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While not residential, Ramée's Börsenhalle in Hamburg, Germany (1803) illustrates many of the predilections he subsequently displayed in his house designs. Laid out on an irregularly shaped site, its ground-floor plan consisted of a nave-like columned hall leading to a court that provided access to surrounding secondary spaces. For the facade, Ramée perched a temple atop a triumphal arch, itself resting on a loggia. Within the great coffered vault of the triumphal arch, he inserted columns and an entablature serving as the base for a lavish program of sculpted figures. Most striking about the building's composition was its sharp-edged quality and contrasts of large with small elements and of mural wall surfaces with delicate ornamentation.

Ramée's house for David Parish in Parishville, begun in 1813, had a Palladio-like combination of temple front projecting from a larger gabled mass behind; it was entered through a portico of thin columns connected by shallow segmental arches. On the inside, the plan was a severe but articulate grid.

At Calverton (1815), Ramee was able to develop a complete landscape plan that included stables and ice and spring houses (Figure 33). Unfortunately, nothing is known about the house's plan except for its perimeter outline. Its bulky massing was certainly not elegant, with an attic that appeared to telescope out of the two-story section below (Figure 34). The Hôtel-Guimard- and Börsenhalle-like entry portico was almost frail. Latrobe proposed a Hôtel-Guimard-like parti, of course, for Pavilion IX at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia. In his published lithographic view of Calverton, Ramée emphasized the dark cavity of the portico and the tall cupola atop the roof, which causes the building's profile to become pyramidal, absent the sense of extrusion evident in extant photographs. Calverton burned in 1874.

In early 1816, David Parish returned to Europe and Ramée followed later in the same year, first working in Belgium before moving back to Paris in 1823. He then moved on to Hamburg, then back to Paris again, before finally settling in nearby Noyon, where he died in 1842. During this coda to his long years of practice, he recapitulated his work in three publications: Jardins irréguliers et maisons de campagne (1823), Recuiel de cottages et maisons de campagne (probably 1837) and Parcs et jardins (probably 1839). Jardins irreguliers and Parcs et jardins include many of his garden layouts for sites in both Europe and America. They reveal Ramée to have been a landscape architect of international standing and America's foremost practitioner of that art in the early-nineteenth century. While Recuiel de cottages et maisons de campagne includes domestic designs in both Europe and America, most of its buildings go unidentified, suggesting perhaps that they are idealized versions of Ramée's executed or even unexecuted works. It contains 25 designs that are separately described and illustrated, with perspective views of all 25 gathered together in a grid on a page that would seem to summarize Ramée's vision for domestic architecture. It includes both Classic and Gothic schemes, with several compositions comparable to Calverton, and reveals Ramée to have been imaginative and innovative, perhaps even slightly eccentric, and to have been a superb delineator.

Another late arrival on the American architectural scene, and one whom Latrobe never met, was William Jay. In 1817, at age 25, Jay emigrated from London to Savannah, Georgia. He had apprenticed to surveyor-architect David Riddall Roper (1774-1855), had exhibited work at the Royal Academy in London, and had built at least one building in the city, the Albion Chapel.56

With family connections in Savannah, Jay immediately established a flourishing practice among merchants made flush by burgeoning cotton profits and produced at least four Savannah residences. Because he arrived more than twenty years after Latrobe, the contemporary work of the two men would seem to offer an opportunity for a comparison of the evolution of architectural thinking during the intervening decades in America and Europe. Jay had benefitted from the full development of Regency Period architecture in England, while it had been necessary for Latrobe, who never returned to England, to evolve largely on his own, with only imported publications and arriving émigrés like Godefroy to keep him abreast of current trends.

Jay’s Ralph Richardson House (ca. 1817) has an old-fashioned five-bay front facade and is almost square, with a central hall and projecting semi-octagonal bays on the rear facade. The familiar double-pile arrangement of four rooms astride the hall is interrupted only by the addition of an apsidal extension to the dining room. Jay concentrated his architectural effects on the hall and its associated, elaborated entry sequence. The front porch is reached by means of two, symmetrically disposed, semi-circular runs of stairs. The porch roof is supported by four columns, so arranged that their architrave bends in a sinuous re-entrant curve. The volume of the porch presses into the hall in the form of a wide niche. Within the hall, a vestibule, defined by pilasters and a column screen, frames an imperial stair, not unlike Latrobe's original stairhall configuration at Ashdown House. This monumental stair conceals a servants' stair behind and at a right angle to it. Such a plan can be compared to the Regency Period work of men such as Sir John Soane whose full development Jay had witnessed. Soane employed compartmentalized central-hall plans, projecting curvilinear or polygonal bays, and multiple room shapes. He displaced walls to produce lateral as well as longitudinal room orientations and used poché in a manner derived from French dégagement. Jay's motifs are similar if assembled with less dexterity. His plans include less poché and are more extroverted, presumably in response to the hot, Georgia climate. In the Richardson House, Jay employed transverse axes only in his rear hall, which connects, through a screen of columns, to the rear parlors and a side porch. He made columns prominent elements throughout, anticipating the cultish proliferation of the orders during the later Greek Revival Period in the Deep South.

Jay's design for the three-bay Alexander Telfair House (ca. 1820), destructively remodeled in the 1880s, is similar in internal conception to the Richardson House, consisting of a central hall with rooms to each side, in this case terminated by semi-circular bays rather than telescoping semi-octagons. To one side, Jay placed an octagonal library. The vacuous character of the apsidal rooms surely does not reflect his original intentions, as they must have once included subdivisions such as column screens producing a sequence of smaller, related spaces.

Jay's Archibald Bullock House (1818) was demolished in 1916. The plan as reconstructed begins with a porch formed by an embedded, trabeated, circular temple.57 This porch leads into a central hall, intersected by a transverse enfilade that includes the servants' stair. In this hall, Jay placed an overwhelming circular stair supported by six Corinthian columns. Beyond the hall, another embedded temple, this one orthogonal, completed the sequence. Jay repeated his circular geometry in a rear parlor.

Jay employed a similar configuration at the William Scarborough House (1818-19) (Figure 35). It has been modified by the removal of a rear dining room and piazzas, but the plan can be reconstructed. Including the rear piazzas, Jay originally created a square parti, with a narrower extension to the rear enclosing the dining room. For the entry he used a projecting porch with massive Doric columns placed in antis between square corner piers and leading into a wide, skylit hall with a second-floor balcony supported by four, Doric columns. To either side of this hall he 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 servants' stairs. Beyond this enfilade he located a ballroom straddled symmetrically by the piazzas and, finally, the attenuated dining hall. NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 33: Calverton, nr. Baltimore, MD (1815), Ramee's site plan (Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectedy, NY). Like Latrobe, Joseph Ramee attempted to succeed in America as an architectural emigré. His sojourn lasted only from 1812 to 1815, however, and produced little constructed work. Ramee took much interest in landscape planning, as this beautifully rendered site plan document. Produced for publication after his return to Europe, it and many others of comparable quality, establish Ramee 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. back

FIGURE 34: Calverton, Exterior photograph (The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD). Seen in isolation, Ramee'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 sites near Baltimore, however, it must have been a source of curiousity, even wonder, until it burned in 1874. back

FIGURE 35: William Scarborough House, Savannah, Georgia (1818-19), First-floor plan (Fazio). 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 (not shown). Finally, he terminated the composition with a long, narrow dining room (also not shown). 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. back

56 Jay's work was first studied comprehensively in James Vernon McDonough, "William Jay: Regency Architect in Georgia and South Carolina," Ph.D. Diss.: Princeton University, 1950, and more recent but less successful is Hanna Lerski, William Jay, Itinerant English Architect, 1792-1837, Landam, MD.: University Press of America, 1983. Jay's work is also well represented in photographs and plans (with some of them incorrectly drawn) in Mills Lane, Architecture of the Old South: South Carolina, Savannah, GA.: Beehive Press, 1982. back

57 See McDonough, "William Jay," 52-54. back