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The Period 1800 and After

In 1804-05 Samuel McIntire built one of his most celebrated residences, the brick Gardner-Pingree House in Salem, Massachusetts (Figure 19). Gone 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 economical of line and mass, which heightens the significance of carved elements on the balustrade and entry porch. The house is a box for holding McIntire's splendid wooden ornament, still inspired by Asher Benjamin's Country Builder's Assistant of 1796.

With the appearance of Benjamin's The American Builder's Companion in 1806, McIntire immediately began borrowing from its plates, lavishing attention on projecting porches, doors, and mantles. However, he transcended publications by developing personal variations on published themes.

While his manner was subsequently emulated by other builders in Salem 40 his work never became more than a splendid local phenomenon. The reasons for this provinciality reveal something of the changes taking place in the practice of architecture in America in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. As a carver-builder, McIntire's attitude toward the design process varied considerably from that of emerging professionals such as Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

McIntire's domestic designs changed superficially but not fundamentally over the course of his career. His massing became more planar and his ornament more restrained to suit prevailing tastes. His plans deviated from orthogonal, central hall configurations only when influenced directly by Bulfinch. Theory never entered into the creation of his work. His results were always dominated by construction pragmatism and the art of woodcarving.

During the decade of 1800-1809, Latrobe established himself as the most influential architect in America and in 1803 took on the country's most important building project: the U.S. Capitol. The Washington architectural scene had changed considerably since the time of the public-buildings competitions. Hallet had departed and would die in New Rochelle, N. Y. in 1825 with no additional architectural commissions to his credit. L'Enfant resided in the city and vainly sought compensation for the architectural and planning services that he had provided to the United States Government. Thornton became director of the United States Patent Office in 1802. Hadfield had been discharged from the Capitol in 1798 but remained in Washington where he seems to have worked steadily. A new European face appeared in the vicinity of the Federal City, Maximilian Godefroy, arriving from France in 1805 and establishing a practice in Baltimore.

When elected president in 1800, Thomas Jefferson disbanded the city commissioners, who had ineffectively managed the construction of the President’s House and Capitol, and brought Latrobe to Washington as the first Surveyor of the Public Buildings. Jefferson charged Latrobe not only with redesigning and building the Capitol but also with planning east and west extensions with rooftop promenades to connect Hoban's President's House with Hadfield's Treasury and War Department office buildings and with developing a layout for the President’s House grounds.

James Madison, who succeeded Jefferson to the presidency in 1809, intended to make the President's House the social center of Washington. For him and his wife, Dolly, Latrobe carried out an extensive program of interior design until Madison terminated his services in 1810.

In 1814, the British attacked Washington and burned the President's House and the Executive Office Buildings. Subsequently, Mary Elizabeth Latrobe wrote to Dolly Madison from Pittsburgh, where her husband was building steamboats, to ask that he be rehired. Back in Washington, Latrobe took the opportunity to propose a radical transformation of the President’s House plan by submitting a proposal that he had conceived in 1807. However, it received no support from Madison who rehired Hoban in 1815 to carry out the rebuilding. Hoban constructed porticoes more or less as proposed by Latrobe, but their exact authorship remains in dispute. He demolished the fire-damaged east and west endwalls down to the rusticated basement and the north wall to each side of the pedimented central bay. Along with restoring the shell he rebuilt the interiors.

Hoban was also hired to rebuild the Executive Office Buildings, reusing as much of the remaining construction as possible. Seen in a number of period views and photographs, they had multiple dormers and numerous tall chimneys and central pedimented porticoes. In their detailing they were decidedly more old-fashioned Georgian in style than Hadfield's progressive Neo-Classical designs.

During the first decade of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson substantially completed Monticello and undertook several other domestic commissions for himself and for friends. His 1802 study for Farmington offers an interesting comparison to Latrobe's asymmetrical house design of ca. 1796-99. Apparently Jefferson thought better of the complexity of the scheme and settled on the design as built with a full-width portico, transverse and elongated front octagon, rear orthogonal rooms with bed alcoves, and an elevation that has much in common with Monticello.

Jefferson reserved his most distinctive Villa Rotunda-like design for a scheme identified by some as a proposal for remodeling Shadwell (1803). It comes down to us in a plan and elevation drawn by Robert Mills while in residence at Monticello (Figure 20). The principle change from the Villa Rotunda parti was Jefferson's elimination of the transverse porticoes. By so doing, he was able to employ his own organization of preference: a longitudinal axis of linked major spaces with front and rear pedimented porches, a transverse axis for horizontal and vertical circulation, and semi-octagonal lateral projections, in this case terminating the principal cross axis. The elevation varies hardly at all from Jefferson's earlier proposal for the President's House, the primary difference being the removal of the skylights from the dome.

Jefferson used more octagons at Poplar Forest, his own retreat built in 1806 near a grove of poplar trees. Conceptually, he began, as at Monticello, with a cruciform organization, but with the garden room octagonal. In one sketch and one drafted plan, he proposed octagons both front and back. As built and now restored and rebuilt, Poplar Forest consists of a skylit square surrounded by four, elongated octagons. However, what may appear to be only an abstract geometric exercise in plan, becomes something quite different when experienced in three dimensions, with it central dining space or study buffered by light modulating anterooms. The result is a singular environment where Jefferson could throw open all the doors to unite the interior with carefully planted surroundings or close himself off inside the toplit cubic core.

During the same period, Jefferson made studies for a house to be built at his farm called Pantops and to be occupied by his daughter Martha and her husband John W. Epps. Here Jefferson created his purest octagonal scheme, employing an orthogonal geometry only in the central dining room. Ultimately he used the Pantops plan at Poplar Forest, where, as at Monticello and Edgemont, he made significant topographic changes, producing artificial mounds and a one-story entrance facade and two-story garden facade. This geometric organization included a 500-foot circle divided bi-axially into quadrants, all of the geometries reinforced by plantings.41 NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 19: Gardner-Pingree House, Salem, Massachusetts (1804-05) (Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA). 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) (Fazio). 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 symbolic exterior form was only appropriate in America for public buildings.

40 Kimball, Samuel McIntire, 49-54.

41 See C. Allan Brown, "Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest: The Mathematics of an Ideal Villa," Journal of Garden History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1990), 117-139.