LATROBE'S COLLEAGUES IN THE FEDERAL PERIOD
by Michael Fazio & Patrick Snadon

The Period 1784-1799
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In 1784, Benjamin Latrobe returned to London and soon began his architectural and engineering training and subsequent practice which lasted until his emigration in 1795-96. During this period in America, the defining architectural events were the planning of Washington, D. C. by Pierre Charles L'Enfant in 1789-91 and the design competitions for the President's House and Capitol in 1792 and their subsequent erratic phases of design development and construction. These projects attracted an international cast of design professionals with varying degrees of talent, including James Hoban from Ireland, George Hadfield from England, and Stephen Hallet from France.

When Latrobe disembarked from the ship Eliza in 1796 and took his first look at American architecture in Norfolk, Virginia he had little knowledge of the status of the design arts in his new country, some 5000 miles from London in physical distance and even farther removed in maturity of architectural taste and respect for professional abilities. He would soon discover that his adopted land was dominated by gentlemen amateurs, such as Thomas Jefferson and William Thornton, and carpenter builders, such as Samuel McIntire, and he would find both groups unacceptable if not reprehensible.1

Latrobe's denigration not withstanding, no American was more capable of making craftsmanship into art than Samuel McIntire, builder and woodcarver of Salem, Massachusetts.2 With better than a decade of design and construction behind him and with an ability to make architectural drawings of a much higher quality than his peers, McIntire was at work in 1795 on his fourth house for the Salem merchant Elias Derby, tolerantly adapting designs already provided by Charles Bulfinch.

His earlier Jerathmeel Peirce House in Salem (Figure 1) of 1782, with its details drawn from Batty Langley's Builder's Treasury first published in 1740, is a memorial to structures built in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War such as the Vassall-Longfellow House (1759) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its highly textured clapboard walls with stout, front-corner pilasters, dramatically moulded window lintels, and sculpted frontispiece demonstrate that McIntire had acquired a keen, if heavy, sense of proportion and an appreciation for classical correctness of Renaissance derivation attributable both to his knowledge of architectural publications and his own measured experimentation.

Influenced as early as 1793 by the work of Robert Adam as interpreted by Charles Bulfinch, McIntire designed the Lyman House in Waltham, Massachusetts to include an elegant Bramantesque palazzo facade translated into wood. On the interior, he followed Bulfinch in his use of cove ceilings and an oval garden room inserted into an otherwise orthogonal composition. This configuration may well have been inspired specifically by Bulfinch's Barrel House (1792), which McIntire had visited and sketched.3 However, even in the 1790s, when not pressed by clients for novelty, McIntire produced straightforward, double-pile-plan houses such as the Nathan Reed House (1796) in Danversport, Massachusetts.

In his lifetime, Bostonian Charles Bulfinch influenced not only McIntire but the architecture of an entire region.4 He would probably never have done so had his bankruptcy in 1795 not forced him to abandon his dilettante status for that of a full-time professional. Bulfinch developed a largely urban, ultimately laconic domestic style by first drawing upon both European and Colonial American sources, then upon a modicum of original thought regulated by his natural reticence and accommodating manner.

Latrobe's contact with Bulfinch came late, in 1818, when Bulfinch replaced him as surveyor of the public buildings in charge of the Capitol's construction. There is no evidence that Latrobe knew Bulfinch's work in Boston. Not surprisingly he was unimpressed with Bulfinch's proposals for the Capitol, saying that his new elevation was "detestable" and questioning his knowledge of structural engineering.5

In 1785, as a 22-year-old, fourth-generation Bostonian, Bulfinch had set out for Europe on the Grand Tour, an experience that included time spent in London, Paris--where he met with Thomas Jefferson, and Italy. Returning to Boston in 1787 and finding himself with an independent income, he provided enough free architectural advice to establish a local reputation as a talented amateur and eventually enough professional advice to create the first cityscape in America distinctively fashioned by a single architectural mind.

For his public buildings he preferred Anglo-Palladian models, exhibiting a particular fondness for the work of William Chambers. In his design of houses he drew upon Robert Adam and upon John Soane, whose books he owned, acquiring, in the process, an indirect knowledge of French planning. Three of his early houses, those for John Joy (1791), Joseph Coolidge Sr. (1791-92), and Joseph Barrell (1792-93), provide evidence of his approach to domestic design in the years leading up to Latrobe's arrival.

For the Joy House Bulfinch, like McIntire, first turned to colonial American buildings for inspiration. The facade, with its giant order, central portico, hipped roof, and rooftop balustrade, was obviously derived from New England Georgian structures such as the aforementioned Vassall-Longfellow House. The rooms are largely undifferentiated. The support spaces appear as afterthoughts, neither unified nor hierarchically arranged. Room elevations are often asymmetrical. The stair configuration is the most interesting feature. Into a traditional center-hall plan Bulfinch inserted not one, but two, stairs with landings back-to-back, that for servants as grand as that for family use.6 The device is not without spatial and structural inventiveness, but it is inefficient and awkwardly scaled and exemplifies a design dilemma that would plague Bulfinch throughout his career: his discomfort with monumentality.

At his Joseph Coolidge House in Boston, Bulfinch applied his experience on the international scene, producing a decidedly English facade composition based on work Robert Adam had produced 20 years earlier, such as his Royal Society of Arts Building (1772-74) in London. Behind this facade Bulfinch distributed a variant of the double-pile plan with lateral service stair and axial stair for family use widened to produce a so-called "imperial" stair, a device popular in England in the second half of the 18th century.7

Bulfinch offered an even more cosmopolitan interpretation of domestic planning in his Joseph Barrell House in Somerville, Massachusetts (Figures 2-3). Within a cross-axial scheme, he developed a sequential entry sequence that must have appeared as a revelation to the local owners of ubiquitous double-pile-plan houses. His spatial arrangement can be compared to that of the Parisian Hôtel de Salm (1784), which Jefferson so admired, but has more kinship to the English interpretation of French planning by architects such as Sir John Soane, as at his Letton, Tendring and Burn halls. The portico and front-entry stairs lead into a wide, shallow vestibule with its transverse axis defined by enfilade openings in anterooms connecting to a front parlor on the left and kitchen on the right. Beyond the vestibule rises a double stair certainly inspired by stairs used as nave thresholds in New England churches, including Bulfinch's celebrated Lancaster Meeting House (1816-17). In the Barrell House, circulation leads either under the stair, on axis into the oval garden room, or laterally to the servant stair and passage on the right and passage on the left, or up the principal stair to either side and between bedrooms to a roof terrace above the garden room. This spatial experience is rich if uncomfortably compressed. Furthermore, while the gangling column-supported stair assembly sits claustrophobically amidst surrounding partitions, the tripartite core of which it is a part is cleverly subdivided by double partitions between which Bulfinch inserted the winders of the stairs, closets, the anterooms, and diagonal access to the rear rooms.

By 1795 Bulfinch was also at work on the Boston State House. Here he turned for his inspiration to the exterior form, but not the plan, of William Chambers's Somerset House in London, amplifying its colonnaded central section and inflating its diminutive dome. The plan confirms that organizing a public building at this scale was well beyond Bulfinch's capabilities; it lacks not only monumentality, but also formal spatial sequence and any sense of hierarchy. Without a concise planning model to rely upon, Bulfinch was unable to make a convincing statement about the desirable qualities of the major interior spaces of a public building. Only at a domestic scale, beginning with clear models and slowly evolving modest, practical forms, could he adequately address the radical planning solutions demanded by the distinctive programmatic requirements of rapidly evolving Federal Period America.

Bulfinch designed three houses during the period 1795-96, the first of three that he built for Harrison Gray Otis (1795-96), that for Perez Morton (1796), and a dwelling for James Swan (ca. 1796). Otis required a setting in which he could properly entertain. Bulfinch developed a central-hall configuration with the first floor given over completely to a hall, kitchen ell, china storage, dining, and a single parlor, and an adjacent office so related to the parlor that Otis must have often retreated there with guests who had matters of business as well as pleasure on their minds. Under instructions from his client, Bulfinch recreated the planar facade design of the William Bingham residence in Philadelphia.8 Its taut, almost fragile-appearing front wall provided an appropriate architectural billboard for announcing financial success.

Bulfinch designed the Perez Morton House on a tee-hall plan, made distinctive by the complex treatment of its garden facade. Its sedate, if oversized, entry hall led to octagonal garden rooms, the one on the second floor encased within a semi-octagonal porch. Bulfinch never pursued such an overtly plastic composition in any of his later commissions.

Bulfinch's friend, James Swan, gave him an opportunity to explore other adventurous territory: interpreting the French hôtel, or its English manifestation in the hands of such designers as John Soane, in the context of Dorchester, Massachusetts (Figures 4-6). Bulfinch had no French books in his library, but when he spent time in France in the late 1780s, Thomas Jefferson, no doubt, took the opportunity to educate his countryman in matters of architectural taste. The French had employed circular garden rooms for 20 years. The architect Guslain Joseph Henry designed the Hôtel Lakanal (Figure 7) in 1795 with such a space surrounded by a variety of other elegant room shapes and provided it with a dense circulation and service core. Bulfinch's design succeeds on the basis of efficiency but fails in terms of grace; he infelicitously embedded a two-story cylinder in an orthogonal plan strung out laterally along a transverse hall with equivalent entries at both ends. The section reveals a peculiar spatial sequence along the house's longitudinal axis with two, tall volumes astride the low-ceilinged corridor, which had to serve as a common vestibule for both. It seems clear that Bulfinch so preferred the sedate to the dramatic that he was willing to conceal major interior features and was prepared to sacrifice spatial richness for efficiency and regularity.

While Bulfinch never developed this configuration further, his proposal for the Elias Hasket Derby House (1795-99) in Salem, Massachusetts (Figure 8) was modified by Samuel McIntire to take on a similar form. In Bulfinch's proposal, he allowed his principle stair to be approached tangentially and downplayed the longitudinal axis in favor of a central, wood-vaulted spatial cell around which the various spaces loosely revolved. This scheme suggests the elegant, sedate qualities that Bulfinch would so fruitfully pursue in his mature domestic commissions.

The Derbys, in possession of Bulfinch's plans for his Barrell and Thomas Russell houses, wished their residence to include prominent features from both. Fiske Kimball has thoroughly discussed the process by which McIntire succeeded in conflating the three designs.9 The most telling document is his first plan, obviously derived from Bulfinch's proposal, with all the principle elements still in their relative positions, but with all semblance of Bulfinch's order missing.10

While McIntire and Bulfinch were at work in New England, the center of American architectural activity developed farther south along the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland when George Washington chose Pierre L'Enfant to plan the national Capital. L'Enfant, the son of a court painter, had grown up at Versailles during the reign of Louis XVI. In 1771 he entered the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and, six years later, sailed for America where he became a soldier in Washington's army and attracted the future president's attention as an artist and designer. After carrying out a variety of design projects in the 1780s, such as a badge for the Order of Cincinnati and Federal Hall in New York City, he offered Washington his services as a city planner. When the President accepted, he set in motion a complex set of events that led to a published and executed plan but ended with L'Enfant's dismissal by 1792. Out of favor and bitter over his change of fortune, he faded from the architectural scene, producing only the Morris Mansion in Philadelphia (1794-96), perhaps the only design in America (Figure 9) that left Benjamin Latrobe literally at a loss for words.11

While it does not appear that Latrobe had any professional relationship with L'Enfant, he was well aware of the Frenchman's plight. "Daily thru the city," wrote Latrobe, "stalks the picture of famine L'Enfant and his dog. . . ." While recognizing L’Enfant’s authorship of Washington's city plan, Latrobe had no respect for his architectural abilities, saying that "it is not known whether he was ever educated to the profession" and concluding that he had "neither good taste nor the slightest practical knowledge. . . ."12

In 1792, inspired by Thomas Jefferson and supported by George Washington, the Federal Government announced design competitions for both the President's House and Capitol. A remarkably heterogeneous group of men submitted entries for the Capitol competition, but none satisfied Washington. Amidst this impasse, William Thornton, a young physician from the Caribbean island of Tortolla, asked for and received permission to make a submission past the announced deadline.13 His so-called Tortolla scheme, a sprawling English Palladian country house, found little favor. However, after being allowed to examine at least some of the rejected designs, Thornton began work on a second scheme, possibly influenced by Washington's preference for a now-lost proposal from L'Enfant (indicated schematically on the published plan of the Federal City) or by the expressed architectural predilections of Washington and Jefferson.14 In 1793 Thornton's second proposal was accepted and turned over to French émigré Etienne Sulpice Hallet, known as Stephen Hallet in America, who was charged with rendering it buildable. Misunderstandings over design leadership led to constant animosity between Hallet and Thornton until 1795 when George Hadfield was summoned from England to take control of Capitol construction.

James Hoban, an Irishman who had set up a practice in Charleston, South Carolina, was awarded the premium for the President's House and began its construction. There seems to have been little but ill will between Latrobe and Hoban. Jefferson chose Latrobe to replace Hoban as Surveyor of the Public Buildings in 1803, which included responsibilities at the President's House. Hoban served as Superintendent of the Capitol at the time when Latrobe's most trusted assistant, John Lenthall, was killed in the collapse of the vaults in the Supreme Court Chamber. Latrobe considered Hoban a hack, writing to Thomas Munroe, Superintendent of Washington, D. C., in 1812 that "I have an insuperable repugnance that Mr. Hoban should be let into the completion of any part of the work [on the Capitol] designed by me." 15 Hoban attacked Latrobe in the Washington Federalist, accusing him of neglect, misrepresentation, and even ignorance of construction methods, and concluding that his "vanity" could be "equalled [only] by his disregard of truth."

George Washington had met Hoban in Charleston in 1791 through Colonel Henry Laurens.16 Frustrated by L'Enfant's lack of both diplomacy and pragmatism, Washington sought to import a builder who could assure the timely construction of the President's House and provide the nascent country with a prominent symbol of permanence. His choice was propitious. Hoban's accomplishments suggest a complete understanding of the building process, if not imaginative architectural thinking.

This is not to say that Hoban did not have his share of challenges. L'Enfant had begun excavations on the site for an enormous presidential palace. Its form, if ever fully understood by L'Enfant himself, remains enigmatic. Washington, nervous that Hoban's design would not provide a sufficiently impressive Federal symbol, ordered its size increased by 20 per cent. Once at work on this inflated scheme, Hoban found himself constantly warding off efforts by Washington's city commissioners to modify it. Still more dramatic changes resulted from the difficulty in obtaining sufficient stone from the Acquia Creek quarry and this stone's porosity. Hoban had intended for the President's House to sit atop a high base, like Leinster House in Dublin on which it was modeled.17 In the process of changing from monolithic stone to brick with stone-veneer construction, he eliminated the base, placing the basement of the north elevation below grade but protected by a retaining wall and areaway, and compensated for the resulting loss of monumentality by adding a central pediment.18 Moreover, the Scottish masons, following their accustomed practices, applied a white sealant to the vulnerable sandstone by 1798, causing the President's House to become white by the time John Adams arrived to occupy it as the country's second president,19 although the official designation of "White House" did not come until 1902.

While virtually nothing remains and little is known about them, James Hoban produced numerous designs other than the President's House and busied himself with construction oversight, city government jobs, and elected offices in Washington. His Blodgett's Hotel of 1793-1800 is known through a post-Civil War woodcut and an 1818 watercolor drawing. Because Samuel Blodgett's speculation in Washington real estate led to his bankruptcy, his so-called hotel never served that purpose, becoming instead, under Latrobe's supervision, the city's post office and U. S. Patent Office. Atop its lonely site, the building was not unlike a number of London houses of the 1760s and 1770s, such as Robert Adam's Shelburne (later Lansdowne) House.

Two men could hardly have been more dissimilar in their approaches to architecture than James Hoban and Thomas Jefferson. While Jefferson had little knowledge of technical matters, he planned not only competently but even innovatively, and he commanded extraordinary powers of synthesis. Possessing a personal, social, and political vision which few, if any, could match in America, Jefferson produced solutions to American domestic design problems comparable to his assemblage of political theory in the Declaration of Independence. As a true product of eighteenth-century thinking, Jefferson was an empiricist and a man fascinated with the natural order of things. In creating the Declaration of Independence he fused the ideas that he had confronted in conversations, letters, printed essays, and the writings of men from Plato and Aristotle to John Locke. It was borrowing of sorts, but required the recognition of fundamental truths, amidst the flow of varied information, and their expression with clarity and lucidity. His process of architectural design was no different; his elements were diverse and eclectic, but he selected them through an intense scrutiny of their properties and a high regard for their provenance; he intended that his compositions be not only appropriate but valid and that they reflect those values and aspirations that he felt to lie in the hearts and minds of Federal Period Americans.20

Latrobe wrote to Jefferson as early as 1798, and he encountered Jefferson's architecture and planning in Richmond, Virginia. While Minister to France, Jefferson had enlisted the assistance of C.L.A. Clérisseau in his design of the Virginia State Capitol. Built in 1785-90, it would be the only public building to interest Latrobe during his early years in America. Now dwarfed amidst much larger structures, the Capitol once stood alone atop the slopes of Shockoe Hill, a dramatic harbinger of informed, unqualified Neo-Classicism in America. Jefferson eventually brought Latrobe to Washington where the two strong-willed men collaborated effectively. While Jefferson had little to teach Latrobe professionally, the force of his intellect must have challenged Latrobe's conceptual powers as an architectural visionary for the new republic.

In particular, Jefferson explored the idea of the domed residence through his studies for a Governor's House to be built in Richmond, Virginia (ca. 1783), his competition entry for the President's House (ca. 1792), the second Monticello (1789-1809), and his later schemes for the modification of Shadwell (1803) and Barboursville (1817). Only at the President's House and possibly the Governor's House did he intend the domed space to be two stories tall; in the others he employed the dome primarily as an exterior feature, revealing it on the interior only as a second-floor room.

Jefferson's Villa Rotunda-like scheme for the Governor's House is known only through a partial plan drawing. Its affinity with Palladio's published plan suggests strongly that Jefferson intended the rotunda space to be covered with a dome. While he did not develop the idea fully here, he returned to it for the President's House competition.

Jefferson entered the competition anonymously, signing his entry as "A. Z." With this scheme, he unequivocally posited the dome as an appropriate symbol for the public man in America. The modifications that he made to Palladio's Villa Rotunda prototype reveal some of his predilections. While Palladio included equivalent cross-axial entries, Jefferson proposed that the longitudinal axis should dominate; therefore, he enlarged an entry hall to become a stair hall, albeit with an awkward stair. In the bedchambers he used bed alcoves with which he had first become familiar at the Hôtel de Langeac, his Parisian residence, and which he included at Monticello and elsewhere. To support the flanks of his portico, he deployed re-entrant columns, as at Monticello, rather than a pierced wall in the manner of Palladio. For his front elevation he envisioned a dome not like Palladio's, but with alternating rib-like skylights inspired by those in the Halle au Blés in Paris, a building he so favored that he had Latrobe include similar skylights in the ill-fated dome of the House of Representatives in the Capitol.

For the first Monticello Jefferson began excavating his hilltop site in 1768. He briefly explored a square plan divided into a nine-part grid and a rectangular one that included a projecting portico on one long side and a central loggia on the other. Finally, he considered several cruciform schemes taken from James Gibbs's Book of Architecture and Robert Morris's Select Architecture and settled on a composite version in 1769 and began construction of a two-story Anglo-Palladian villa with a central portico having superimposed columns (Figures 10-11).21

The drawn plans were only a beginning, however, as Monticello served as Jefferson's architectural laboratory. By "putting up" and "pulling down", he was able to evaluate elements at full-scale. Its organization has been quite adequately analyzed in detail elsewhere,22 but, surprisingly, its place within Jefferson's oeuvre has not. The first Monticello has often been treated as a timid, Neo-Palladian, retardataire false start, hardly more interesting than innumerable Georgian plans found in Virginia in the eighteenth century, rectified only when Jefferson returned from Paris passionately devoted to current French planning. However, while the particulars of the first plan may not have been original, the overall conception was. In fact, this plan contains all of the germinal elements that matured in the finished design: dominant, linked central volumes, a subordinate cross-corridor adjacent to which Jefferson positioned his stairs, a variety of room sizes and shapes, including prominent half-octagons, and the treatment of the building skin as a faceted perimeter which could be glazed and oriented to gather and modulate light. With this scheme, Jefferson had obviously already left far behind both Morris and Gibbs.

Furthermore, in developing the site, Jefferson turned Palladian planning backward by suppressing his linkers behind the main block, an extraordinarily original act within the largely conservative realm of late-eighteenth-century American architectural thought. That is, instead of enclosing a forecourt at grade, Jefferson's linkers and dependencies create a platform oriented toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, comprised as they are of a crypto-portico housing service functions and made accessible from the sides by means of a clever manipulation of topography. America had seen nothing like it (Figure 12). 23

While the crypto-portico suggests a connection to ancient Roman complexes such as Hadrian's Villa, Jefferson had never visited this site or anything akin to it. Possibly he had been inspired by the existence of a basement in the Villa Rotunda, although he would not have known from the I Quattro Libri that it had been used for agricultural processing. Or he may have been influenced by the multiple levels employed in French hôtel grounds, such as those at the Hôtel Thelusson. However, it seems just as likely that his bi-level scheme reflects his own sensitivity to three-dimensional topographic organization as illustrated in his hand-drawn site plans with their accurate contour lines and his plan drawings, such as that at Edgemont, annotated with relative room elevations. Such a sensitivity befitted a man whose surveyor father would have acquainted him through example with the potential manipulation of the ground plane.

When Jefferson returned home from abroad in 1789, he exorcised the obvious vestiges of Neo-Palladianism from Monticello by removing what existed of the two-story, south portico and set out both to expand his plan to the south and to transform its appearance into that of a low-slung French hôtel. These hôtels were typically freestanding and had apparently simple partis. However, their symmetrical facade compositions masked complex, asymmetrical plans with spaces linked by enfilades and axes, sometimes denied. In the second half of the eighteenth century, French architects had built upon existing traditions of convenance and bienséance to produce an almost fanatically intricate system of domestic planning. Convenance, a broad-based term, included among its concerns the proper relationship of parts to one another and their functions. Bienséance dealt with propriety and decorum and demanded forms appropriate to purpose and social custom. In the late-eighteenth century, French designers dramatically increased their emphasis on la distribution, the proper disposition of spaces to maintain propriety and to achieve a higher degree of efficiency and convenience. La distribution was facilitated, in turn, by dégagement, the ingenious manipulation of wall poché to form a hierarchical system of residual support spaces.24 A by-product of dégagement was the creation of incongruent floor plates. Consequently, while this technique produced a variety of spaces that were carefully ranked by means of size, placement, orientation, and décor, it created structural problems, since upper-floor bearing walls did not always extend all the way to the ground.

Jefferson's radical alteration of Monticello after his return from Paris brought it up to date in terms of la distribution. His revised plan (Figure 13) includes a wide variety of room shapes, cleverly and artfully united by means of a tightly developed collection of service spaces acting as poché and yielding a disciplined separation of public and private domains. In a design accomplishment no less profound than his site-planning maneuvers, Jefferson, in effect, turned the typical French hôtel organization inside out. That is, instead of creating, through dégagement, a prominent but often denied central-axis organization with particularized spaces packed around a central core, he maintained an open, axial, longitudinal core, surrounded first by spaces of greater particularity and second by light-entrapping semi-octagons. 25

Monticello's innovations extended to the details. Its projecting-bay-within-portico with reentrant columns was not Palladian or even Neo-Palladian, although the English had long employed projecting bays as light-collecting chambers on domestic buildings. In various preliminary studies Jefferson included porticoes and separate projecting bays on both the main house and its dependencies. He merged the two in his 1772 plan of the entire complex, using the four-columned portico with reentrant columns on the west or garden front and only a single file of four columns on the east or entry front.

Like that at Monticello, Jefferson's site plan for Edgemont (1797) depends upon topographic manipulation. The house stands astride a raised platform, in this case of earth held back by retaining walls, a configuration which allows for the one-story front facade to become two stories in the rear and for underground passages to extend from the basement of the main block, under the lateral exterior stairs, and to terminate beneath the dependencies. The distinctive architectural features of the house are all traceable to Monticello experiments: dominant, longitudinal rooms, a transverse passage, multiple porticoes, and an octagonal, projecting bay placed on the east or garden front and encased within a portico supported laterally by reentrant columns.

Jefferson's architectural influence extended to his recruiting of George Hadfield, brother of Maria Cosway whom Jefferson so much admired. Among America's first professional architects, Hadfield was arguably the most highly trained and most talented designer in the country after Latrobe.26 While Latrobe had met Hadfield in England,27 their careers first intersected in America when both men submitted competition entries for the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. Latrobe appreciated Hadfield's talents and eventually employed him in his office.28 However, he initially concluded that Hadfield was "too young to possess experience, and educated more in the room of design, than in the practical execution of great works" and, therefore, was ill-prepared for the "rogues . . . employed in the construction of the public buildings, or for the charlatans in architecture who . . . designed them," a not inaccurate assessment of Latrobe's own situation in Washington.29 In a poignant act, Latrobe returned to Hadfield the Royal Society medal with which he had apparently parted as a result of financial difficulties. Latrobe wrote: "In losing the prospect of an independence arising from your professional talents, it would be too much were you also to part with the honors you have so deservedly obtained."30

Born in Italy to English parents, Hadfield returned to England in 1779 where he studied architecture at the Royal Academy then worked six years for James Wyatt until he won the first Royal Academy traveling fellowship, which sent him back to Italy in 1790. He produced a series of spectacular drawings while in Rome and exhibited his work in London, which Latrobe probably saw. However, when his career was stymied by a failure to be voted into the London Architect's Club, he took advantage of Maria Cosway's connections to Jefferson and accepted an invitation to superintend construction of the Capitol. After assuming this position in October, 1795, he resigned the following month, but, once reinstated, remained at work until June, 1798.

In 1796-97, while superintending work on the Capitol, Hadfield designed an executive office building for the Treasury Department on a site east of the President's House, then a similar structure west of the President's House to house the War Department in 1798-1800. Hadfield's original facade design for the Treasury Department remains today only in a drawing retained by Jefferson. Hadfield intended its central feature to be a portico, without pediment, with four Ionic columns inspired by those on the Erectheion--an order eventually seized upon by numerous American architects but one not erected in America until Latrobe built his Bank of Pennsylvania in 1798-1800. Both of Hadfield's office buildings were constructed under the supervision of James Hoban, but in a modified form.

Hadfield dated "1798" his unidentified house design (Figure 14), long incorrectly associated with Commodore David Porter (In 1798, Porter had just entered the Navy as a midshipman), a comrade of Stephen Decatur. The plan, notable for its almost complete lack of poché, is organized by a variable grid, with some grid lines dissolved into files of columns. It is remarkably similar to the typical Jeffersonian domestic formula, with linked public spaces arrayed along a central, longitudinal axis (but with a monumental stair, which Jefferson would never have sanctioned), a transverse corridor with a service stair, and projecting bays in the lateral endwalls. Externally, it can also be interpreted as a much more sophisticated version of Hoban's original design for the President's House, including, as it does, a central pedimented portico on the front facade and a full-width portico to the rear.

The front-facade composition includes a giant Ionic Order, comparable to those Hadfield proposed for his executive office buildings. Its concessions to domesticity are the elimination of a basement level, the proliferation of arched openings, and the addition of roundel panels and a recess-paneled door.

William Thornton, eventually became the nemesis of both Hadfield and of Latrobe.31 Latrobe became aware of Thornton while still in Virginia and anticipated making his acquaintance.32 However, once made responsible for Capitol construction, Latrobe found himself in conflict with Thornton, conflict that eventually escalated to public accusations and a libel suit won by Latrobe.33

Thornton earned his medical degree in Scotland and traveled in England and Europe, including time spent in Paris, before he appeared in Philadelphia by 1786. In 1789 he won the design competition for the Philadelphia Library Company's headquarters, which provided him with both experience and credibility. Though he claimed only seven weeks of study among the Library Company's architectural books, his extant artwork reveals an already adept hand.

Back on the island of Tortolla by 1790, he married Anna Marie Brodeau and attempted to settle down. However, realizing that plantation management hardly suited his restless nature, he seized the opportunity offered by the Capitol competition to relocate in the Federal City.

Thornton's reputation rests largely on three commissions: his designs for the national Capitol, the John Tayloe House in Washington D.C., now known as the Octagon, and Tudor Place in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. A ca. 1793 sketch, attributed by some to Thornton, for the west front of the Capitol (Figure 15) is quite French, particularly in its monumentality and prominent use of the orders; whether his or not, its composition of receding masses astride a domed, circular temple was one that he used repetitively.

Latrobe made designs for John Tayloe's house in ca. 1798, but they were not accepted. Thornton worked on designs for Tayloe during ca. 1797-99. The evolution of his plan studies suggests that the program was not well established when he began work. Given a triangular site, he was faced with a design problem for which he could not expect to find appropriate precedents. He made three significant initial decisions, two of which he pursued in his final scheme. First, he arranged the lateral walls of his plan to run parallel to the two bounding streets. Second, he hinged his lateral spaces, a basilican-form room that may have been for dining, and a much smaller rectangular room, which could have been an office, kitchen office, or a bed chamber with the family stair adjacent to it, about a semi-circular central entry hall with a lozenge-shaped vestibule beyond. Third, he made his major space a dominant, rear garden room. Thornton included no service stair. He placed all bed chambers on the floors above. In this first plan he attached columns to the entry-hall facade in a configuration that could have yielded an elevation similar to his Capitol sketch. In subsequent iterations he eliminated the orders, producing a composition with the walls of the plan extruded uniformly to the building's full height.

In his second plan he completed the circle of the vestibule and regularized the lateral rooms. Having displaced the family stair in the process, he relocated it within a second circular space behind the entry hall, leaving room only for oddly shaped and equally oddly oriented minor spaces in place of the large garden room.

In his final plan (Figure 16) he further simplified geometries. Leaving the lateral, symmetrical rooms and circular entry hall intact, he created a triangular space to the rear, subdivided into a conventional stair with smaller triangles of residual space to each side, one housing a service stair and the other a pantry.

Thornton also designed stables, which were constructed at the rear of his site and which were, ironically, destroyed by the American Institute of Architects to make way for their headquarters building in 1973. Although slightly awkward, their massing and detailing were more assertive than that of the Octagon. Thornton made use of two different sizes of semi-circular arches united by a single belt course forming their common impost. He made space for coaches in the two central bays with stalls to either side and with servants' quarters above.

Such practical buildings were a specialty of New York City architect John McComb Jr. with whom Latrobe had several connections. In 1802, he competed unsuccessfully against McComb and Joseph Mangin in the New York City Hall competition. In 1808, at a time when he was considering moving to New York, Latrobe made plans for the development of the New York Navy Yard and, transmitting drawings to Colonel Jonathan Williams, he wrote: "I hope Mr. McComb will not be offended at the alterations. If I come to New York I may have occasion and I shall certainly have the inclination to serve him."34 McComb was then laying foundations for a lodge at the Navy Yard,35 but Latrobe's correspondence does not make clear whether he and McComb ever met.

McComb continued his practice, begun in 1790, until 1826, becoming perhaps the most productive architect of his day. While very little remains of his executed work, a massive collection of his drawings is housed in the New York Historical Society.

McComb, like Hoban, fashioned himself as more of a builder than an architect, such that in 1826 he could comment that he had not drawn in a "number of years."36 While Latrobe's sarcastic description of him as a "New York City bricklayer"37 contained an element of truth, McComb's reputation as a technician made him a candidate to replace Latrobe at the Capitol before Bulfinch's arrival.38 Catering to wealthy merchant and lawyer clients, most of them conservative Federalists, McComb seldom if ever chose to be innovative. All of his townhouses and most of his country residences exhibit a sameness enlivened only by his early and continued use of Adamesque features. His formula proved successful financially as he left better than $70,000 to his heirs upon his death in 1853.39

McComb produced an extraordinary variety of commissions: commercial, academic, and governmental buildings; churches; banks; even lighthouses. He also made many residential designs, the majority of which were urban townhouses. In 1794 he designed a house for Rufus King, a New York state senator and minister to Great Britain. It is known only through an elevation drawing and possesses no features that might set it apart from its speculatively built neighbors.

In 1797, McComb designed Dominick Lynch's country house for Clauson's Point in Westchester County. Its elevation looks back to Anglo-Palladian models. Plans and an endwall elevation remain for his John B. Coles House (1797). The elevation reveals marginal drafting skill. The plan follows orthodox precedents with no sign of innovation. McComb also left behind a plan and elevation for a ca. 1798-1800 country house scheme (Figures 17-18) which is more adventurous than any of the previous projects. Like Bulfinch's Swan House, it includes double entries and a transverse hall and an elliptical (Bulfinch's was circular.) garden room with an enveloping porch. Judging from this project, McComb had a problem with both scale and proportion, making the stairs and porches much too large for the main block. Furthermore, he seems to have miscalculated completely the rise of the interior stair, as it could not have contained sufficient headroom.

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

After 1810 Jefferson's production of house designs declined. By 1817 he was immersed in the design and construction of his "academical village" at the University of Virginia.

For Ampthill (ca. 1815) in Cartersville, Virginia he proposed a variation on his Farmington scheme. The front of the house displays a central portico between elongated octagonal bays and beyond it a transverse hall and four, modular, orthogonal rooms, a remarkable collision of the exotic and the mundane.

Much more complex is his design for James Barbour's house, Barboursville (1817). Here he used the Monticello parti, again missing only the lateral, faceted walls.

Perhaps most striking about Jefferson's designs for pavilions at the University of Virginia is how dissimilar they are to his houses. The elevations, rather than involving a single theme with variations, represent multiple sensibilities, so that, as Jefferson intended, they could serve as an architectural textbook, beginning with the most traditional compositions adjacent to the rotunda and ending with the most avante garde facades at the opposite end of the lawn. The plans show none of his by-this-time-standardized motifs but, instead, are artless, almost schematic responses to function.

During this period, George Hadfield carried out at least four commissions and worked in Latrobe's office. No description survives of his arsenal built in 1803. His Washington Jail burned in 1861. He also erected a domestic building, the Commandant's Headquarters, and the adjacent Marine Barracks for a site southeast of the Capitol. The barracks building partially burned in 1829, then was razed in 1906. The Commandant's Headquarters still stands, but has been radically altered. It appears originally to have been a cube-like mass with a pyramidal roof, cupola, and dormers and with two, two-story, projecting, semi-circular bays facing the parade grounds. It illustrates the situation faced by scholars examining Hadfield's oeuvre: insufficient evidence to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

In 1817 Hadfield designed the Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington, Virginia (Figure 21) for George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of President George Washington. The house's northern wing was built first, apparently intended to serve as a banquet hall, then the wing to the south which was divided into an office and a parlor. Finally, the central block was completed, including the portico of massive unfluted Doric columns. The building's plan is remarkable only for its wide, shallow proportions, consisting as it does of a narrow central hall with single-pile orthogonal rooms to each side and in the wings. Its extraordinarily width to depth ratio, together with the sculptural effect of the huge columns, makes the house visually prominent when viewed from the city below. Even during construction observers took notice. Rosalie Stier Calvert who lived at Riversdale (to which Latrobe made contributions) wrote that "Custis has finished a wing of his building, which will be handsome and will be seen from all parts of Washington."42

Hadfield's Second Bank of the United States (1824) is known only through late-nineteenth-century photographs, which show a two-story block approaching a cube covered by a pyramidal roof (Figure 22). Presumably, the cornice had been altered by the time that the image seen here was created. The fenestration on the ground floor represented a Regency interpretation of Ancient Roman thermal windows. The recessed entry was defined by a segmental arch. The walls were roughcast and were relieved only by the windows and the doors and by recessed panels above the second-floor windows and a belt course. The disparity between the heights of the two floors suggests the presence of masonry vaulting at the first-floor level.

Hadfield's most ambitious design was that for the Washington, D. C. City Hall built in 1820-26 on a prominent site north of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and White House (Figure 23). The scale of Hadfield's proposal, seen here as drawn by A. J. Davis in 1832, suggests that he could have dealt quite successfully with an original composition as large and complex as the Capitol. However, the rear wings and rotunda were never built. Hadfield also covered this building in roughcast and had it struck like stone. It was sheathed in a stone veneer in the early-twentieth century, at which time Hadfield's interiors were lost.

Rendered distinctively by Davis, the plan is Schinkelesque, combining multiple orthogonal temples and an embedded rotunda with an extended, trabeated entry porch. Hadfield infilled his composition with modular groin-vaulted bays that anticipated Mills's designs for the Patent Office (adjacent to the City Hall) and the Treasury Building. In fact, the entire scheme prefigures Mills's Treasury Building site plan with its long, colonnaded or pilastraded office blocks lit by windows opening into great interior courts. Perhaps the plan is most striking for its similarity to projects emanating from the École des Beaux-Arts in the late-eighteenth century. Comparing it for instance to Charles Percier's 1786 scheme for Un Edifice à rassemblar les Académies, one can see common characteristics. Both have bi-axial symmetry and are composed primarily of rectangles disciplined by a modular grid. Such compositional strategies were developed at the École only at the end of the eighteenth century.43

Hadfield's final project was the mausoleum (1826) (Figure 24) he designed for the same John Peter Van Ness for whom Latrobe designed an urban residence. It was built on H Street adjacent to the orphan asylum long supported by Marcia Van Ness, but has been moved to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. It is Hadfield's essay on the circular temple theme, which originated in antiquity then obsessed Renaissance designers, and it can be compared to such monuments as the Temple of Vesta in Rome, the form of which is quite similar, and Bramante's Tempietto, which includes Doric columns and a crypt.

In 1805 William Thornton undertook the design of Tudor Place in Georgetown (Figure 25). Already standing, although in what form is not clear, were two pavilions between which Thornton was to insert his house. While he would probably never have admitted it, his two-story facade as built is not unlike Latrobe's Ashdown House, with its embedded, Doric, garden-front temple and three-bay parti, including tripartite windows; it has, however, a smaller percentage of mural wall surface than was Latrobe's preference. Like Ashdown's, the plan is conservative, completely orthogonal including a conventional central hall.

More interesting are the preliminary plans that Thornton developed, but that the clients, Thomas Peter and his wife Martha (granddaughter of George Washington) apparently never found acceptable.44 All combine circular, oval, and rectilinear rooms and all include a projecting circular garden-front temple. However, none fully resolves the complex, contrasting, juxtaposed room geometries.

More successful are Thornton's elevation studies for a one-story building or for a French-hôtel-inspired masking of two floors by an apparently one-story facade, all, like the plans, having an embedded temple at the garden facade. One study, without linkers or end pavilions shown, is low-slung, without an attic but with single windows inside semi-circular retreat arches to each side of a central circular temple. Left unfinished, another, still more horizontally proportioned study, has three bays of windows flanked by pilasters, each within a semi-circular retreat arch, to each side of a central circular temple. Still another, also without linkers or end pavilions shown, has a raised first floor and three niches for sculpture to each side of a central circular temple, with low windows or panels above and below them.

In his only drawing of a five-part composition, this one with the Corinthian Order, Thornton returned to the veiled two-story elevation, but with a central block dominated by its central, embedded temple. The temple is flanked on each side by only one window inside a semi-circular retreat arch. From this central block he extended linkers lit by tripartite, flat-headed windows and terminated the ensemble with hip-roofed pavilions quite like those that stand today; it is the most successful facade composition of his career and obviously the inspiration for the final, more conservative design as built.

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 which 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 his design process and 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 the monument an appropriate opportunity for his frontal, painterly approach to compositio, 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 his 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 which he 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

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 which 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 which were 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, emigrated 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 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 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 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.

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 sculptured 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 great Hôtel-Guimard- and Börsenhalle-like entry portico was almost frail. Benjamin 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 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 mature 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 opens to a central hall, intersected by a transverse enfilade that includes the servants' stair, where Jay placed an overwhelming circular stair supported by six Corinthian columns. Beyond the hall, another embedded temple, this one orthogonal, completes 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.

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, at 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).

Back in Boston in 1816 and working on a house for David Sears, Parris found himself dealing with a reversed site condition: a principle facade at streetfront facing south. His clever, if unorthodox, solution on a corner site was to distribute the three principle rooms, in a configuration similar to the Wickham House, along the south side and to develop an entry sequence off the side street to the east, a parti that Latrobe never considered and that probably would not have satisfied the sense of formality prevalent among Southern and Mid-Atlantic clients. The Sears House facade illustrates that Parris also took back to Boston a preference for austere exterior form that served him well amidst the late work of Bulfinch rendered in granite such as the Massachusetts General Hospital.

A little farther north, John McComb continued his methodically practice. In 1801-02, he designed the Grange (Figure 39), the country house of former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Its imaginative, if stiff, plan of double, elongated octagons encased in squares and rectangles presents McComb at his most adventurous. However, by this time, his career had so matured that he did not have to concentrate on domestic commissions, and he never again explored such provocative themes.

The New York City Hall Competition of 1802 was won by McComb and Joseph Mangin. It seems evident from the French spirit of the drawings that Mangin strongly influenced the design. It seems equally obvious from the details of the executed building that McComb made many decisions during the construction phase, which he alone supervised. The elevation and section are decidedly French, while the plan could easily have been the work of William Kent, and the interior ornament is decidedly Adamesque.

By 1800 Charles Bulfinch, while still an adherent of Adamesque exterior form, had developed his own unique form of domestic planning. The house that he designed for Ezekial Hersey Derby (ca. 1800) in Salem, Massachusetts represents his best work, with its thin, taut facade, not unlike his much later and much celebrated Lancaster Meeting House (1816-17), and reserved, pragmatic plan with no pretensions to monumentality(Figure 40). His alternative scheme (Figure 41) illustrates just how uncomfortable he remained with a composition based upon an axial, central entry-hall and the difficulty he had within such a configuration in coordinating major and minor spaces and primary and secondary paths of circulation. Bulfinch's design as constructed neatly separates major from minor spaces and allows for circulation adjacent to both the principal stair and the nearby servants' stair, which serves as a transitional zone between the family rooms and kitchen. Like Bulfinch himself, the plan is quite competent but self-effacing.

In 1805-08 Bulfinch designed a third house for Harrison Gray Otis (Figures 42-43). No longer slightly anemic, like the first Otis house, or brittle and ambivalent like the second, it can be admired for its crisp, dignified planarity. The plan is not so successful or memorable as the Derby House, although much published, with the family stair reached only by a sidling movement from the vestibule on the first floor and positioned on the second floor such that none of the surrounding rooms can be approached axially from it. On the other hand, these rooms, a dining and two drawing rooms--one of which once had a great bow window--offer splendid opportunities for entertaining and must have been even more dramatic before Bulfinch built a house for his daughter on the site to the east, embedding the bow window in it.

Bulfinch's deferential and diplomatic nature and his many years working effectively as a member of Boston's city government served him well when he assumed Latrobe's duties at the U. S. Capitol in 1817. Willing to carry out the designs of others, except for his own interventions at the west portico and the rotunda and his building of an awkward, wooden dome (now, fortunately, replaced), and willing to forego an extensive private practice, Bulfinch worked amicably with the Congress--an extraordinary accomplishment in and of itself. Where the mercurial L'Enfant, intransigent Hallet, vulnerable Hadfield, and temperamental Latrobe had failed, Bulfinch succeeded. The last architect at the Capitol in the Federal Period, Bulfinch made way for now-established practitioners, his successor being Thomas Ustick Walter whose professional lineage led directly back to Latrobe through William Strickland.

1 Latrobe wrote: "The profession of Architecture has been hitherto in the hands of two sets of Men. The first, of those, who from travelling or from books have acquired some knowledge of the Theory of the art, but know nothing of its practice, the second of those who know nothing but the practice, and whose early life being spent in labor, and in the habits of a laborious life, have had no opportunity of acquiring the theory. The complaisance of these two sets of Men to each other, renders it difficulty for the Architect to get in between them, for the Building mechanic find his account in the ignorance of the Gentleman architect, as the latter does in the Submissive deportment which interest dictates to the former " (BHL to Robert Mills, 12 July 1806) (C2).

2 The standard work on McIntire is Sidney Fiske Kimball, Mr. Samuel McIntire, Carver: The Architect of Salem, Salem, MA.: Essex Institute, 1940. Also see William Pierson Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects, Vol. I, New York: Anchor Books for Doubleday Books, 1976, 221-28; Gerald W. R. Ward, The Gardner-Pingree House, Salem, MA.: Essex Institute, 1976; and Ward, The Pierce-Nichols House, Salem, MA.: Essex Institute, 1976.

3 Kimball, McIntire, 80.

4 For Bulfinch see Harold Kirker, The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969 and Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch's Boston, 1787-1817, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Also see Pierson, American Buildings, Vol, I, 240-285.

5 BHL to Robert Goodloe Harper, 2 April 1818 (C3), and "Memorial to Congress in Vindication of His Professional Skill," 8 December 1818 (C3).

6 This arrangement was used infrequently in New England as at the Lady Pepperell House (after 1759) in Kittery Point, Maine.

7 Damie Stillman, English Neo-classical Architecture, London: A. Zwemmer, 1988, Vol. 1, 287.

8 Latrobe made plans to convert the Bingham residence into a merchant's exchange in 1805-06 (BHL to Robert Hare, 30 May 1813) (C3).

9 Kimball, McIntire, 77-90.

10 While Charles Bulfinch practiced in Boston, a major urban center, and spent time as an elected official, Philip Hooker did so in a provincial setting, that of Albany, New York and vicinity. Competent and workmanlike, Hooker began designing in about 1790, basing his work on what he learned from his builder father and from books. While he may have come in contact with French émigré architects and engineers who had fled the revolution in France and made their way to upper New York state, most of his work was decidedly English: Neo-Palladian like that of James Gibbs or in the fashion of Robert Adam, and even some not-uninformed early Gothic revivalism. For example, Hooker's St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Albany (1802-03, steeple 1822) resembles Gibbs's St. Martins-in-the-Fields; his New York State Bank in Albany (1803) was closely modeled on Adam's Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; and his remodeling of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Utica, New York (1818, 1828) had lancet-arch windows and pinnacles on an otherwise Gibbs-like mass. His later work shows more consciousness of Neo-Classicism with a fine sense of proportion, as in his domed Albany City Hall (1829-32). While they apparently knew nothing of one another, Latrobe would have viewed Hooker and his Neo-Palladian and Adamesque work as hopelessly old-fashioned and his Neo-Classicism as uninspired. Hooker's career is discussed and illustrated in A Neat Plain Modern Stile: Philip Hooker and His Contemoraries, 1796-1836 edited by Mary Raddant Tomlan (Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

11 Journals, Vol. 2, 376-78 (entry of 26 April, 1798). Latrobe wrote: ". . . I did not mention the house of Robert Morris because I know not what to say about it in order to record the appearance of the monster in a few words. Indeed I can scarcely at this moment believe in the existence of what I have seen many times in its complicated, unintelligible, mass."

12 Journals, Vol. 3, 71-72.

13 For a discussion of the Capitol competition, see Jeanne F. Butler, Competition 1792: Designing a Nation's Capitol, special issue of Capitol Studies: A Biannual Journal Devoted to the Capitol and Congress, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1976.

14 See Pamela Scott, "Stephen Hallet's Designs for the United States Capitol," Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 27, Nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn, 1992), 145-170 and Bates Lowery, Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789-1912, New York: Walker and Co., 1985, 19-26.

15 BHL to Munroe, 19 August 1812 (C3).

16 "James Hoban: The Architect and Builder of the White House," American Catholic Historical Researchers, Vol. 24 (1907), 37.

17 Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia, in the Society of Architectural Historians Buildings of the United States series, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 152.

18 The retaining walls appear first on Latrobe's plan but must have been planned by Hoban as he included windows across the north facade of the basement.

19 William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea, Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1992, 23.

20 See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978, 364-65 and Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence, New York: Knopf, 1940, 26-27.

21 Gene Waddell, "The First Monticello," JSAH, Vol. 41, No. 1 (March 1987), 5-29 and Pierson, American Buildings, Vol. I, 293.

22 See for instance Pierson, American Buildings, Vol. I, 292-316.

23 See Kerry Albert, "Thomas Jefferson's Use of Landscape Section in the South Pavilion and Dependencies at Monticello," M.S. in Architecture Thesis, Mississippi State University, 1993.

24 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1986, 105-127.

25 Dennis, Court and Garden, 233.

26 No one has brought forth a monograph on Hadfield. At present the best single source is George S. Hunsberger, "The Architectural Career of George Hadfield," RCHS, Vols. 51-52 (1951-52), 46-65. Also see entries in Daniel Reiff, Washington Architecture, 1791-1861, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 1971 and Diane Maddex, Historic Buildings of Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh: Ober Park Associates, 1973.

27 BHL to Thomas Jefferson, 28 Feb 1804 (C1).

28 BHL to Hadfield, 28 April 1804 (C1) and BHL to Hadfield, 12 July 1812 and BHL to Hadfield, 19 August 1812.

29 Journals, Vol. 3, 12 August 1806, 72.

30 BHL to Hadfield, 19 August 1812.

31 Thornton has not yet received satisfactory, comprehensive treatment. The only general monograph is Elinor Stearns and David N. Yerkes, William Thornton: a Renaissance Man in the Federal City, Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1976. The Octagon has been well covered in George McCue, The Octagon: Being an Account of a Famous Washington Residence: Its Great Years, Decline, and Restoration, Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1976 and more recently by Orlando Ridout, V, Building the Octagon, Washington, D.C.: The American Institute of Architects Press, 1989. For Tudor Place, see the idiosyncratic Peter Armistead III, Tudor Place, Designed by Dr. William Thornton . . ., Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1970, which offers little insight into the architecture but reproduces Thornton's various studies for the house.

32 BHL to Dr. Joseph Scandella, 24 January 1798 (C1).

33 Correspondence, Vol. 2, 939, n.3.

34 BHL to Williams, 22 August 1800.

35 BHL to Williams, 19 August 1808.

36 Stillman, "McComb," 5.

37 BHL to CIL, 4 November 1804 (C4).

38 Stillman, "McComb," 6 and 119, n. 20.

39 Stillman, "McComb," 10.

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.

42 Rosalie Stier Calvert to Mme. H. J. Stier, 29 December 1803 as published in Margaret Law Calcott, ed., Mistress of Riversdale, 70.

43 See Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977, 124-29.

44 See Armistead, Tudor Place, images following page 80.

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.

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

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

48 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 110-11.

49 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 103-04.

50 Alexander, Maximilian Godefroy, 141-42.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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, ca. 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 William H. Pierson Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects, Vol. I (1970).

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.

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