Benjamin Henry Latrobe emigrated from England to America in 1795-96 and became the greatest American architect during the formative years of the new republic and one of the greatest architects of his generation within the Western tradition. Though Latrobe's public buildings have been treated extensively in the scholarly literature, his houses have remained understudied and have never been examined as a group. Our book sets out to rectify this situation.
Introduction: Reinterpreting Latrobe
A Professional Conundrum
A Distinctive Education
Successes and Failures in London
A Fresh Start in America
Chapter 1. |
Learning the Profession: Latrobe in the London Office of Samuel Pepys Cockerell |
| The Influence of Sir Robert Taylor Cockerell and his Office Cockerell's Design Strategies Latrobe and Cockerell |
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| Chapter 2. | Hammerwood and Ashdown: Latrobe's English Country Houses and the Architectural Avant Garde of the 1790s |
| Hammerwood , Sussex : the rural retreat of an ambitious family Ashdown , Sussex : an exquisite villa for a country squire Latrobe's Contributions to the British country house |
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| Chapter 3 | Latrobe's Design Theories and Architectural Practice in a New Country |
| Design Theories Marketing Architectural Services Office Practices Relationships with Artisans and Craftspersons Contracts and Fees Design Drawings, Renderings, and Contract Documents Financial Management |
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| Chapter 4. | Houses for a Landed Gentry: Virginia (1795-1798) |
| British and European Reflections American Experiments Positing the Rational House |
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| Chapter 5. | Houses for the Merchant Elite: Philadelphia (1798-1807) |
| British and European Connections Maintained The Rational Country House The Mature Rational House with Scenery |
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| Chapter 6. | Houses for the Young Republic : Washington , D.C. and Pittsburgh (1807-1815) |
| The Rational House for Public Use The Pope Villa: Latrobe's consummate rational house, scenery house, and rotunda house The Van Ness Mansion: Latrobe's "best house" |
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| Chapter 7. | Houses for an Expanding Democracy: Washington , D.C. , Baltimore , and New Orleans (1815-1820) |
| Casanave House: a cottage villa for a single woman Decatur House: a rational house with complications State Bank of Louisiana : a residence over a masonry-vaulted banking room |
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| Chapter 8 . | Perspectives on a Career |
| Latrobe on the International and National Architectural Scenes Latrobe's Originality as a Domestic Planner Latrobe as Architect-Interior Designer Latrobe as Architect-Engineer |
Epilogue: A Preservation History of Latrobe's Houses: The Vicissitudes of the Avant Garde
Catalogue
Narrative
This short piece explains the backgrounds and views of the authors and the motivations for and objectives of this book. Both of us are designers, one an architect and the other an interior designer. We have both long been design-studio teachers who stressed not only design ideas and principles but also how to proceed with a design problem. Consequently, we have shown a bias toward both design theory and process in our examination of Benjamin Henry Latrobe's development as America 's first professional architect, and we have considered exterior and interior design to be coequal. However, our graduate training in architectural history has made us acutely aware of the larger historiographical context into which our work falls.
We first looked at Latrobe's work through research on his Mississippi River lighthouse and the restoration of the Pope Villa in Lexington , Kentucky . Examination of the lighthouse design revealed Latrobe to have been both an architect and an engineer, and inseparably so. At the Pope Villa, we attempted to place a very sophisticated design erected in a provincial circumstance within the broader landscape of the Federal Period. Initially, we found this placement to be impossible because previous Latrobe scholarship has focused on his American public buildings, while his domestic buildings have been treated secondarily, with specific discussions found, at best, scattered throughout comprehensive accounts.
The landmark study of Latrobe is Columbia University architectural historian Talbot Hamlin's Pulitzer-prize-winning 1955 biography, Benjamin Henry Latrobe . In it, Hamlin shaped an interpretation of the architect's life and career that everyone since has accepted in its broad outline. Later scholarship has examined some of Latrobe's buildings in greater detail, but no one has seriously challenged the principal aspects of Hamlin's interpretation of the man. This is not surprising, as what has come to be called "high-style" architecture in 18th- and early-19th century America has not, for the last few decades, been a lively arena for scholarship. This omission has been due in part to the arrival in the United States in the 1940s of sophisticated European art and architectural historians as a result of the diaspora caused by World War II and the consequent refocusing of American graduate students and scholars on European topics. By the late 1960s and 1970s, when American scholars began returning to American architectural topics, the focus had shifted from the buildings of the 18th and early-19th century to those of the late-19th and 20th century, and since the 1970s, many creative scholars concerned with the earlier periods have involved themselves with vernacular studies, often applying new and innovative research methods.
Also during this period, other works of architectural history roughly contemporary with Hamlin's monograph have received critical reappraisals. Consider for instance Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (first edition 1941), which is now viewed as a flawed polemical work, an historical apology for Modernism rather than “objective” architectural history. In fact, Hamlin's Latrobe , though its late-18th and early-19th century subject matter ostensibly had little to do with the struggle and ultimate triumph of European Modernism in America, is rooted in Modernist polemics. Hamlin interpreted Latrobe as a sensitive, emotional, artist-architect who, with his progressive and rationalist vision, attempted to introduce an avant garde architecture to the United States and, in the process, engaged in herioc struggles against the ignorance and intransigence of his adopted society, his sometimes-phillistine clients, and his often ill-trained competitors. This interpretation sounds, in fact, much like the plot of another Pulizer Prize-winning book of the period, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), a popular celebration of heroic Modernism through architecture.
We have set as our objective reinterpreting Latrobe's career by means of his domestic work. We have provided an introduction that surveys and analyzes his family background, education, and early experiences and traces the broad outlines of his English and American career. Then, in the initial chapters, we have closely considered the English architectural scene and Latrobe's experiences within it, particularly his time spent with S. P. Cockerell and his first efforts at private architectural practice. Next, we have distilled from a study of his English and American houses a description and explication of his design theories and manner of architectural practice. Because there are very few extant Latrobe drawings related to the English work, but many related to the American buildings and because class consciousness had so strong an impact in England but less so in America, we have stressed analysis of the client context for the English houses and analysis of designed or built form for both the English and American houses. For the English work, we have concentrated on Alderbury House (executed in the office of S. P. Cockerell), Hammerwood Park , and Ashdown House. For the American houses, we have composed 24 essays, some of them lengthy, describing and analyzing those projects for which the most documentation is available and that represent signal moments in Latrobe's development as a designer of domestic buildings. These essays are constructed as freestanding pieces, which we intend not only to illuminate Latrobe's design theories and process and to document his design innovations but also to serve the needs of those who interpret the houses to the public, particularly the extant houses.
These entries do not and cannot be expected to present an inevitable succession of design progress leading toward a single hermetic perfection, as Latrobe constantly responded to the exigencies of clients, program, budget, builders, and site, as well as to his own momentary interests and circumstances. They do, however, illustrate his preoccupation with certain design problems, particularly his determination to build what he called a "rational" house, and they present clear evidence of a logical, if not inevitable and if sometimes irregular, progression in his domestic work, his maturation as a design intellect, and the cumulative nature of his powers of synthesis as an architect, interior designer, and engineer. Consequently, we have followed the entries with a chapter of concluding essays treating the larger issues, ideas, and themes in Latrobe's domestic work over time and within the context of his American and European colleagues. As a coda to this chapter, we have considered the fortunate preservation, and more frequent and unfortunate modification and destruction, of Latrobe's houses. Finally, in an expanded Catalog of Works listing all of Latrobe's domestic projects, we have included comments on the less significant ones, mindful and hopeful that addition information on them may come to light.
Also, because there is no comprehensive study of the Federal Period, we have posted on a website a chapter that places Latrobe's domestic architecture in a broader setting among his Federal Period colleagues. This website also includes other materials formerly found in conventional book appendices.
Overall, we have discussed fourteen English houses, three built to Latrobe's designs, four more that he likely remodeled, one designed by him but probably never built, and six houses designed in the office of S. P. Cockerell while Latrobe served as Cockerell's chief assistant and upon which the young architect may have worked or participated in construction supervision. And we have discussed more than sixty American residential projects or projects with substantial residential space within them by Benjamin Henry Latrobe as principal architect. Why have we focused our attention on houses? In our opinion, domestic architecture has been undervalued as a means for understanding the broader contours of the architect's art in America . Instead, it has been the larger public buildings that have most often been seen as the carriers of the most advanced design deas and meanings. Such neglect has not been true in England where the English houses have been examined extensively in the writings of Mark Girouard, John Harris, Christopher Hussey, Sir John Summerson, Peter Thornton, and Damie Stillman, among others, illuminating their esthetic, social, political, and construction aspects. Perhaps the American neglect of Latrobe's domestic architecture is only a reflection of a similar attitude within the contemporary American architectural profession. Even today, architectural firms most often concentrate on larger commercial, institutional, and civic commissions. The reason is most often financial; it is difficult for offices with even a modest number of employees to make an acceptable profit on other than very large houses. In 18th-century England , a work on the scale of Blenheim Palace could certainly have been lucrative, but there were no such behemoth commissions in 18th-century America . Frank Lloyd Wright designed important houses throughout his career, and Le Corbusier used his early domestic work to incubate many of his most important architectural ideas. However, the late-20th century is replete with much-celebrated designers who built houses early in their careers but largely abandoned domestic work as soon as they could.
Latrobe's marketing strategy was slightly different than that of these contemporary architects. In England , he may well have imagined conducting a thriving country-house practice in the manner of Robert Adam. When he emigrated to Virginia and had time on his hands, he designed a number of hypothetical projects as well as a few real ones. In a largely agrarian society, most of these projects were domestic, and Latrobe may have intended them primarily as portfolio material to replace the drawings he apparently lost in transit from England to America . However, this was not a time of inactivity in his development as a designer. Rather, it was an extremely fertile period when he first came to terms, sometimes uncomfortably and awkwardly, with the American setting. Subsequently, as he obtained larger commissions, he continued to take on every domestic project offered to him. Some of his motivation arose, as it still does for architects today, from a desire to cultivate future clients or to placate those who had already sent larger commissions his way. More importantly for this study, however, the resulting houses were of simpler construction than his public buildings and more rapidly built, which offered him an opportunity for experimentation and fairly rapid evaluation of the completed work. As a consequence, we believe that Latrobe's domestic architecture provides an ideal laboratory for assessing his development as an architectural thinker.
If the evolution of Latrobe's design process is our principal theme, what related sub-themes have we found it fruitful to pursue? First, previous scholarship has been generally inattentive to Latrobe's English career. Since his architectural projects in England were largely domestic, a close study of them has enabled us to describe and analyze in detail this period of his professional life. We believe that only by understanding this English experience is it possible to follow properly the trajectory of his development in America . Second, we have scrutinized Latrobe's personal and professional financial-management practices. We believe that Latrobe the businessman cannot be separated from Latrobe the designer. Third, we have likewise chosen to interpret Benjamin Henry Latrobe not as an architect or engineer, but as an architect and engineer. We have not commented in detail on what are often categorized as his engineering projects, such as his waterworks and canals, but we have carefully studied the technical solutions and innovations in his domestic designs.
Our work has also been influenced by prevalent attitudes toward architectural preservation. At both the Pope Villa and Decatur House, we have worked with and observed the working methods of preservation and restoration consultants Charles Phillips and Joseph Oppermann. Significantly, they were trained by Paul Buchanan, an early participant in the research and restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. American preservation practice, due in no small measure to the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, has developed in a significantly different manner from that abroad. Because English and European buildings have often evolved over many centuries, restoration of them has rarely meant taking a structure back to its original appearance. English and European preservationists have assumed an attitude of inclusion wherein later changes and modifications to historic structures have been viewed as no less important than the original fabric.
In America , the early-20th-century Williamsburg experience has encouraged a type of intensive research using both documentary and physical evidence, with the goal being the restoration and even reconstruction of historic structures to a particular period or moment in their existence. Today, while most architectural historians and preservation professionals recognize that this kind of radical intervention can be undesirable, the tradition of intensive documentary research and exhaustive on-site investigation remains as a prominent, perhaps the most prominent, preservation strategy. The information from this sort of investigation is usually assembled as an historic structure report (HSR), and such reports were compiled for the Pope Villa and Decatur House. We have used them where they existed, and where they did not, we have assembled and analyzed the documents and inspected the buildings as fully as possible and have compiled our own HSRs. We have typically done this work as a team, finding a constant critical dialogue to be the best means for evaluating often complex and even contradictory architectural evidence. Another aspect of this dialogue has been drawing. In our experience, it is often necessary to study a condition graphically in order to appreciate fully its possibilities. Many of our graphic analyses and representations have made their way into this book.
What have we learned from all of our research, drawing, and writing? While we did not set out to diminish the reputations of Andrew Jackson Downing, who created a distinctive mid-19th century American taste in residential design, or Frank Lloyd Wright, who is credited with producing the most distinctive set of American house forms in the late-19th and early-twentieth centuries, it became obvious during the course of our work that Benjamin Henry Latrobe had responded quite consciously to the specifics of the American social and physical context and had, as a result, invented such a house form for the nascent, democratic, American republic. We believe that Latrobe made a conscious effort to develop this new domestic type and that his houses present extremely condensed and focused evidence of his originality as a designer. The new republic carried out fresh experiments in both politics and architecture. Federal Period architecture manifested the high ideals and optimism of these experiments, yielding an unpretentious elegance befitting the new democracy. In retrospect and though not a very fashionable position to take today, the architecture of the Federal Period might be viewed as a kind of “golden age” of American democratic culture, even though Latrobe, with all of his professional trials and tribulations, would probably have seen such a categorization as preposterous.
A final question might be asked: why study Benjamin Henry Latrobe in particular? In a word, because he had genius. He was among the best in his time and place at what he did. When his work is compared to that of his peers in both England and America , Latrobe's status as an international talent of the first order cannot but become clear.
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