Architecture has been hitherto in
the hands of two sets of Men. The first, of those, who from travelling
or from books have acquired some knowledge of the Theory of the
art, but know nothing of its practice, the second of those who know
nothing but the practice, and whose early life being spent in labor,
and in the habits of a laborious life, have had no opportunity of
acquiring the theory. The complaisance of these two sets of Men
to each other, renders it difficult for the Architect to get in
between them, for the Building mechanic finds his account in the
ignorance of the Gentleman architect, as the latter does in the
Submissive deportment which interest dictates to the former " (BHL
to Robert Mills, 12 July 1806) (C2). back
2 The standard
work on McIntire is Sidney Fiske Kimball, Mr. Samuel McIntire,
Carver: The Architect of Salem, Salem, MA: Essex Institute,
1940. Also see William Pierson, The Colonial and Neo-Cjassical
Styles, Vol. 1 of American Buildings and Their Architects,
New York: Anchor Books for Doubleday Books, 1976, pp. 221-28; Gerald
W. R. Ward, The Gardner-Pingree House, Salem, MA.: Essex
Institute, 1976; and Ward, The Pierce-Nichols House, Salem,
MA.: Essex Institute, 1976. back
3
Kimball,
McIntire, 80. back
4
For Bulfinch see Harold Kirker, The Architecture of Charles
Bulfinch, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969 and
Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch's Boston, 1787-1817,
New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964. Also see Pierson, American Buildings, Vol,
I, pp. 240-285. back
5 BHL
to Robert Goodloe Harper, 2 April 1818 (C3), and "Memorial
to Congress in Vindication of His Professional Skill," 8 December
1818 (C3). back |
