<<PREVIOUS PAGE
The idea of garden-front niches (meaning no large windows and, therefore, little or no light) was a radical one in America, apparently too radical for the Peters, as was an attic story or even a raised first floor. These adventurous sketches for unbuilt Tudor Place projects apparently document the end of Thornton's architectural-thinking evolution.

Maximilian Godefroy designed and built St. Mary's Chapel in Baltimore in 1806-08 and his Unitarian Church in Baltimore in 1817-18.45 Comparing these two, it is difficult to imagine anyone's work maturing more in a decade. Godefroy immigrated to America as an exile from the Napoleonic regime. While his drawings confirm that he had received instruction as an artist, he had no such formal training as an architect. Based upon his didactic reading of the publications from such luminaries as J. F. Blondel and J.-N-L. Durand, he established a decidedly French bias toward design that he was able to put to use in Francophile, Roman Catholic Baltimore. He returned to France in 1827 where he continued to practice, but his most significant architectural accomplishments by then lay behind him in America. One could speculate, based upon this trajectory, that contact and collaboration with Latrobe was essential to the success of his design process and to his personal development.

Arriving in America in 1805, Godefroy established contact with Latrobe by August, 1806. The two men enjoyed a mutually beneficial friendship and professional relationship for a decade, until their collaboration on the Baltimore Exchange led to an estrangement.46 Their correspondence flashes with intellectual energy, wit, and erudition and provides vivid insights into the difficulties both men faced in establishing the architectural profession in America.47

That Godefroy conceived St. Mary's Chapel as a painterly tableau is apparent from a comparison of his elevation (Figure 26), more of a romantic landscape painting than an architectural rendering, with his plan (Figure 27) and an oblique view (Figure 28) of the constructed building where the maladroit screen-like quality of the front facade becomes obvious. The quadrant arch, which acts as a buttress for the facade and was an afterthought, also illustrates Godefroy's early innocence of structural realities. This facade and the wings behind it present a series of parallel, receding planes, made picturesque in the rendered elevation by their irregular profiles and Godefroy's artificial manipulation of light. However, in this view not only lighting is fictive, as foreshortening and overlap would have radically distorted and obscured portions of the planes in depth for the ground-level viewer.

On one hand, the plan is clever, bringing together the facade screen with a conventional nave, chancel, side aisles, and two, flanking chapels (never built). On the other, the artificiality of the facade created planning problems, as it contained a thin layer of habitable space that was too shallow to provide a proper vestibule. Godefroy attempted to solve the problem by inserting supports for a second-floor balcony within the nave such that they defined a spatial transition, but succeeded only in creating an awkward collision of structural necessities.

In 1810, Godefroy produced an unexecuted design for a Washington Monument in Baltimore. Its purpose made it an appropriate opportunity for his frontal, painterly approach to composition, here an attenuated triumphal arch with associated triumphal columns. However, his Commercial and Farmers Bank in Baltimore of 1812-13 illustrates that he had still not mastered three-dimensional composition. Located on a corner site, it made use of a Hôtel Guimard-like monumental niche, which Godefroy placed inside a triumphal-arch motif to form his entry. However, this carefully conceived ensemble had little relationship to the flanking facades.

In ca. 1812 Godefroy developed an unbuilt design for a Baltimore Masonic Hall. A tentative fusion of the Gothic and Classic, it represented his first use of a pylon gateway motif. Entered through a loggia with Doric columns, it is more like Karl Friedrich Schinkel's later Bauakademie (1832) than anything French or English.

Between 1813-15, Godefroy designed a carriage entrance and several sepulchral monuments for the yard of Baltimore's First Presbyterian Church (Figure 29). Using an almost hallucinogenic array of Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Italian Renaissance, and contemporary French forms, he created a set of architectural incidents like none other in America at the time. These compositions make explicit two of his distinctly French tendencies: a sympathy for symbolic forms and a desire and ability to create monumentality.

In 1816 Godefroy designed a battle monument to commemorate Baltimore's citizens lost in the War of 1812 (Figure 30). Less fantastic than the tombs, it still possesses so radical a severity that it shocked nineteenth-century sensibilities.48 Godefroy returned to the pylon motif, transforming it into a rusticated base on which he placed a giant 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.49 Clearly he conceived the monument as a sculptural object, with the only sense of spatial enclosure to be supplied by four, upturned cannon barrels that were to surround it. Even though executed with some changes, the result is striking: a highly textured, monumental, allegorical performance that perfectly characterized Godefroy's capabilities, sensibilities, and limitations at the time. The monument is noble, disciplined, and, though slightly exotic, comfortable in its provincial American circumstance.

In 1816-17 Godefroy was called upon by Richmond bank presidents John Wickham and John Brockenbrough to design a unifying facade for their adjacent buildings. Godefroy chose as his screening device a Florentine Early Renaissance arcade of semi-circular arches supported by Tuscan columns, a motif thathe would employ again on his most successful American design, his Unitarian Church of 1817-18 in Baltimore.

The church is cube-like with dominant pylon-like corners. Its mass, transfixed by a single, arcaded, pedimented portico, is comparable, in its subtle changes of plane, to Latrobe's Baltimore Cathedral, located a block to the north, and in its floating of a dome over a Greek cross, to Latrobe's St. John's Church in Washington, D.C. Other obvious comparisons also come to mind: Schinkel's Neue Wache in Berlin (1816-18) (but with Godefroy's addition of the Florentine arcade) for the facade composition but hardly for the spirit, the "Great Room" of James Wyatt's Pantheon for the interior, and Soane's Bank of England spaces with nine-part-grid plans beneath domes on pendentives supported by faceted piers for the parti. While it seems unlikely that any of these structures served as explicit models, it does seem significant that non-French examples come so close to Godefroy's result. Indeed, he appears to have drawn from a strikingly broad spectrum of sources: the Roman Pantheon, Ledoux's centralized-pavilion barriéres, and images in Percier and Fontaine's Palais, maisons, et autres édifices modernes, dessinés à Rome, including the Vatican and the Farnese Palace.50 NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 26: St. Mary's Chapel, Baltimore (1806-08), View of the front facade (The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD). Maximillian Godefroy executed no residential commissions in America. He conceived this facade as a painterly tableau, as this drawing, more a romantic landscape painting than an architectural rendering, shows; the screen-like quality of the facade becomes obvious in the photograph (Fig. 28)taken at an oblique angle. As presented in full frontal view, the composition is an adroit one, as is the plan (Fig. 27), 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 considered him to a be a colleague and 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. back

FIGURE 27: St. Mary's Chapel, Plan (Fazio). This kind of wide facade with potential corner towers has a long tradition going back to Bernini's ill-fated towers for St. Peter's in Rome. Godefroy's handling of the nave is ambitious, as he sought to combine the lateral slot of space withing the facade with longitudinal files of columns that create the conventional nave and side aisles and support the rear balcony. The result, however, seems crowded: too many ideas for so small a space.back

FIGURE 28: St. Mary's Chapel, Exterior photograph of the front and right-side facades (Fazio). The facade amounts to a cowboy-storefront like those used throughout the nineteenth century on longitudinal-gable-roofed commercial buildings. It is difficult to say what the purpose of the quadrant-arches was to be, as the facade is rigid along its transverse axis, but is more susceptible to damage from wind loading along its longitudinal axis.back

FIGURE 29: First Presbyterian Churchyard, Baltimore (1813-15), Photograph of carriage entrance (Fazio). 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 much admired. While Latrobe never incorporated such eccentricities into his domestic commissions, he did use comparable forms, including a pyramid, for his proposed monument to those who died in the Richmond (Virginia) Theater fire. back

FIGURE 30: Battle Monument, Baltimore (1816), Photograph (Fazio). Monumentation offered Godefroy an opportunity to exploit his ability as a French-trained architect to express 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 Benjamin Latrobe, could have reached. back

45 Godefroy has been well studied in Robert Alexander, The Architecture of Maximilian Godefroy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. In addition to the sources cited there, see Mark Reinberger, "The Baltimore Exchange and its place in the career of Benjamin Henry Latrobe," Ph.D. Diss., Cornell University, 1988. back

46 See for instance BHL to Godefroy, 18 August 1806 (C2). For the exchange, see Reinberger, "Exchange." back

47 See for instance BHL to Godefroy, 10 October 1814. back

48 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 110-11. back

49 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 103-04. back

50 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 141-42. back