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Jay designed four, equally imaginative and varied entry facades for these four houses. The Richardson House has not been changed significantly. Here Jay composed a horizontally proportioned, hip-roofed, old-fashioned five-bay block with a heavy belt course, much lighter roof cornice, and parapet wall with recessed panels capped by a central pediment. He defined the building's corners by means of pilasters and divided the floor levels with a projecting, denticulated belt course.

The original, up-to-date, three-bay configuration of the Telfair House (ca.1815-20) (Figure 36) consisted of two floors divided by a deeply moulded, denticulated belt course. Jay used unusually stout Corinthian columns to support a deep entablature matching the belt course. Above the porch he placed a large thermal window. Only at the Bullock House did Jay include a central pediment, this one perched uneasily atop the cornice. Presumably it was intended to relate harmoniously to the porch roof below. Finally, for the three-bay Scarborough House elevation, he employed a massive Doric Order with full entablature for the porch and a thermal window above and a slightly projecting central bay.

Latrobe had contact with many of the designers of the next generation in America, those who embraced the full-blown Greek Revival Style. One among them was Alexander Parris, born in 1780, who produced at least four domestic designs between 1806 and 1820: the Commodore Edward Preble House (1806) in Portland, Maine; the Governor's Residence (1811-12) in Richmond; the John Wickham House (1811-12) in Richmond; and the David Sears House (1816) in Boston. During the design of the Wickham House he was influenced directly by Latrobe.

Parris began as a carpenter's apprentice in Hebron, Maine, then worked as a builder-architect in Portland, Maine, served as an engineer in the War of 1812, and finally settled in Boston where he became a construction supervisor for Bulfinch and where he developed a distinctive Neo-Classical idiom, often building in granite, as at the Quincy Markets.58 In 1836 he participated in the organization of the American Institute of Architects. The first formal professional organization for building designers in the United States, the AIA represented those professional aspirations brought to America by Latrobe more than 40 years earlier.

Parris began designing in the style of Robert Adam popularized in New England by Charles Bulfinch. In 1806 he built the W. P. Preble House in Portland, Maine on an unimpressive plan that exhibits an almost complete lack of hierarchy among the rooms and seems unconsciousness of orientation.

In 1811 he traveled to Richmond, Virginia to supervise the construction of a house for John Bell. While there, bank executive John Wickham commissioned him to design his house.59 Parris's first plan (Figure 37) included an exterior stair and five-bay facade like the Preble House but a much greater consciousness of sequence, spatial modulation, and monumentality. Significant features of the initial design were to be family and servants' stairs without landings (typical of Bulfinch designs), a bow window, and a central, colonnaded rotunda, reminiscent of the work of Adam or Soane. Wickham sent Parris's plan to Latrobe for an evaluation, and Parris eventually produced a scheme that incorporated some of Latrobe's suggestions.(Figure 38). NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 36: Telfair House, Savannah (ca. 1815-20), Front elevation (Fazio). This facade composition illustrates Jay’s mastery at an early age of Regency Period elegance. Unlike Latrobe’s work in its use of a multiply molded and denticulated belt course, an external, laterally-approached stairway, and a thermal window, it is still a composition of which he would likely have approved. Most obviously progressive is the three-bay facade and accompanying large areas of mural wall surface completely unlike anything seen in Savannah up until its time. While this composition is the one favored by Latrobe, the portico leads to a central hall of which he would never have approved. Unfortunately, Jay’s work had virtually no influence on the course of American architecture. back

FIGURE 37: John Wickham House, Richmond, Virginia (1811), First floor plan of the initial project (Fazio). Alexander Parris began his career designing in the Adamesque Style popularized in New England by Charles Bulfinch. His initial design of a house for John Wickham included a central, colonnaded rotunda not unlike the work of Robert Adam or John Soane and quadrant-arc exterior stairs. Lacking confidence in Parris’s design, Wickham sent the plan to Benjamin Latrobe for an evaluation. Never timid about showering a colleague’s work with criticism, Latrobe challenged the hierarchy of ornamentation, the stairs without landings, the lack of sun control, and the chimney locations. Parris responded by eliminating the exterior stair and rotunda, relocating the interior stair, modifying the fenestration and door openings, and additing a south-side porch.back

FIGURE 38: John Wickham House, Richmond, Virginia (1811), First floor plan of the final project (Fazio). Ultimately, Parris settled on a design integrating some of Latrobe’s ideas with many of his own. It displays Latrobe's rational-house distribution, with three adjacent principal rooms (but on the north side) and secondary rooms on the opposite side of the plan.back

58 Parris has not received monographic treatment, but his work has been considered as part of the Boston architectural scene in Walter H. Kilham, Jr., Boston After Bulfinch: An Account of Its Architecture, 1800-1900, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1946 and John M. Bryan, "Boston's Granite Architecture, c. 1810-1860," Ph.D. Diss.: Boston University, 1972 and in general surveys from Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and the Early Republic (1922) to Pierson, American Buildings, Vol. I. back

59 See Edward T. Zimmer and Pamela J. Scott, "Alexander Parris, B. Henry Latrobe, and the John Wickham House in Richmond, Virginia," JSAH, Vol. 41, No. 3, (October, 1982), 202-211. back