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Given the success of the church's design, and the clumsiness of Godefroy's planning ten years earlier, it is appropriate to reflect now on the hypothesis that this improvement can be attributed to Latrobe. Godefroy's plan is simple, elegant, and precise. Its primary ordering device is a nine-part, irregular grid within which the front corner blocks become stairs. (Figure 31) Of the remaining seven blocks, the central one contains the dome on pendentives; the lateral blocks--arms of a Greek cross--contain pews; the front block or arm becomes the second vestibule containing 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. Godefroy's use of interlocking volumes corresponds to Latrobe's planar inferences at buildings such as the Bank of Pennsylvania, and his carefully delineated corner masses are a device that Latrobe used repeatedly on both domestic and public buildings. It is the synthesis of a variety of forms and ideas that makes the building so successful. Godefroy could not have learned such a process of synthesis from books, and he could have learned only about its ramifications from construction supervision. Who or what in America, other than Latrobe, could have been a source for his development of a unifying design process?

Evidence of Godefroy's need for interaction with and guidance from Latrobe can also be derived from an analysis of his work subsequent to his traveling to England in 1819 and returning to France in 1827. Among these projects, the most well documented in their original form are his buildings at the Place de la Prefecture in Laval (1831-34) and his proposal for the enlargement of the mairie or town hall in Chateau-Gontier (1830). For the Place de la Prefecture (Figure 32), he designed a set of gateway buildings which, even though they contain jarring contrasts of scale, seem unified when seen in elevation. However, an oblique view reveals that Godefroy had regressed, creating problems similar to those found at St. Mary's Chapel 25 years earlier, that is, forms thatwere incoherent when considered as three-dimensional compositions. Likewise, his modest addition to the mairie contains by-now-familiar elements: corner pylons and an entry niche, but assembled in a clumsy plan. There is certainly nothing new here; Godefroy's creative development had apparently stopped.

Born in 1764 (the same year as Benjamin Henry Latrobe) in Gvet in the Ardennes region of France, Joseph Ramée was a man constantly on the move. Architect, planner, interior designer, landscape architect, and military engineer, he came to America in 1812 where his professional activity eventually intersected that of Latrobe. In 1812, Latrobe was working in Washinton, D.C., then from late 1813 to the summer of 1815 in Pittsburgh; when he returned to Washington in the summer of 1815, Ramée had set up a practice in Baltimore.

While Ramée's American work is the primary concern here, it is necessary first to outline his tumultuous European experiences. His pedigree was sterling. In 1780 he came to Paris as a precocious 16-year-old, where he studied with François Joseph Belanger, architect to Louis XIV's brother, the Comte d'Artois, and with Jacques Cellerier, a hôtel designer trained by J. F. Blondel and J. D. LeRoy. In this setting, he developed a light, almost insubstantial, abstracted form of Neo-Classicism with an emphasis on contrasts of size, shape, and texture. In addition, he became particularly adept at landscape planning, and his detailed site layouts, with buildings shown in plan and myriad trees shown in axonometric projection, are a tour de force among landscape designs of the period.

In Paris, he constructed hôtels that displayed the artfulness of French designers in compressing a variety of functions and room shapes into a simple volume and worked with Cellerier on an environment celebrating the French Revolution. However, his prior associations with the French royalty led to his flight from France in 1793, with periods of employment following in Belgium and in Saxony, where the Weimar context of Goethe gave him an opportunity to study the Romantic English-garden phenomenon transplanted to Germany. Subsequent to the bankruptcy of his Hamburg-based interior-design firm of Masson and Ramée, he returned to Paris in 1810, and in 1812, at age 48, immigrated to America.

Ramée's patron was David Parish, a man of Scottish descent who had made a fortune in America converting Napoleonic bullion from Mexico into commodities, which he then shipped from American ports.51 Having become one of the richest men in America, Parish invested in huge tracts of land in Upstate New York, which he had grand plans to exploit through the creation of towns and industry. With this vision in mind, Parish called Ramée to be his personal architect.

While Ramée spent much of his time in Philadelphia, exhibiting his work there in 1814 at the Fourth Annual Exhibit of the Pennsylvania Academy and the Columbian Society of Artists in Philadelphia, his designs for Parish were intended for sites in the hinterland, including the new towns of Parishville and Rosie. In Parishville, they included Parish's own house, a tavern, and a barn and in Rosie possibly even a grist mill and an iron furnace. Through Parish, Ramée met Eliphalet Nott, President of Union College in Schenectady, New York, and in 1813 Nott selected him to complete the site plan for his institution, a commission that has long been the most well known among Ramée's works and one often compared to Thomas Jefferson's celebrated plan for the University of Virginia.52 With Parish's continuing support, Ramée sought commissions in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in 1813-15. In 1815, Parish even recommended Ramée to John Peter Van Ness, then a Commissioner of the Public Buildings, as Surveyor of the Capitol, the position Benjamin Henry Latrobe had held from 1803 to 1811 and to which he was reappointed in 1815.53 Parish also supported Ramée in his unsuccessful bid to design the Baltimore Exchange, a hotly contested commission that was eventually carried out by Latrobe.54 Ramée's Baltimore experience also included the design of a country house for merchant Dennis Smith, which was called Calverton and which is discussed below. Latrobe designed a house for Smith in 1817 and had recommended George Bridport as a decorative painter at Calverton in 1816.55

There is a consistency about Ramée's buildings, from his early European work, to his American commissions, to his career-summarizing publications. His unidentified country-house design of 1796 confirms that he was more concerned with exterior character than with interior room distribution. Without the nuance of hôtel planning, its core is based upon a grid creating orthogonal rooms, while its lateral semi-circular projections are awkwardly packed with a variety of room shapes and functions. Ramée's rendered transverse section, however, shows him to have been at least Latrobe's equal in depicting interior finishes and furnishings, and his front elevation is comparable to Belanger's own house in Paris. NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 31: Unitarian Church, Baltimore (1817-18), Plan (Fazio). 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, the church's interiors have been much modified. back

FIGURE 32: Place de la Prefecture, Laval, France (1831-34), Exterior photograph (From Robert L. Alexander, The Architecture of Maximillian Godefroy, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 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. Maåry’s Chapel, with its billboard-like facade. One has to wonder if his separation from Benjamin 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? back

51 Among Parish's associates in the bullion trade was Vincent Nolte for whom Latrobe designed a house in New Orleans. Parish also lived for a time in Philadelphia in the Captain John Meany House designed by Latrobe in 1807. back

52 Ramée's career is now much better understood as a result of the publication of Paul V.Turner's Joseph Ramée: International Architect of the Revolutionary Era , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. This book formed the basis for the present discussion of Ramée's work. back

53 Correspondence, Vol. 3, 634-35, n. 2. back

54 BHL to Godefroy, 19 July 1815 (C3) and BHL to Robert Goodloe Harper, 7 December 1815 (C3). back

55 BHL to Henry S. B. Latrobe, 4 June 1817 (C3) and Correspondence, Vol. 3, 892, n. 10 and 837, n. 4. back