The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 9780801881046

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reinterpreting Latrobe
Chapter One: Learning the Profession
Chapter Two: Hammerwood and Ashdown
Color Section I: English Houses
Chapter Three: Reinventing the American House
Chapter Four: Houses for the Virginia Landed Gentry (1795-1798)
Color Section II: American Houses
Chapter Five: Practice in Philadelphia (1798-1807)
Chapter Six: A Capital City and an Expanding Democracy (1807-1815)
Chapter Seven: Last Houses (1815-1820)
Chapter Eight: Some Perspectives on an Architect's Career
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Citation preview

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SOUTHERNENGLAND &

Houses from the office of S. P. Cockerell,

|

Houses independently designed by Latrobe

designed or built while Latrobe worked there

10 *Ashdown (Sussex, near Forest Row) 11 *Hammerwood (Sussex, near East Grinstead)

1 “Admiralty House (London) 2 *Alderbury House (near Salisbury, Wiltshire)

3 *Daylesford (Gloucestershire, near Moreton-in-Marsh) 4 Gore Court (Kent, near Sittingbourne) 5 Houses Proposed for Tunbridge Wells (Kent) [recorded in Latrobe's English Notebook] 6 Middleton Hall (Carmarthenshire, Wales) 7 *Pierremont Hall (Broadstairs, Kent) 8 Waterstock House (Waterstock, Oxfordshire) 9 *Wyndham House (Salisbury, Wiltshire)

House remodelings by Latrobe

12 *Frimley Park (Surrey, near Frimley) 13 *Saint Hill (West Sussex, East Grinstead) 14 *Sheffield Park (East Sussex, near Sheffield Green)

15 *Teston Hall/Barham Court (Kent, near Maidstone) *extant

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Fig, 1.51. Pierremont Hall, Broadstairs, Kent, S. PR. Cockerell’s office, ca. 1791-1792.

Hypothetical restoration of (bottom) first and (top) second floor plans. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

Dining Room

Breakfast Room or Study?

(Original wall unknown

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(Original wall unknown)

While Latrobe worked in Cockerell’s office, he kept a small, pocket-sized

ALDERBURY HOUSE AND

book into which he entered drawings and memoranda. His “English note-

LATROBES ENGLISH NoTEBOOK’

book,” one of the few surviving documents from his English years, is now in the Library of Congress. It contains several designs for houses, most of them probably never built. These drawings are discussed in the catalogue. However, one page of the notebook is of particular importance; on this page, Latrobe

made drawings that he labeled “Mr. Fort's house” (fig. 1.52).3° The drawings consist of “ground floor” and “chamber floor” plans, a two-point perspective sketch showing two facades of the house, and a small elevation of the entrance front. In his table of contents page at the front of the notebook, Latrobe further identified the drawings as the “Plan of Mr. Fort’s house Salisbury.’ Latrobe's drawings relate to a commission that Cockerell received in 1790 or 1791 for a medium-sized house called Alderbury House, which survives in excellent condition in the village of Alderbury two miles south of Salisbury, in Wiltshire. The owners and builders of the house, George Yalden Fort and his wife Mary, erected it around 1791-1796.39 Latrobe's notebook plans corre-

spond closely to Alderbury House as it exists today (figs. 1.53~-1.54; plate 1). Latrobe's drawings suggest that he had a hand in the project. At the least, he may have copied the designs into his sketchbook from existing drawings by Cockerell or another architect in Cockerell’s office or, at the most, he may have designed the house. To clarify the Alderbury House drawings and Latrobe's involvement in the project, it is necessary to define the types of drawings that he entered in his notebook. Some drawings are of ancient buildings copied by Latrobe from published sources. Another is an unidentified drawing in which he recorded

(apparently on-site) the floor plan of an existing building. Some are copies by Latrobe of designs by other architects (mostly those in the Cockerell office milieu). Finally, some are drawings of buildings designed by Latrobe; in this category are drawings in different stages of design development, from the most schematic and conceptual pencil sketches to nearly finished, rendered drawings.*° In order to hypothesize about Latrobe's involvement with Alderbury House, it is necessary to determine into which of these categories his drawings of it belong. The Alderbury House drawings are obviously not of the first type

(ancient buildings copied from books), nor do they seem to be of the second type (record drawings made from existing buildings) because they are too schematic and have too few details and dimensions. They are also probably

not of the third type (sketch records of drawings by other designers), as in

Learning the Profession

63

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Fig. 1.52. “Mr. Fort’s house” (Alderbury House,

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near Salisbury, Wiltshire) designed ca. 1791

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in S. P. Cockerell’s office. This drawing from Latrobe's English notebook (page size: 7 inches by 4% inches); north is to the top in the plans. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

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ca. 1791-1796. Floor plans; (top) first story

(Latrobe's “ground floor”); (bottom) second story (Latrobe's “chamber floor”). (Patrick Snadon)

Fig. 1.54. Alderbury House, Wiltshire,

this type of drawing Latrobe seems always to have identified designers other

ca. 1791-1796. North, or entrance, front.

than himself. Also, when making sketch copies of designs by others, Latrobe

(Michael Freeman photograph)

did not position them in a such a careful, orthogonal relationship to each other on the notebook page. The Alderbury House drawings seem to be of the fourth type: a building designed by Latrobe. His not crediting another designer is one indication; other clues follow from the way the drawings are composed and executed on the page. In fact, the drawings seem to be conceptual sketches, and this page seems to be an early, if not the first, record of Latrobe's design process for the house. One persuasive piece of evidence is Latrobe's use of the watermark lines in the paper of the notebook page as a partial grid for laying out the floor plans. The notebook appears to be a custom-made object. Its pages were cut

to their present size (7 inches by 4% inches) from larger sheets of paper and were then bound between leather covers with the “hinge,” or spine, on the

66

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

short dimension. The paper has a distinctive pattern of closely spaced hori-

zontal watermark lines (called “laid” lines—like the pattern of a washboard), intersected at right angles by vertical lines spaced at about 1% inches apart

(called “chain” lines). These lines resulted from the paper pulp being pressed into a wire grid or “strainer,’ a part of the papermaking process of the day. The paper is consistently bound into the notebook so that the chain lines with the 1¥-inch spacing run longitudinally or parallel to the long dimension of the pages. Latrobe perhaps had the paper bound this way intentionally so that

he could use the watermark lines (especially when he was outside the office), in lieu of a T square, triangles, and a drafting board (or as some architects used coordinate grid paper), to provide both guidelines and a built-in scale. Latrobe positioned the Alderbury House floor-plan drawings one above the other, with the ground-floor plan at the top of the page and the second-floor plan below it, and he centered both plans on the three, centermost longitu-

dinal (chain) watermark lines of the page. The center chain line forms a central axis for the plan, while the flanking chain lines act as guidelines for the left- and right-hand outer walls. This shows most clearly from the back of the page with light shining through it (figs. 1.55-1.56). Latrobe seems to have used the watermark chain lines both as guidelines and a rough scale; Alderbury House as built is approximately 60 feet wide, which makes the 1%-inch spac-

Fig. 1.55. Latrobe's English notebook. Verso of page with Alderbury House drawings showing watermark “chain” lines that Latrobe used as

drawing guidelines. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

ing of the longitudinal chain lines correspond roughly to a scale of 1 inch equals 30 feet. Latrobe used the same rough scale of 1 inch equals 30 feet in other drawings of buildings designed by him in the notebook, which seems

to confirm this technique (see hypothetical Ashdown sketch, fig, 2.59). In addition to the longitudinal (chain) watermark lines, Latrobe added a light grid of double-ruled pencil lines running vertically and horizontally on the page. These lines approximate the internal walls of the floor plans and form a grid of the sort Cockerell employed for the design of the Middleton Hall plans (see fig. 1.47). The doubling of the lines seems to have formed guidelines for the wall thicknesses or poché.41 Having added the ruled pencil lines, Latrobe next inked the ground-floor plan of the house in freehand at the top of the page, perhaps with some slight pencil underdrawing. Unusual as it seems, this working out of a design in freehand, pen-and-ink sketches, beginning with the ground-floor plan, moving to the other stories, then to the

elevations, is exactly the design process Latrobe's son, John H. B. Latrobe, later described as his father’s method.*? In the Alderbury House drawings, having laid down the ground-floor plan, Latrobe then added room dimensions that correspond with the rough

Learning the Profession

67

1 inch equals 30 feet scale of the watermark lines in the page. After finishing this plan, Latrobe drew the chamber-floor plan immediately below it, again centering it on the watermark lines, so that he could simply transfer down common wall locations orthographically from the upper to the lower plan. This process again suggests that he was designing the house, floor by floor, while drawing it. Strengthening this hypothesis is the fact that the order of the

drawings (ground floor above and chamber floor below), reversed Latrobe's procedure for finished sets of drawings (executed on the drafting board after the design was completely worked out), in which he routinely placed the chamber story plan above the ground story plan, so that the two could be seen in the same vertical relationship as in the building as built. Evidently, only in the case of a preliminary, or conceptual, drawing would Latrobe place the

Fig. 1.56. Latrobe's English notebook page. Drawings of Alderbury House, with watermark

ground-floor plan above that of the upper floor. The ground floor, however, being the primary floor, had to be designed first, hence Latrobe's placement of

“chain” lines picked out. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams; adapted from original

it at the top of the page, while the plan of his chamber floor derived from it and

drawing in Library of Congress, Manuscripts

was thus placed orthographically below it.*

Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

Below the floor plans, in the remaining space at the bottom of the notebook page, Latrobe drew two, freehand ink sketches showing the exterior of the house. The left-hand sketch is a perspective showing the south and west fronts; the right-hand sketch is a small elevation of the entrance or north front. In addition to the execution of the drawings and their placement on the page, other evidence supports the hypothesis that the Alderbury House drawings are Latrobe's conceptual sketches and record his design process for the house. Small changes are evident in the design from one drawing to the next down the page, suggesting that he refined the design as he drew it. The most obvious is the difference in the windows at the center of the chamber-

floor plan, on the entrance or north front (where two separate windows are shown lighting two small dressing rooms) and the entrance or north elevation at the lower right (where the two windows have been combined into one tripartite window). In the house as built, these windows correspond to the RS

small elevation sketch, suggesting that it represented a final solution, while the chamber-floor plan was a preliminary solution (fig. 1.53).

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In summary, all the internal evidence of the drawings themselves and the context of the notebook suggest that the Alderbury House page represents

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Latrobe's conceptual or design-process drawings for the house and that he

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remote clients is exactly the sort of commission one would expect a busy Watermark Lines

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London architect like Cockerell to delegate to his chief assistant.

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Alderbury House is similar in size to Sir Robert Taylor's villas of the 1750s17708 for his well-to-do businessmen and banker clients. Its client, George

Alderbury House as Built

Yalden Fort, had a similar profile. A successful Salisbury merchant and entrepreneur, he skillfully augmented his family’s landholdings and wealth. When he died, the Alderbury estate contained three hundred acres, and he owned several hundred acres of other properties in Wiltshire. Fort served as mayor of Salisbury in the late 1780s, and became High Sheriff of Wiltshire in 1800. By 1837, Wiltshire historian Richard Colt Hoare spoke of Fort’s son, the third George Fort, as being “the present lord of the manor.’*4 George Yalden Fort also had a taste for speculation and visionary engineering projects. In 1770, he became the principal promoter of the Salisbury Canal scheme. This ambitious plan would have run a canal south from Salisbury for several miles through difficult terrain to connect with the then-building Andover Canal, providing Salisbury access to the sea. Not only would this scheme have benefited Fort’s Salisbury business interests, but the proposed canal route crossed his Alderbury estate and would have provided a convenient outlet for his agricultural products.** He integrated the canal into his picturesque landscaping plans by channeling it through a tunnel and damming it into an ornamental lake where it crossed his property within sight of his new house.*® The canal scheme ultimately failed, but by ca. 1796 Fort had completed his new house and the lake and tunnel that were to accommodate the canal. The lake survives as an ornamental feature in the landscape, visible from the south and west windows of Alderbury House. Like so many of Cockerell’s commissions, Alderbury House accommodated an existing building on the site, the earlier Fort family house, which became the service wing to the new house. Still extant on the east side of the new house, it is a low, two-story, brick structure that appears to date from the

later seventeenth or early eighteenth century (fig. 1.57). A surviving tithe map of the estate, dated 1847, shows Alderbury House in an outline form that

is virtually identical to the plan outline of this early brick house (fg. 1.58).*” The absence of the newer house (finished ca. 1796) on this 1847 map suggests that the mapmaker copied the house outline unchanged from an earlier map that antedated the building of the new house. The old house probably faced north with major rooms on the north, west, and south fronts and with services, service yard, and kitchen gardens to the east. The new house replicated this orientation at a larger scale. The addition of the new house to the west obliterated the west front of the old house. The largest chimney in the old

Learning the Profession

69

house is located between the two southern rooms. If one of these rooms was not originally the kitchen in the old house, it may have become so for the new house, and this chimney perhaps accommodated a cooking fireplace. Three factors influenced the plan of the new Alderbury House: first, the existence of the original approach road from the north and the consequent need to locate the main entrance on the north front; second, the existence of the older house on the east that became the service wing of the new house and the consequent need for lateral, or east-west, service circulation between it and the principal rooms of the new house; and third, the superb landscape views to the south and west and the consequent need to locate the principal public rooms of the new house on those fronts. The south and west views encompass the River Avon; Richard Colt Hoare, describing the new Alderbury House in 1837, enthused: “It commands a singularly beautiful view over the valley of the Avon and the opposite eminences.’** If the northern approach to the house dictated that the main entrance be on the north, with a central, north-south entrance axis, the use of the existing older house as a service wing on the east precluded views in that direction, necessitated the location of the service rooms and service stair on that side of the new house, and dictated that the internal service circulation run laterally, or east-west, perpendicular to the axis of entry, to connect the rooms of the new house with the services in the old. Increasing the complexity of the planning, the compact size of Alderbury House made it necessary to minimize the amount of space consumed by internal circulation.

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Fig. 1.57. Alderbury House, Wiltshire,

ca. 1791-1796. First-floor plan with new house in outline to the left (west) and with preexisting house to the right (east) shaded. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

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30 ft.

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Hypothetical Old House [_] New House (1790s)

Fig, 1.58. 1847 tithe map of Alderbury House grounds, which shows outline of earlier

(pre-1790) house. North is to the left. (Wiltshire Record Office)

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Like Sir Robert Taylor's villas, Alderbury House has a central, top-lit, stair hall that provides both circulation and light at the center of the plan. Unlike Taylor's plans, however, where a circuit of rooms surrounds a central stair, the Alderbury stair and adjacent service stair had to serve as lateral, east-west connectors to the old house, making it impossible to wrap the public rooms in a full circuit around them. In response, the main and service stairs are pushed to the east side of the plan, like a smaller version of Cockerell's Mid-

dleton Hall (fig. 1.45). The Alderbury House stair rises gracefully through a half-basilican curve and in the upper hall is lit by a glazed oculus (figs. 1.59-1.60). This main stair rises only from the first to the second story. The service stair, however, serves four levels, from the basement through the main

Learning the Profession

71

and chamber floors, to the attic. The service stair also connects the first foor of the main house with the older house-cum-service wing to the east, the floor of which is four steps below the level of the new main house. To capitalize on the beautiful landscape views of the Avon Valley and the ‘canal lake” to the south and west of the site, the main public rooms of the new house are laid in an L-configuration along its west and south fronts. On the west is the handsome basilican-shaped drawing room, 18 feet wide by 30 feet long, its long axis running north-south, its northern apse protruding into one of the canted bays of the north facade. Its cross-axis is articulated by the fireplace on its long east wall, balanced by a large, tripartite window opposite on the west. The dining

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running east and west, perpendicular to the direction of the drawing room.

Fig, 1.59. (Opposite) Alderbury House, Aine

Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. Main staircase.

—_ (Michael Freeman photograph)

Its eastern wall includes a sideboard niche enframed by Greek Ionic columns, with symmetrical doors to either side, one leading to the library, the other

merely opening into a shallow cupboard (fig. 1.61). Continuing across the south front of the house, east of the drawing room an 18-eighteen-foot-square library contains its original built-in bookcases. Beyond the library, at the southeast corner, a small, oblong room may have functioned as a private office or a gentleman's dressing room for George Fort. Although this room is a single space today, Latrobe's sketch plan shows it partitioned into three spaces, a larger room to the south and two smaller ones to the north; in Latrobe's plan, the left of these contains an X of dashed

Fig. 1.60. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. Upper stair hall ceiling and oculus-

skylight. (Michael Freeman photograph)

Learning the Profession

73

lines, suggesting the reflected ceiling plan of a masonry, groin-vaulted space, perhaps the sort of safe room occasionally found in gentlemen's ofhces of the period. The small space adjacent to it may have been a passage to the service stair (Latrobe's sketch shows no door through to the stair, though such a door

exists today), or it may have been a toilet as is indicated in the same space Fig. 1.61. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 17911796. Original dining room, looking toward east wall with Ionic column screen and arched

sideboard niche. (Michael Freeman photograph)

above, on the second story. The final room, in the northeast corner, has a semicircular end protruding into the canted bay of the north facade. It may

have been a breakfast room or a family dining room (conveniently close to the kitchen in the older service wing) or a sitting room for Mrs. Fort.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 1.62. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. Circulation diagrams of first story.

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RADIAL CIRCULATION

“CIRCUIT” OR PERIMETER CIRCULATION

In the Cockerell tradition, Alderbury House has several interlocking circulation systems on the ground floor. The entrance circulation is central and

axial (though blocked at the back of the inner hall so that it does not extend completely through the plan); service circulation from the old house is lateral; the top-lit stair hall provides central, radial circulation to the downstairs rooms; and the principal rooms are connected by a circuit of doorways

around the perimeter walls (fig. 1.62). Latrobe's sketch plan indicates a door leading directly from the entrance hall west into the drawing room; if originally built, this door has been walled up. The drawing room and dining

room are connected through a small vestibule space concealed within the curving walls (the opposite door leads from the drawing room into the stair hall). The little vestibule also leads into the garden through a glazed door on the west. Along the south front of the house, the dining room, library, and office or dressing room are connected by an enfilade of doorways. The library reconnects to the stair hall, completing the circuit of public rooms. The central stair hall served for daily family circulation and as service space to the public rooms during formal entertainments when the guests presumably circulated around the perimeter. That the central stair hall could be adapted

Learning the Profession

75

as a serving room during entertainments is proved by the existence of a little, flip-up serving table, built into the dado of the south wall under the

upper flight of the stair (fig. 1.63). On the second story, five bedchambers and their dressing rooms are approached through the upper stair hall and a longitudinal corridor parallel to it. The most elegant room is an ellipse in the northwest corner. The dynamic asymmetries of the Alderbury House plans are masked by the perfect symmetry of its facades (see figs. 1.55 and 1.64-1.66). The numerous contradictions between plan and elevations are maintained by an extensive use of disengagements and artifices, such as sham windows, variable wall thicknesses, and the capturing of windows within the wall poché between rooms. The house is rife with instances where asymmetries in plan contradict the symmetry of the elevations. Alderbury House also exhibits an exaggerated variety among its three

principal facades (north, west, and south), Such contrasts appeared often in Cockerell’s work, but here they are even more pronounced, Its facades are designed as wholly independent, symmetrical units, each with a completely different composition and character. The contrasts seem more extreme

because of the modest size of the house (fig. 1.65; plate 2). The north or entrance front of Alderbury House is the most dynamic of its facades, with the twin canted bays and recessed center, a Cockerell tradeFig. 1.63. Alderbury House, Wiltshire,

mark. Alderbury House is built of gray limestone, on a slightly raised and rus-

ca. 1791-1796. Flip-up serving table in south wall

ticated basement. The entrance door, under a blind elliptical arch, is almost

of main stair hall. This table could help the

completely glazed. Such extensive glazing suggests French, eighteenth-century

servants to turn the stair hall into a serving room

garden pavilions, such as the Petit Trianon (1761-1768) at Versailles by J.-A.

for the dining room. (Patrick Snadon)

Gabriel. The suggestion of French garden pavilions is, at Alderbury House, slightly contradicted, however, by the rusticated basement that necessitates stairs and separates the house somewhat from its landscape. Here, modern French sources seem in conflict with the older, English, neo-Palladian tradition of the rusticated basement. Later, at Hammerwood

and Ashdown,

Latrobe resolved this problem by eliminating basements and by a more excessive use of glazed, French doors and floor-length windows. Above the Alderbury House roofline emerge two, parallel parapetchimneys into which the flues of all the rooms are gathered. This device— the consolidation of flues into a continuous wall—appeared in Taylor's

houses and in Cockerell’s Pierremont Hall (above) and suggests the combined flue-and-parapet walls of urban, multiunit residential terraces in London. Whereas in urban, terraced rows the flue-and-parapet walls separate the

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

housing units, at Alderbury House their use is aesthetic: a device intended to eliminate the visual chaos of multiple independent chimneystacks and thus unify the principal elevations. Perpendicular to the north, or entrance facade, the symmetrical west

facade is a planar elevation with three, giant Venetian windows (the central one actually a jib window) contained beneath half-round, blind arches; above

are rectangular windows in the second story. The central,jib window opens down a flight of stone steps into the garden.

Learning the Profession

_ ig, 1.64. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 17911796. West front. (Michael Freeman photograph)

77

Fig. 1.65. (Top) Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. From the southwest (south front

to right; west front to left). (Michael Freeman photograph)

The three-bay composition of the west facade suggests either one large or

three smaller rooms behind, but the plan does not conform. The drawing room is parallel to this facade, while the dining room is perpendicular to it.

Fig. 1.66. (Opposite, top) Alderbury House,

The bearing wall between the two rooms meets the west facade wall in line with the central jib window and is saved from a collision only by the little

Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. South front. (Michael

vestibule space created by the curved wall of the drawing room. This device,

Freeman photograph)

a facade containing three equal Venetian windows with noncorresponding

Fig. 1.67. (Opposite, bottom) Alderbury House,

room divisions behind, reappeared in a more developed form in Latrobe's

distribution, based on composition of south

later American houses, where the three-bay, Venetian facade often concealed two major rooms behind, with the central window captured in a similar,

front. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

vestibule-like Spaces”

schematic plan drawing of “expected” room

78

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

south facade suggests a symmetrical division of three rooms behind: a large,

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advanced end pavilions (reminiscent of Cockerell’s Admiralty House and Middleton Hall). The principal-floor windows rest on inset balustrades, and those at the ends are set within blind arches. The composition of the

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The south front of Alderbury House is the most complex of its facades. Like the north facade, it has a recessed center, in this case created by slightly

three-bay central room with smaller, single-bay rooms in the advanced end

pavilions (fig, 1.67), yet the actual room disposition behind this symmetrical facade is the most asymmetrical of all. The rooms become progressively

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smaller from west to east, and the perpendicular bearing walls that separate

them meet the facade wall with no relationship to its exterior composition.

Learning the Profession

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The north-south wall between the dining room and library, containing the column-screened sideboard niche, meets the facade wall directly behind the central window, which on the exterior is blind, though filled with fully glazed sash. The idea of a perpendicular wall negating the central window of a principal facade is so unusual as to perhaps be unprecedented in English country-house architecture, but Latrobe soon repeated it at Hammerwood

in Sussex (1792; see Chapter 2).°° Like the combined parapet-flue motif, this device likely derived from urban examples. In the earlier eighteenth century,

London architects such as Robert and James Adam pioneered the use of uniform classical street fronts that appeared to be large, single houses or palaces Fig. 1.68. Double House in Portland Place

(nos. 46 and 48), London, by Robert and

but concealed multiple town houses. Surviving examples are 46 and 48 Port-

James Adam, ca. 1776-1780. A single facade

land Place, London, ca. 1776-1780, by the Adams, in which a central blind

composition masks two town houses with

window masks the point where the division wall between the two houses

a central division wall behind a central, blind

meets the facade (fig. 1.68).>! In Alderbury House, such devices seem bred of

window on the exterior. (Patrick Snadon)

urban practice, then carried into a country house. At Alderbury House, the symmetrical, classical elevations are elegant masks concealing the functional and programmatic asymmetries of the plan, creating fascinating discontinuities between the plan and its elevations. These disparities are more than utilitarian compromises between a plan responding to pragmatic imperatives and elevations responding to the need for classical decorum. The contradictions are elaborated with a conscious delight— that of a young designer showing off by taking devices developed by his mentor and exaggerating them. The south facade of Alderbury House, in particular, with its contradictions between interior and exterior, its misleading outsets and insets, its real and false windows, and its unexpected encounters with, and concealments of, perpendicular walls behind, may be one of the more complex wall membranes in the history of English domestic architecture. [he only possible criticism of this virtuoso performance in such a small house is that, as the saying goes, “it is too clever by half.”

Slightly east of the main house the Alderbury House stables survive (fig. 1.69). They are of Flemish-bond brickwork with a central, arched opening beneath a pediment; the side spaces are covered with shed roofs that give the facade a Palladian, basilican character. It seems likely that these stables were designed in Cockerell’s office, perhaps by Latrobe. Alderbury House impressively synthesizes both Taylor's and Cockerell’s domestic achievements. It has the top-lit stair hall characteristic of Taylor's compact and centrally planned villas and exhibits Cockerell’s preference for a series of rectangular rooms revolving asymmetrically about a central circulation

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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ee

il! ie ill

Fig. 1.69. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, ca. 1791-1796. Stables to the east of the main

house. (Patrick Snadon)

cell. Like most of Cockerell’s houses, it has a facade of twin canted bays but

also has the multiple focal facades characteristic of Taylor's and Cockerell’s villas. Latrobe's drawings of Alderbury House and the house's exuberance and artifice suggest that he was its principal designer. It may be seen as a kind of “thesis piece” in which Latrobe displayed the domestic planning strategies he inherited from Taylor and Cockerell, condensed into a smaller package, and raised to a higher intensity. Alderbury House is a consummate, if slightly exaggerated, essay by Latrobe in the manner of S. P. Cockerell. Latrobe learned much from Cockerell and repeated many of his unusual planning strategies in his own, later houses. In 1792, however, Latrobe began practice on his own and struck out a bold, new stylistic direction that Cockerell had ignored: the Greek Revival.

Learning the Profession

81

Chapter Two

Latrobes English Country Houses and the Architectural Avant-Garde of the 1790s

AFTER LEAVING S, P. CockERELL, Latrobe began practice on his own and soon received commissions for two major country houses, Hammerwood and Ashdown in Sussex, as well as possible remodeling work at three other

country houses, St. Hill in Sussex, Teston Hall (now Barham Court) in Kent, and Primley in Surrey. The documentation for these remodelings is inconclusive, however, and they are discussed in the catalogue. Hammerwood and Ashdown are Latrobe's principal English buildings and allow us to evaluate his abilities as a domestic designer at this stage in his career and to situate him within the context of English neoclassical architecture. Hammerwood and Ashdown are only three miles apart and were simultaneously under construction from ca. 1792 to 179, so that on his trips from London to Sussex Latrobe could visit both sites. In addition, the houses shared some craftsmen and suppliers of materials. As nearly concurrent designs, they have many similarities, but these are of a conceptual rather than a formal nature, and at first glance they seem more different than alike. Hammerwood strikes the viewer as an ambitious house, while Ashdown seems more modest. Hammerwood is horizontal and spreading, with a grand, multipart composition, while Ashdown is compact and vertical. Visu-

ally, the houses exemplify the two “types” into which John Summerson has categorized later eighteenth-century country houses in England: the continuing but declining tradition of the “greater country house,’ which, like Hammerwood, was intended especially for formality and show, and the newer “villa,” which, like Ashdown, was smaller, more domestic, and less formal.! In some ways this difference is illusory, however, because the size of the two houses was originally about the same. Hammerwood appeared larger than it was, while Ashdown appeared smaller. Some differences between Hammerwood and Ashdown may be attributed to the characters of the clients and their functional programs. The Sperlings intended Hammerwood as a seasonal residence and a rural retreat for part-time occupancy and for indulging their interests in hunting, entertaining, and experimental farming, but they viewed the house as a fashionable complement to their London town house. The Fullers, by contrast, were an old Sussex family and a part of the local gentry who intended Ashdown as a year-round residence and farm. The Sperlings thus built Hammerwood for a London audience, while the Fullers’ frame of reference was primarily within Sussex. Although Hammerwood appeared to be a grand country house, it thus functioned like a villa, and while Ashdown appeared to be a villa, it functioned more like a traditional country house.

84

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe assigned Hammerwood and Ashdown not only different compositional characters, but different genders. Hammerwood, as a rural retreat and hunting lodge, was masculine in form and associations, while Ashdown, intended for more sustained domestic use, had a more private and feminine character. The exterior order at Hammerwood uses precociously bold and primitive Greek Doric models, while the exterior order at Ashdown is an elegant version of the Ionic of the Erechtheum at Athens, the most obviously “feminine” of ancient Greek buildings. Latrobe was surely familiar with Vitruviuss characterization of the Greek Doric as a masculine order and the Greek Ionic as a matronly female one. He thus identified Hammerwood as a masculine, rustic building, meant to refresh its urban owners and their visitors with hunting, riding, horticulture, and other rural pleasures, while he identified Ashdown as a “matronly” house, meant to accommodate the Fullers and their numerous children. The styles of the houses, as well as their planning, speak directly to the desires and functional needs of their clients. For all their differences, Latrobe conceived the exteriors of both Hammerwood and Ashdown in the same, elegantly austere neoclassical vocabulary of geometric forms, planar surfaces, and Grecian details. In addition, both houses share similar siting conditions and landscape orientations. The principal facades of both face south over beautiful valleys, and both were originally approached across those valleys from the southwest. Older houses existed on the sites of both, which determined the location and orientation of the new houses. Latrobe incorporated these existing buildings into the new houses but with markedly different strategies. The Sperlings, as newcomers to Sussex, showed little interest in the older house on their site. For them, Latrobe encased it so that the grand new Hammerwood concealed it and with it the previous history and built context of the site. The Fullers, by contrast, as an integral part of the local gentry, had Latrobe simply set the new Ashdown in front of the existing manor house, thereby adding a conspicuous new layer to the site but with no attempt to conceal its previous history or context. Despite the differing contextual strategies that Latrobe deployed at Hammerwood and Ashdown, the existence and appropriation of the older houses caused similar results. The northern, uphill portions of both sites became rear regions of older construction, with services and stables, while the new, southern portions accommodated the fashionable public rooms. Because of the existence of the older houses to the north, the new south facades of both

houses had to serve the dual functions of both approach and garden fronts;

Hammerwood and Ashdown

85

that is, they functioned simultaneously as objects to be seen from the landscape during the approach and as viewing fronts from which to admire the landscape after arrival. This fusion contravened one of the conventions of English country-house planning, which typically located the entrance and garden facades on opposite fronts. At Hammerwood, the south facade cleverly served as a focal “approach” front, but the house could actually be entered at multiple points, while at Ashdown, Latrobe focused the vocabularies and functions of both entrance and garden fronts in the device of a circular Ionic temple embedded within the south facade. This little temple served both as a portico-vestibule for the “entrance” function and as a landscape viewing pavilion for the “garden” function. At both Hammerwood and Ashdown, Latrobe worked out a series of innovative compromises between the heavy, solid-walled character of the new, Greek Revival forms on the one hand and an increased openness to the landscape on the other. In some ways, Grecian forms worked to his advantage, for example, as in the elimination of the traditional, Renaissance-derived rustic or basement story, the absence of which allowed the principal story to be close to the ground, like a Greek temple. In other ways, the closed, planar quality of Grecian architecture was a disadvantage that Latrobe overcame by a judicious use of arcuated openings, floor-length windows, and glazed doors, all of which provided a visual and physical connection between interiors and landscape. Because of the urbanity of its clients, one might expect Hammerwood to be aesthetically more daring than Ashdown, and in some ways it is. But Latrobe managed, through unorthodox planning, progressive use of Grecian forms, a radical simplification of the neoclassical vocabulary, and the design of innovative relationships between the houses and their landscapes, to place both Hammerwood and Ashdown in the architectural avant-garde of the late eighteenth century. With them, he predicted future directions in both his own architecture and in British country-house design.

Urbane Rusticity for Adventurous Clients HAMMERWOOD

LODGE

As Latrobe's first independent architectural commission, Hammerwood occupies a critical position within his work.? Scholars have recognized the importance of the house for its pioneering use of Grecian forms, especially the primitive Doric porticos of its south facade. Little has been written, however, about its history, its site, or its planning.

86

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Multiple factors affected the design and creation of Hammerwood, including the personalities and ambitions of its clients, its landscape setting, the existence of the earlier house on the site that Latrobe incorporated into the new one, and the modifications and additions of subsequent owners to Hammerwood to make it a more practical residence. Hammerwood is a complex building for which historic evidence is fragmentary. The loss of most of Latrobe's English papers means that none of his client correspondence survives, and the commission is mentioned only fleetingly in his journals. Recently, however, important new documentation has come to light. In 1997, a presentation-quality perspective drawing of Hammerwood by Latrobe was discovered in England that shows the house either in an earlier phase of

its design evolution or as an alternative proposal to that which was built. Then, in 2002, photographs and architectural drawings emerged that document the house as it was in 1864-1865, immediately before a remodeling by its new owners, Oswald Augustus and Frances Dora Smith, and their Victorian architect, S. S. Teulon. These documents and much information dis-

covered by David Pinnegar and his family (the current owners of Hammerwood) have shed new light on Latrobe's first independent building and have made it possible to hypothesize about its earliest form.

In 1821 (after Latrobe's death, perhaps from information gleaned from

The Sperlings

Latrobe's brother Christian Ignatius Latrobe), Rudolf Ackermann described how the architect received the Hammerwood commission:“ Whilst pursuing

his studies at home, he [Latrobe] was visited by a friend, Mr. Sperling who, finding him disengaged, and admiring his growing talents, commissioned

him to design and build for him a mansion near East Grinstead [Sussex], to be called Hammerwood Lodge.’3 Sperling's visit to Latrobe probably occurred in late 1791 or early 1792; Latrobe was 28, and Sperling was 29 years old. John Sperling (1763-1851) came from a well-to-do family of Essex. He was educated at Felsted School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and served as justice of the peace for Essex. The Sperlings had emigrated from Sweden to England in the late seventeenth century; they were involved in the fur trade and had established a business in London. They eventually purchased Dynes Hall, a seventeenth-century country house with a five hundred-—acte estate, at Great Maplestead, in Essex.* By the mid-eighteenth century, the Sperlings had

removed from London to Essex where they became a part of the local gentry, ‘New energy, ambition, and perhaps money, entered the family with the marriage of John Sperling to Harriet (Rochfort) Kilpatrick in 1789. He was

Hammerwood and Ashdown

87

then 26 years old, and she was around 31 and the widow of John Kilpatrick, a member of Parliament for Corville, County Tipperary, Ireland. Mrs. Sper-

ling was born Harriet Rochfort (ca. 1758-1854), daughter of William Rochfort of Clontarf, County Dublin, Ireland. Her uncle was Robert Rochfort, Baron Bellfield, later first Earl of Belvedere; her grandparents George and Lady Elizabeth Rochfort; her great-grandfather the third Earl of Drogheda. The Rochfort family built several classical country houses, including Rochfort, the house of Harriet's uncle George Rochfort, and Gaulston and Belvedere, the houses of her uncle Robert Rochfort, north and west of Dublin.* These grand houses surely helped to form Harriet Sperling's ideas of country-house life. Belvedere especially, a house of her uncle Robert Rochfort, perhaps influenced her when she and her husband collaborated with Latrobe in the planning of Hammerwood. Architect Richard Castle designed Belvedere ca. 1740 as an elegant, classical villa retreat, with a long garden front and a plan basically one-room deep. It overlooks a landscape sweeping down to the shores of Lough Ennell. The length, shallowness, and topographical situation of this Irish villa recall the eventual plan and siting of Hammerwood, The name “Rochfort” suggests that Harriet Sperling's family had Norman or French ancestry. Latrobe himself had both French and Irish family connections, though he generally chose to deemphasize his

family’s Irish history in favor of its more remote French ancestry (his father’s family had left France in the late seventeenth century and had resided in Dublin for much of the eighteenth century).® In this case, however, the common Dublin connections of both Latrobe and Mrs. Sperling perhaps engendered a solidarity that may help explain why Latrobe got the Hammerwood commission. John and Harriet Sperling maintained a town house at 34 Devonshire Place, in the Marylebone region of northeast London, a newly developing area near Portland Place, just south of what would soon become Regent's Park and the most fashionable residential district in the city.” This adventurous new location seems consistent with the Sperlings’ patronage of an untried but precocious young architect and with the avant-garde style of Hammerwood. It also predicted a theme of Latrobe's career: he and progressive clients like the Sperlings had a magnetic attraction for each other. Harriet Sperling's relations formed the major social and business con-

nections of the family. Her brother William Rochfort had married John Sperling's sister Elizabeth in 1788, making Sperling and Rochfort double brothers-in-law. Harriet’s sister, Mary Rochfort, married Edmund Grange,

88

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

of an aristocratic Irish family that had previously intermarried with the Rochforts. Grange served with the British military in India. Harriet’s sister

Diana Rochfort (d. 1803) first married William Cotes, an East India merchant of Calcutta; after his death, she married Sir John Hadley D’Oyly, 6th Baronet D’Oyly, a successful East India merchant and an intimate of War-

ren Hastings, the famous governor-general of India (for whom S. P. Cockerell had designed Daylesford). Sir John and Lady Diana kept up D’Oyly Park, their Hampshire estate, and a London house in Portman Square; their

parties included the Sperlings and perhaps also Warren and Marian Hastings. The Sperlings, as part of the D’Oyly—Hastings—East India circle, may have had the Hastings’ fashionable new Daylesford in mind when they commissioned Latrobe to design Hammerwood. The Sperlings reached their social zenith in the early 1790s, with three residences: their London house, Dynes Hall in Essex, and their new country seat at Hammerwood in Sussex.? In them, Latrobe found the ideal clients: willing to give a young architect his first commission and, with their ambitious, yet undefined, social position in London, eager to be adventurous aesthetically in order to attract attention. The Sperlings’ ambitions suggest a functional program for Hammerwood: that it be fashionable, visually arresting, and designed for entertaining, though not for year-round living, as they surely intended to retain their London house. They named the new house “Hammerwood” as a romantic reference to the hammer used in the furnace of the ancient iron forge that had existed on the property since the Middle Ages. That they called it Hammerwood Lodge” suggests the character of a rustic retreat for hunting and riding parties, the great aristocratic entertainments of eighteenthcentury England, although John Sperling also had interests in experimental farming that he likely intended to pursue as part of his improvements to the estate.?° The program for Hammerwood thus suggests stables and kennels for horses and dogs in addition to the necessary entertaining rooms,

service rooms,

and accommodations

for guests from

London.

Another aspect of the Sperlings’ situation perhaps affected Latrobe's designs: while building Hammerwood,

they were also investing large

amounts of money in business ventures, such as the building of a great distillery in Dublin. They probably wished to create a house of impressive appearance for the most reasonable outlay. This may help explain why Latrobe used a multipavilion composition, which was visually grand, yet

could have a shallow plan and be constructed and occupied in stages.

Hammerwood and Ashdown

89

In 1792, the Sperlings purchased the Bov-er, an estate of several hundred acres near East Grinstead in Sussex on which to construct their new country house, The estate is approximately thirty miles south of London—less than a day's carriage ride—and only twelve miles west of Tunbridge Wells, an increasingly fashionable late-eighteenth-century spa town. Construction of Hammerwood began in 1792, and by September of that year, Latrobe anticipated needing scaffolding poles and planks for which he inquired of St. Swithun’s Church in East Grinstead. On 23 and 24 October 1792, Christian Ignatius Latrobe wrote in his diary of a trip with his brother from London to Hammerwood: “After breakfast we set out for Hammerwood Lodge a place now building by my brother for a Mr. Sperling, who at present inhabits a farm called the

Bower|.] This place is 3 mls. and % from E. Grinstead... We met Mr. Sperling at the lodge, and while my brother was given [surely CIL meant, or wrote, giving’] his Directions, Mr. Sperling took me all around.’!? By the autumn of 1792, Latrobe was thus supervising construction, whether related to demolishing parts of the old building, excavating and laying out foundations, or putting up of walls.

A Greek inscription molded into the backs of

the Coade Stone column capitals of the west pavilion of Hammerwood bears the date of 1792 and states that this was the “first portico” erected, while the capitals of the east portico are simply stamped “Coade Lambeth 1792." This suggests that both sets of Coade capitols were simultaneously cast in 1792 but that the west pavilion was the first built. Christian Ignatius’s account also suggests that the Sperlings may temporarily have resided in an existing farmhouse on the Bower estate, at a short distance from the building site. In addition to the Bower farmhouse, however, a larger house, possibly also called the Bower, existed on the Hammerwood site itself.1* The form of this old house is not known, but it is probable that Latrobe incorporated portions of it into the new Hammerwood.

The Hammerwood Site

Latrobe's design process for Hammerwood began with his response to the

and Landscape

site and its landscape, which, to a certain degree, was fixed by the location of the earlier house. It is an Arcadian setting. As Christian Ignatius Latrobe continued on his 1792 visit: “Mr. Sperling took me all around and across the woods to explain his intended plan of improvement. Nature has done a great deal for him. He has low and high wood, hills, vales, runs of water, springs &c. and but a little assistance from art is wanting to render this as delicious a Spot as any in the Kingdom,."?°

90

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

The landscape context conspired to make the south front the most impottant feature of the new house. Hammerwood is sited on a south-facing hill above a valley. The south facade looks across the valley to a stream where once sat the iron forge that gave the house its name. A serpentine lake, artificially

dammed from the stream and apparently part of the Sperlings’ landscaping scheme, occupies the valley floor. The lovely prospect is enhanced by open parkland, which sweeps from the house down extends visually beyond the boundaries of the views of distant hills continuing south for two arrival of the Sperlings and Latrobe, the site may

to and across the lake and Hammerwood estate, with or three miles. Before the have been more forested, as

its earlier name, The Bower, suggests (though the charcoal-burning operations necessary for the early iron foundry may have resulted in its gradual

clearing). Latrobe and his clients probably enhanced the lovely parkland prospects to the south of the house. Both the new house and its views seem to have been simultaneous creations of Latrobe and the Sperlings. Writing in America, long after the Hammerwood commission, Latrobe claimed a “very intimate’ acquaintance

with Humphry Repton (1752-1818), the renowned English landscape gardener.'© Many features of the Hammerwood landscape, including the extended southern prospect from the house and its appropriation of views beyond the estate boundaries, conform to Repton’s theories. Although the date Latrobe mentioned for his intimacy with Repton was 1794, it is not unreasonable to suppose that their acquaintance began earlier, perhaps in 1792 or 1793, when the young architect was planning Hammerwood. By the early 1790s, Repton’s career was ascending, with commissions pouring in to him from all over England, and he was codifying his design principles and consolidating his practice as the country’s preeminent landscape gardener. Latrobe would have known some of Repton’s “Red Books,” in which the landscape designer presented his drawings and recommendations for specific commissions. Repton was also preparing his first book for

general publication (Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, completed in 1794; published, London, 1795). This, too, was the moment when gentlemen theorists Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price challenged Repton’s ideas in an exchange of published open letters and in their respective books

(Knight's The Landscape, a Didactic Poem and Price's Essay on the Picturesque; both, London, 1794). Through Repton, Latrobe thus had firsthand knowl-

edge of the development and controversies of picturesque landscape theory and practice.

Hammerwood and Ashdown

gI

Fig. 2.1. Latrobe's Hammerwood

(ca. 1791-1795),

Sussex, from the original southwest approach.

(Michael Freeman photograph; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

Repton’s principles tended to be pragmatic. He advocated a

relatively

direct approach to the house rather than the more circuitous routes of other picturesque theorists and he avoided small garden follies, advocating instead that the house be the principal ornament of the park. He carefully studied the effect of optics and proportion and used his observations to increase the apparent size of parks and the houses within them. He recommended that water within landscapes should follow natural rules of shape and location, preferring serpentine lakes that followed valley floors. The serpentine lake at Hammerwood, in its length and narrowness, may have appeared from the house more like a substantial river flowing through the estate, another of Repton’s techniques for enlivening a prospect. The creation of the Hammerwood lake, with its regulating sluices and weirs, conforms to Latrobe's canal-building experiences. Repton claimed to have learned much about the control of water within his landscapes from canal engineers; he may have had

92

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe in mind.17 In addition to ornamenting the landscape, the lake surely served boating and fishing parties. If Latrobe and the Sperlings did not actually consult Repton about the Hammerwood landscape, his theories probably influenced them. _ The main approach to Hammerwood was from the southwest, through the village of Ashurst Wood. The drive entered the Hammerwood park from the south, curved in an easterly direction, and then executed a full ninetydegree turn to the north, at the head of the lake. This approach, with its

sharp turn (a technique used often by Repton), revealed to visitors a fine view of the south front of the house on its distant slope (fig. 2.1; plate 3). From that point, the drive crossed the stream on a stone bridge (which survives) and curved uphill along a margin of trees to pass by the western pavilion, where it

circled behind the house and then continued north to the stables (which survive, but have been remodeled many times and are currently divided into

flats). A secondary road branched off to the west of the house, running north past the Bower Farmhouse (which survives in altered form), to join the road from East Grinstead to Tunbridge Wells. Another drive apparently continued beyond the house to the northeast, joining the main road farther to the east

(fig. 2.2).1® The original approach exhibited Hammerwood's south facade to great advantage, while the most sweeping landscape views from the house are also to the south. The northern portion of the site is a wooded, uphill slope that conceals both the stables and the Bower Farmhouse. The Hammerwood site discouraged conventional architectural responses based on any of the standard eighteenth-century country-house types, such as the long, “hall-saloon” country house, or the more compact villa. The hallsaloon plan—usually a rectangle two-rooms deep with opposing entrance and garden fronts—had a hall in the center of the entrance front and a corresponding saloon on the garden front. One approached and entered the hall and moved through the house on its short axis into the saloon, which typically overlooked the parkland and landscape views. Villas, by contrast, usually had squarish plans and nearly equz' fronts, simultaneously creating sculptural objects within the landscap nd houses that served as fourfronted, landscape-viewing devices.

The Hammerwood site challenged both of these plan types. The fact that it nestled into the side of a hill rather than being at the top, or ridge, meant that its south facade could be easily approached and would have extensive views, while the north facade would be less accessible and would have restricted views. The east and west fronts had better prospects than the

Hammerwood and Ashdown

93

north front, but less dramatic than that of the south front. The site thus dic-

tated a hierarchy: the south front would be the primary facade (both for the approach view and for prospects from the house), the east and west fronts secondary, and the north front tertiary. Neither the opposing, entrance, and garden fronts of the hall-saloon plan, nor the four, more equal fronts of the villa plan would suit this context. Complicating the problem was the fact that Latrobe was undoubtedly using portions of the older house on the site, while attempting to conceal them with new construction. He seems to have confined visible portions of the older house to the north, while encasing and concealing it with new construction on the south, east, and west. On the basis of his decisions both to approach Hammerwood from the south and to create a landscape-viewing terrace on the south front, one can speculate with some degree of confidence that Latrobe established the present topographical contours of the Hammerwood site. By excavating from the

hillside to the north and by terracing the soil to the south and east (a “cut-andfill” operation), Latrobe simultaneously formed a rear (northern) service courtyard cut into the hill, and a front (southern) terrace created by the displaced

3 miles to

12 miles to

East Grinstead

Tunbridge SA Wells Bower Farm

Fig. 2.2. Schematic map of Hammerwood site in late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams; reconstructed from an 1808 ordnance survey map, British Library Map Room; an 1841 tithe map, East Sussex Record Office; and an 1873 ordnance

survey map, British Library Map Room)

Stream

1 mile to Ashurst Wood i

94

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

_——

———

)

50 ft.

Original Ground Line

Earth Fill of South Terrace

earth. This terrace gave the new house’a podium that enhanced its visual

Fig, 2.3. Hypothetical site section of

impact from the southern approach and created an effective platform from

Hammerwood, 1790s, cut from north to south.

which to view the valley from the house. (‘The terrace on the south front orig-

(Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

inally sloped more gradually away from the house but in the later nineteenth

century was landscaped into four more pronounced earth terraces:) Latrobe's original cut-and-fill terrace required considerable earth moving. The architect, with his engineering and canal-building experience, would have been com-

fortable with this sort of large-scale site reconfiguration (fig. 2.3). In his transformation of a sloping hillside into an artificial terrace, Latrobe may have submerged portions of the earlier house on the site and have used some of its walls as foundations and cellars for the new house.!® Because of the greater slope of the site to the east, the terracing was deeper on the southeast, which helps to explain the existence of vaulted cellars under the east wing of the house. Latrobe must have built these cellars at least partially above the original ground line, then terraced the earth up around them. The terrace on the south front also recalls Repton’s landscapes. Repton departed from the practice of his precursor, landscape gardener Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716-1783), who set country houses in an undifferentiated sea of lawn, preferring instead a somewhat more formal treatment in the immediate vicinity of the house and often recommending terraces and parterres to separate the house from the park and to give the landscape near the house a more practical and domestic character. Repton’s terraces were sometimes walled or balustraded but served the same purpose as Latrobe's more naturalistic earthen terrace at Hammerwood:

to enhance the dra-

matic character of the house and to serve as a convenient place—an outdoor room, really—for strolling and viewing the park.?°

Hammerwood and Ashdown

95

Latrobe's Design Process for Hammerwood

The earliest visual document in the design evolution of Hammerwood—and the only drawing by Latrobe to survive of the house—is the elegant perspective rendering (figs. 2.4—2.5; plate 4). This drawing (now in the Drawings

Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London) probably dates from late 1791 or early 1792 at the beginning of the Hammerwood design process,” Latrobe depicted the south front of the house, resting on its banked earth terrace, with the wooded hillside rising behind it to the north. Oddly, he chose a viewing angle from the southeast rather than from the southwest, which would ultimately become the major route of arrival. It is possible that he made this drawing before he became fully acquainted with the potentials of the site, including the planning of the eventual southwest approach road and the resulting views of the house from the distant landscape. Latrobe perhaps also selected this angle to conceal some vestiges of the earlier house that remained on the west flank wall. He may have felt that the house made a more attractive closeup perspective from the southeast because the arcaded loggia in the east wing contained a fully glazed conservatory,

while he depicted the west wing loggia as containing some blind arches (probably a result of the unusual room configuration behind it). Also, the eastern half of the house was Mrs. Sperling's particular domain, and the architect may have rendered it from the southeast to please her. Latrobe included portraits

of his clients in the Hammerwood drawing (fg. 2.6). Harriet Sperling, with her three children, is seated prominently on the lawn in the central fore-

ground, beneath the shade of a great tree, while John Sperling stands at a distance, beneath the portico, with his dog and gun (his enthusiasm for hunting being one of the motivations for building this hunting lodge house).?? Mrs. Sperling’s prominent position in the drawing suggests that she played an important role in the commission. Although Latrobe's design is a five-part composition typical of neoPalladian houses, the central block is, in its nearly four-square compactness and integrity, more like a freestanding villa to which wings have been added, or a “villa with wings.’?3 Latrobe also synthesized the approach and the garden facades on the south front, which both acknowledged the circumstances of the site and served picturesque aesthetics; the south facade thus became both a focal object to be viewed within the landscape during the approach and a lens through which to view the landscape on arrival. The Hammerwood design shown in Latrobe's perspective drawing does

not correspond entirely with the house as built (see figs. 2.14-2.15). Although the wings shown in the drawing are virtually identical to those in the final

96

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 2.4. Latrobe's perspective drawing of a

proposed design for Hammerwood, from the southeast, ca. 1791 or 1792. (British Architectural

Library, Royal Institute of British Architects, London, Latrobe Heritage Trust, Pilgrim Trust,

Heritage Lottery Fund)

Hammerwood, the central pavilion is significantly different. The differences suggest that this drawing represents either an earlier stage in Latrobe's design process for the house or a variant design that the Sperlings chose not to build.” It is an unorthodox design. Even though it employs a traditional, fivepart, neo-Palladian composition, Latrobe suffused it with new ideas. The central pavilion is a two-story, three-bay block with a one-story Ionic portico. The wings are composed of one-story, arcaded loggias that link Doric, temple-like end pavilions to the central block. The central pavilion is set almost directly on the ground, with no basement or rustic. It is a smooth ashlar box with windows cut into its surface, their frames recessed behind the masonry plane of the wall. The south facade contains, on the ground story, three giant

Venetian windows within blind arches (the ultimate source for which was probably the garden front of Chiswick, 1727-1729 [see fig. 6.23]); the central Venetian opening is made into a glazed door. Above these large openings are

three small rectangular windows in the second story. This composition (tri-

0

Fig. 2.5. South elevation of Latrobe's Hammerwood design as derived from his perspective

drawing (see fig. 2.4). (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

50 ft.

Hammerwood and Ashdown

7

partite openings below, smaller windows above, an Ionic portico) echoes the sea front of Pierremont Hall in Kent (ca. 1791-1792, Chapter 1), the villa designed in S. P. Cockerell’s office while Latrobe was there, and forecasts Latrobe's design for the nearby Ashdown and is one to which he later returned,

notably at Sedgeley in Philadelphia (Chapter 5) and at the commandant’s quarters at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh (Chapter 6). The most progressive English villas of the later eighteenth century, such as those by John Soane, substituted simple, three-bay compositions for the earlier, 1-3-1 villa fenestration pattern. The elevation of this Hammerwood central block appears to be a double square in its proportions, probably 50-feet wide by 25-feet high

(approximately the same width as in the house as built). Above the secondstory windows is a plain entablature capped by a parapet, at the center of which is inserted a raised rectangular block with a recessed panel. Above the parapet rises a hipped roof with a shallow central deck and low chimneys. On the east wall of the central block is another Venetian window. The

wings (which are identical in the house as built) adjoin the sidewalls in a Fig. 2.6. Details of John Sperling and his dog;

Harriet Sperling and her children, from Latrobe's perspective drawing of Hammerwood (see fig. 2.4). (British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects, London)

somewhat jarring fashion. Despite their setback from the frontal plane of the central block, they meet its sides uncomfortably near the flanking Venetian windows. Latrobe's setting back of the wings such a distance from the facade plane probably resulted not only from his attempt to increase, villa-like, the visual autonomy of the central block and to preserve its east and west landscape views but also perhaps from his attempt to accommodate portions of the earlier house on the site and to plan the lateral circulation of the new

house along its rear (or northern) walls. The arcaded wing to the right, or east, contains an orangery-conservatory, its arches glazed with double-hung sash behind which plants are exhibited. This was the perfect orientation for a conservatory, with south-facing windows and a protected northern wall. Integral conservatories became more common in nineteenth-century villas but were unusual at this date.?> Here may be a programmatic requirement specific to clients especially interested in horticulture and floriculture. Above and behind the east wing Latrobe shows a long, lateral roof that, in the house as built, belonged to the north, or rear, service offices. Latrobe's use of Greek orders in this design was advanced and unorthodox. For the central portico, he employed a modified version of the Ionic order and antae of the Erechtheum at Athens, with the columns left unfluted and the antae capitals simplified.?° The end pavilions are bold, Doric temples. The column capitals of these porticos conform to those of one of the sixth-century

B.c., Greek Doric temples at Paestum, in southern Italy near Naples (known

98

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

as the “Basilica” in the eighteenth century, it is now known as the “Temple of

Hera I”). Thomas Major published this temple in his The Ruins of Paestum (London, 1768). Although Latrobe visited Naples and may have viewed the nearby Paestum firsthand, it is likely that his primary visual source for this

order when designing Hammerwood was Major's publication (fig. 2.7).?” The original Paestum Doric order, however, had fully fluted column shafts, while Latrobe's column shafts are fluted only at the base and the top, above the necking band. Latrobe seems to have adopted the idea of these partially fluted, or “unfinished,” column shafts from the Doric Temple of Apollo at Delos (the

mythological birthplace of Apollo), as discovered by Julien-David LeRoy and published in his Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Gréce (Paris, 1758) (fig. 2.8).28 Behind these “synthesized” Doric columns, at the corners of the small temples, Latrobe used the bold and primitive anta order of the Paestum tem-

ple, with its flaring, cavetto-like capital (as published by Major). Latrobe probably combined the Paestum Doric and the Apollo-Delos Doric orders for a variety of reasons, including practical, visual, and symbolic ones. The Delos-like elimination of the fluting of the stone column shafts made for greater ease and economy of construction, while the more elaborate

Paestum-Doric capitals could be cast in Coade Stone (as they were in the house as built) rather than being laboriously carved.?° The boldness and reduction of detail in the columns and thus their lack of identifiable scale create the optical illusion from a distance that they are larger and more monumental than they are, thereby increasing the apparent size of the house as a whole. Finally, the fusion of these “primitive” Greek Doric orders created appropriate symbolic references for a house intended as a rustic hunting lodge and entertaining pavilion. Major, in The Ruins of Paestum, cites the idea that Greek Doric temples originated in primitive wooden structures with columns made of tree trunks; Latrobe, in his perspective drawing of Hammerwood, seems intentionally to have juxtaposed the Doric portico of the west pavilion with trees in the landscape behind it.3° Major also refers to Scamozzi’s characterization of the Doric as a masculine, even “Herculean,” order and implies that the thickset proportions of the Paestum Doric temples prove this theory.3! From the Renaissance onward, depictions of Hercules show him as “the hunter,’ an apt reference for a hunting-lodge house. The reference to Apollo, via the Delos Doric columns, was apposite as well, Apollo being the patron deity of both archery and music, activities symbolically appropriate to a hunting lodge and entertaining pavilion? That the

more “masculine” Doric order of the end pavilions survived in the house as

Hammerwood and Ashdown

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built, while the more “feminine” Ionic portico shown in the drawing of the central block was eliminated, suggests that the Sperlings’ vision for their house conformed with this more rustic and masculine imagery. Latrobe's fusion of the Paestum and Delos orders at Hammerwood proved stylistically revolutionary. Before this date, fewer than a dozen examples of the Doric Revival had appeared in England; Latrobe was the only British architect ever to use this specific, Paestum-derived Doric order. Latrobe himself used this Paestum Doric order only once more, in the Supreme Court Chamber in the lower level of the U.S. Capitol Building. Economy of construction, a quest for simplicity, the search for origins, and the return to nature for physical and moral improvement, all became themes associated with the revival of the Greek Doric. Hammerwood was among the earliest and most powerful instances of its use in Britain. The boldness of Latrobe's Doric wings makes the central block appear rather tame by comparison. The architect eventually resolved this problem by redesigning it. But the contrasts among the parts of the design in his perspective drawing may have been intentional. Although Latrobe's precocious use of the Greek orders makes this design advanced for its date, its subversion of Palladian hierarchies and the discontinuous character of its composition were equally adventurous. Latrobe may have intended the more refined Ionic portico to denote “higher” functions for the central block and the Doric porticos to signal more “rustic” functions for the wings, but the visual power of the Doric end pavilions causes them to visually dominate the more delicate Ionic portico of the central block and thus—perhaps unintentionally—to subvert the implied, neo-Palladian hierarchy of the composition. [he somewhat diminutive size of the Ionic portico is part of the problem. The use of two orders on a single elevation was not unprecedented in eighteenth-century country-house design, but when English architects used different orders in such multipart compositions, the central order invari-

ably took precedence through its size or placement (either by being a giant order, embracing more than one story, or by being raised on a basement; the

former exemplified in James Wyatt's Heaton Hall and the latter in Robert Adam's Kenwood). In Latrobes Hammerwood perspective drawing, the juxtaposition of the delicate Ionic portico at the center, with the more powerful Doric pavilions at the ends, creates a disconcerting weakness in the middle of an otherwise traditional, centralized composition. Adding to the unorthodox quality of Latrobe’ design is the discontinuity of its parts. The Ionic portico is unrelated to the bold central block against

102

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

which it rests, the wings are visually unrelated to the central block in their attachment to its side elevations, and the open, arcaded forms of the wings contrast with the closed, cubic mass of the central pavilion. Finally, the Doric end pavilions are unrelated to any of the other elements in the composition. With their plain, thickset columns, against blank, cella-like walls, they look like

isolated landscape temples plucked from a picturesque park (the original context in which revived Doric temples were introduced to England).* It is as if Latrobe assembled disparate parts—a plain-style villa, a Grecian Ionic portico, orangery-like arcades, and Doric temples—to emphasize their separate functional and typological origins. A “primitive” lack of coordination underscores the autonomy of these parts, each of which expresses itself individually at the expense of the whole. The entire composition is discontinuous in the manner of the baseless, Greek Doric columns of Paestum or Delos, in which few moldings or other transitional elements exist to soften the abrupt juxtapositions of bold geometric forms. It was this abruptness and lack of refined transitions through unifying features such as moldings and ornament that an older generation of English architects such as William Chambers found so objectionable in Greek architecture, particularly in the Greek Doric order. Thus, despite the overall Palladianism of its five-part composition, the Hammerwood design of Latrobe's perspective drawing challenged English architectural conventions. It seems at once precocious and somewhat immature, as if Latrobe's first attempt to integrate such “primitive” Doric porticos into an overall architectural composition fell short of complete success. Had it been built, however, this design would have been both theoretically and visually one of the most heterodox British country houses of its day. No floor plan survives to accompany Latrobe’ perspective drawing, but it

is possible to hypothesize one (fig. 2.9). Each of the three principal units of the elevation (the central block and its fanking wings) is approximately 50 feet long, yielding a facade of 150 feet in total length (corresponding to the house

as built). The central block appears to be wider than it is deep, or approximately 50 feet wide by 40 feet deep (again, nearly corresponding to the dimensions of the house as built). The locations of the entrance, windows, and chimneys in the central block suggest a central-hall plan with deep, symmettical rooms to either side; these rooms were apparently intended to have fireplaces on their interior walls, centered opposite the arched, Venetian windows in the exterior sidewalls. The similarity of Latrobe's central pavilion in this early Hammerwood design to that of his later Ashdown suggests that he may have envisioned the Hammerwood hall and staircase as similar to that for

Hammerwood and Ashdown

103

Services

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Fig. 2.9. Hypothetical plan, derived from Latrobe's perspective drawing of Hammerwood

(with possible service circulation illustrated). (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

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50 ft.

Ashdown. If so, this would suggest a central hall with a three-part, “Imperial” stair. It is possible that the rooms to either side of the central hall were to be entered by symmetrical enfilades of doors at the front and back of the hall and that circulation along the north, or rear, walls of the rooms could continue uninterrupted under the landing of the staircase, the central run of which, like the original stair at Ashdown, the architect perhaps intended to be of arched masonry construction. A rear corridor may have been intended to link the cenFig. 2.10. Detail from Latrobe's perspective draw-

tral block and its wings to the kitchen service wing behind the house to the

ing of Hammerwood of east pavilion portico

north. The rear corridor would have provided efficient service access to all the rooms of the central block and the wings.

and Coade Stone plaque derived from the “Borghese Vase.” (British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects, London)

In his Hammerwood perspective drawing, Latrobe carefully delineated a pair of sculptural plaques, or panels, above the doors of the porticos of the

east and west pavilions (fig. 2.10). The panel on the eastern pavilion is especially clear and shows, even at this early stage, that Latrobe and the Sperlings intended to incorporate the Coade Stone plaques that appear in the house

as built (figs. 2.11, 2.12). These plaques derive from the “Borghese Vase,’ an antique marble vase that was in the collections of the Villa Borghese in Rome, erroneously thought in the eighteenth century to have been by the

Greek sculptor Phidias. The vase depicts Dionysian (or Bacchanalian) revelers, including nymphs and satyrs, in ecstasies induced by wine, music, and dance.?* The Coade factory separated the figures on the vase into two groups

and produced from them the two plaques found at Hammerwood (which are the only known examples of the Borghese group in panel form). The plaque on the eastern pavilion seems to depict Dionysus (Bacchus) and the old satyr Silenus, the latter overcome with wine; in this context, perhaps, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the dangers of too generous hospitality and overindulgence! At Hammerwood, these plaques provide a witty and appropriate iconography for a house intended for entertainment and revelry.

104

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig, 2.11. Coade Stone plaque derived from the “Borghese Vase,’ above door of east pavilion of Hammerwood as built. (English Heritage, National Monuments Record; reproduced

courtesy of David Pinnegar)

Fig, 2.12. Coade Stone plaque derived from the “Borghese Vase” above door of west pavilion

of Hammerwood as built. (English Heritage, National Monuments Record; reproduced

courtesy of David Pinnegar)

Hammerwood as Built

In the final Hammerwood as built, Latrobe retained the wings shown in the

perspective drawing while altering the design of the central block (fig. 2.13). It is possible that the Sperlings accepted the wings but rejected the earlier centralblock design for both aesthetic and functional reasons. Latrobe's subversions of hierarchy and the fragmented character of the composition may have disturbed them; it is also possible that Latrobe himself, on further study of the site and the planned approach from the southwest, redesigned the central block to have a bolder scale and more visual drama from the distant landscape views. It is also possible that both clients and architect decided to retain a greater proportion of the walls from the earlier house on the site and that the final design for the central block specifically accommodated this existing fabric. It also seems likely that the Sperlings requested fewer and larger rooms in the central block than were contained in the plan that accompanied Latrobe's perspective drawing. Latrobe's final design for the central block made its plan more complex and more independent of the exterior composition, while simultaneously providing larger entertaining rooms on the ground story and adding

Fig. 2.13. Doric portico of west pavilion at

Hammerwood, showing Paestum anta order at corners. (Michael Freeman photograph; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

106

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

extra bedrooms in a raised attic story. The final design also integrated the central block more successfully with its wings and made it more visually dominant

and of an apparently larger size (especially as seen from a distance) than the design shown in the perspective drawing. The architect accomplished all this by retaining the precocious Doric wings, eliminating only the Delos-like fluting of the column bases, and by asserting more traditional compositional principles of hierarchy and unity in the central block. Despite this return to conventionality, however, Latrobe gave the revised central block a bolder and more striking Grecian character than that of his earlier perspective drawing, The best visual document of Hammerwood’s south facade as first com-

pleted is an 1864 photograph from the southeast (fig. 2.14). Made by later owners of the house (and part of a larger set of 1864-1865 photographs and draw-

ings), this photograph nearly replicates the angle of Latrobe's perspective drawing (see fig. 2.4).3© From this historic photograph (as well as from the other photographs and drawings and from on-site inspection), an elevation of the south facade of Latrobe's Hammerwood can be hypothesized (fig, 2.15).

Hammerwood and Ashdown

Fig, 2.14. Hammerwood from the southeast,

1864 photograph. (Courtesy of Sir John Smith,

CH CBE)

167

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For the final central block of Hammerwood, Latrobe designed a giantorder, pilaster-portico, or frontispiece, three bays wide and two stories high,

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Fig. 216. (Bottons) Detallle: Pasobecnmtencd

derived the order of the giant pilasters from the freestanding Paestum-Doric

“Doric” capitals of the Hammerwood pilasterfrontispiece on the central block of the south front. (Patrick Snadon; reproduced courtesy of

columns and capitals of the end pavilions (figs. 2.16, 2.17).3” These giant pilasters give the central block the scale and power necessary to establish its hierarchical precedence over the Doric end pavilions and to create a more

David Pinnegar)

impressive presence for the house from its distant landscape views. The pilasters also create greater continuity between the central block and the end pavilions through the use of related orders. To further integrate the central block and the wings, Latrobe introduced a horizontal belt course between the first and second stories that continues the entablatures of the wings across the central block “behind” the pilasters of the giant portico and weaves together the disparate parts of the composition. The central block is thus less autonomous, less like a freestanding villa than that of the perspective drawing, and more a part of the overall Palladian composition. Latrobe also substituted a more traditional 1-3-1 pattern of fenestration on the facade of the central block for the three-bay villa facade depicted in the perspective drawing. It is possible that the change to this 1-3-1 fenestration accommodated an existing window pattern or existing wall fabric from the earlier house on the site; the redesign of the central block may have facilitated the inclusion of some existing walls from the older house within the new facade. The belt course, for example, may have been useful to conceal a horizontal masonry joint resulting from a new second story added atop existing first-story walls, while the shallow, pilastered frontispiece may have covered similar vertical joints where new and old construction met. Only once following Hammer-

wood did Latrobe employ giant-order columns for a domestic building: in the

108

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

porticos of the President's House in Washington, D.C., where, not unlike Hammerwood, he was attempting to create new facades and a grand, new image for an existing older building. Latrobe's redesign of the central pavilion of Hammerwood

not only

increased the hierarchical order and consistency of its overall composition but simultaneously increased the apparent size of the house, as a central block penetrated by five smaller window bays looks larger than one of the same size penetrated by three larger windows. The success of this illusion is proved by a comparison of the Hammerwood facade with that of the later Ashdown: the 50-foot-wide, five-bay central block of Hammerwood appears larger and grander than the 60-foot-wide, three-bay facade of Ashdown. Latrobe's final, central block of Hammerwood was far more powerful than the bucolic three-bay villa shown in his perspective drawing. This power derived not only from the monumentality of the colossal pilaster-frontispiece Fig. 2.17. Detail of Latrobe's Paestum-Doric

but also from the increased depth of the entablature and cornice and the architect's introduction of a squat, parapet-like attic story above the cornice.

column capitals on portico of east pavilion

This raised attic was a more functional variant of the central tablet that he had

Monuments Record; reproduced courtesy of

inserted in the parapet of his earlier perspective design. Three horizontal

David Pinnegar)

at Hammerwood. (English Heritage—National

windows penetrate this attic above the portico and are repeated in the parapets of the flanking east and west sides, giving light to the additional chambers in the third story. This raised attic relates the Hammerwood facade to that of Gore Court, Kent, the country-house remodeling from S. P. Cockerell’s ofhce executed while Latrobe worked there.3?8 The Doric pilasters of the central frontispiece at Hammerwood support an isolated section of architrave beneath the heavy frieze, creating a further sense of compression over the portico and giving the entire facade a sunken, or compressed, character. The heaviness of the final main block of Hammerwood, combined with the lack of a basement or rustic story, gave the house a weightiness, a power, and a cubic integrity that equaled the boldest of the “plain style” or “square style’ neoclassical houses of the next two decades.39 Hammerwood exceeded in plainness and primitive power any country house in England to its date,

including those by John Soane. For the exterior walls, Latrobe used boldly chiseled sandstone blocks with more finely chiseled or smoothed margins. This created a strong surface texture appropriate to the rustic character of the house. It is possible that the earlier house on the site was built of this chisel-finished stone and that Latrobe, in adding to it, left some original walls exposed and blended them with his new construction. He perhaps also demolished portions of the existing house and reused its stone in his new construction. In addition, he may have reopened the quarry from which the earlier stone came. Latrobe's new linking arcades, the porticos of the east and west pavilions, and the colossal pilasters of the central frontispiece are of smooth-cut ashlar. The columns and pilasters are of a

cool gray stone (originally almost white), which contrasts effectively with the warm yellow sandstone body of the house. One would suppose from Latrobe's final composition for the south front of Hammerwood that the plan of the central block would contain more rooms than it does. The central pavilion, with its 1-3-1 bay composition and its central, walkout windows, suggests the plan of a traditional hall-saloon house (with an entrance hall on the north, leading into a saloon on the south, corresponding to the three central windows, and to adjacent smaller

rooms to either side, corresponding to the single side windows). The wings suggest symmetrical passage spaces behind the arcades, leading to rectangu-

lar, cella-like rooms behind the temple-fronted end pavilions (fig. 2.18). However, if all the rooms “expected” from the exterior elevation actually existed behind it, they would be inconveniently small. Such a plan would contain too many rooms for the limited, 150-foot length of the house. Here Latrobe's

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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The early Hammerwood plan of Latrobe and the Sperlings (as hypothesized from the 1864 photographs [see figs. 2.14, 2.34, and 2.36], the 1864-1865

drawings [see figs. 2.3 and 2.43], and on-site investigation) was probably long and shallow, with a linear disposition of public rooms along its south front (fig. 2.19). These rooms were connected by a 130-foot enfilade, or alignment of doorways, along their north walls, which formed both a visual and circulation axis. Behind the public rooms to the north were the service rooms and offices, (probably less extensive in the 1790s than they became with additions by later

owners). [he overall dimensions of this hypothetical plan suggest that Latrobe laid it out using 25- and 50-foot modules (fig. 2.20). At Alderbury House previous to Hammerwood and at Ashdown following, Latrobe created plans based on modules of 30 and 60 feet. This suggests that, at this point in his career, the architect preferred plans based on modular dimensioning systems, It is possible that his specific use of 25- and 50-feet modules in the Hammerwood plan somehow accommodated existing walls or foundations of the earlier house on the site.

The first public room at the west end of this plan is the great library. A central fireplace occupies its north wall and bookshelves line its north, south, and east walls; on its west wall, three large, glazed “French” doors originally opened into the landscape. The library straddled the exterior compositional

units of the temple front and the arcade; surprisingly, the entire south wall of

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the library was blind. The exterior temple front was a sham, with a false door, while all the windows of the arcade were blind but with full, glazed exterior sashes. [his articulation of a blind wall is reminiscent of Sir Robert Taylor's

(and later Soane'’s) articulated, blind perimeter walls at the Bank of England. Latrobe's blind “veneer” of the south wall of the Hammerwood library wing, as well as the excessive thickness of the east and west walls of the library, suggest that this room might have remained from the earlier house. The library is quite large relative to the total size of the house and suggests the Sperlings’ interest in books, though by the later eighteenth century,

Fig. 2.19. Hypothetical Hammerwood first-story plan; 1790s, Latrobe-Sperling period. (Patrick

Snadon / Thomas Williams)

libraries also functioned as living, entertaining, and reception rooms (as in Robert Adams famous library at Kenwood, 1767-1770). The great, western French doors of the Hammerwood library suggest a possible entrance for guests arriving by carriage perhaps reinforcing its alternative use as a recep-

tion room, as well as an egress into the landscape (see figs. 2.42, 2.48). That the windows are confined to a single wall agrees with Latrobe's general preference for lighting rooms from one direction only, Next to the library, on the east, is the entrance hall, entered from the north through a shallow Doric-columned porch. This hall terminated in an apsidal end on the south, again, like the library, concealed on the south facade by blind-arcade windows. The apsidal end of the entrance hall occurred almost 6 feet forward of the south outer wall, leaving a thick, undefined area of poché. It possibly screened a secondary staircase from the landing of the adjacent main stair, up to what Latrobe may have intended as a viewing platform, or belvedere, on a shallow roof deck atop the west wing. Latrobe recorded in his English notebook a formula for roofing, using a boiled tar and chalk mix-

ture, under the title “Earl [of ] Stanhope's Cement for Roofs—or Decks of

Fig, 2.20. Hypothetical first-story plan of Hammerwood with modular 25- and 50-foot

Ships,’ which could be applied to flat or shallow roofs of splined planks

grid superimposed; 1790s, Latrobe-Sperling

butted end-to-end like floorboards, “in order that the Inhabitants [of the house] may have the pleasure and convenience of walking on the roofs for air

period. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

and retirement.’4° The apse at the south end of the entrance hall may have carried a low half dome, enabling the little stair to rise over it. On the west wall of the hall, large double doors led into the library, while an opposite door, on the east wall, led into the stair hall. The latter door was single but had a corresponding inset in the wall, which may have held a matching false door to balance the double doors of the library. This balanced apsidal hall, with its cross-axial circulation, recalled similar halls by Sir Robert Taylor and forecast Latrobe's sophisticated basilican entry vestibule at Decatur House in Washington, D.C.

Hammerwood and Ashdown

113

Within the main block of Hammerwood, Latrobe created three spaces of unequal size: the stair hall, the dining room, and the drawing room. In the stair hall, a U-shaped stair rose from the east to an intermediate landing on the west wall, with the door from the entrance hall beneath, and returned to the second-story landing on the east. The open well between the stair runs was 3 feet wide, a more generous dimension than Latrobe allotted to subsequent domestic staircases; this suggests that he may have designed the Hammerwood stair within an existing space—perhaps within the stair well of the earlier house. A window high on its north wall lit the stair hall. South of the stair hall was the dining room, a 17- by 24-foot rectangle with a deep, perhaps half-domed, apse on its north wall. The back of this apse contained a sideboard niche. A fireplace was centered on the shorter east wall, with two windows on the south wall and a blank wall on the west. The large apse and sideboard niche were removed in an 1865 remodeling, but its walls were apparently made of masonry because its stone foundations survive beneath the floor. The massive foundations of this apse, and the fact that it shared a wall with the main stair on the north, suggest that Latrobe created a complex arched and vaulted masonry structure in the apse wall that perhaps supported and balanced a cantilevered stone staircase, a solution that comported with his engineering training. Entrance to the dining room from the stair hall occurred through a curving passage in the wall poché. On the opposite side of the apse, a similar curved passage led from a door under the stair landing directly outdoors through a half-blind fan-lighted French door, its southern half captured within the wall poché of the apse. This passage may have functioned either for guests to move from the stair hall out onto the south terrace or for servants to access the south terrace during outdoor entertainments without having to pass through the major public rooms. Latrobe

used such curving “poché passages’ in the earlier Alderbury House (Chapter 1), and later in designs such as those for the Pennock House in Richmond,

the Tayloe House in Washington, D.C. (Chapter 4), and others. The French door in the west wall is surprising. Half blind, it occurs, like its counterpart in the east wall of the central block, very close to the arcade of the wing, with a long, blank stone wall to its south. Although its position

is the same as its eastern counterpart, its form differs (cf. figs. 2.14, and 2.34). The corresponding eastern opening is a three-part Venetian window within

a blind arch (as Latrobe had depicted in his perspective drawing) (cf. figs. 2.4 and 2.14). These different windows disrupt the symmetry of the main block of the house, although they would never have been seen at the same time, and

114

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

the one in the west wall would not have been visible from inside because it

was wholly concealed within the wall. (When S. S. Teulon, the architect of the 1865 remodeling, removed the dining room apse, he opened this western window into the room and rebuilt it after Latrobe's design for the window in

the east wall, so that the two now match.) The asymmetry between the east and west windows could hardly have been Latrobe's choice and suggests that the arched western window may have survived from the earlier house.*! The central wall dividing the dining room and the drawing room forms another surprise in the plan. It cuts axially through the middle of the central block, bisecting the central windows on the south facade, which, in all the stories, are blind, though they contain full, glazed sash. These sham windows and the denial in the floor plan of the central axis of the south elevation seem so idiosyncratic as to defy that they could have been part of Latrobe's original planning, except that he had employed exactly the same device only slightly earlier in his design for Alderbury House (Chapter 1). Hammerwood, however, exhibits more conscious artifice even than Alderbury House. For example, the single end windows on the south front of the central block and the blind-arched side windows of the pilastered three-bay frontispiece acted as identical, nearly symmetrical, pairs of windows from inside the main rooms of the central block, creating regular interior wall elevations, while on the exterior, they are read as differently shaped windows, belonging to different com-

positional units (fig. 2.21). From these floor-length windows, the rooms communicate directly with the south terrace and its fine landscape views. To the right, or east, of this central wall is the drawing room, which, at 24 by 36 feet, equaled the great library in size. The drawing room undoubtedly functioned not only for conversation and social gatherings but also for music and dancing; perhaps even for banquets that exceeded in size the capabilities of the dining room. A fireplace is centered in its long west wall, opposite the arched Venetian window on the east. The room is encircled by square, Doric

pilasters that have mirrored panels set in their faces (the present owners have

Fig, 2.21. Analytical-axonometric diagrams illustrating Latrobe's central spine wall and “window artifice” on exterior and interior of the south front of the Hammerwood central

block. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams / Iulia Ionesco)

recently restored these mirrors, the originals having been lost sometime in the

twentieth century) (figs. 2.22-2.24). The pilaster shafts rest on plinths that correspond to the height of the chair rail. Both the pilasters and their plinths are made of wood, while the pilaster capitals, like the beaded and rosetted cornice above them, are cast in plaster. Although additional wooden moldings were later applied to the walls and elegant Elizabethan Revival pargework

plaster moldings were applied to the ceiling (perhaps in 1865 by architect S.S. Teulon for the Smith family), the pilasters and cornice of this elegant room

Hammerwood and Ashdown

115

Fig. 2.22, Hammerwood drawing room

seem to be original to Latrobe. The mirrored pilasters recall, in a restrained

with mirrored pilasters. Photograph from the

fashion, Robert Adam's Glass Drawing Room at Northumberland House in

late nineteenth or early twentieth century

(reproduced from a 1921 sale catalogue). Marble mantelpiece shown is possibly the original

by Latrobe. (East Sussex Record Office; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

London (1773-1775; demolished).4? They create a highly successful neoclassical space, filled with light, reflections, and glimpsed diagonal vistas. This room sparkles on the cloudiest of English days and would glitter at night by the light of candles or Argand lamps. The pilasters on either side of the Venetian window are hollow and conceal sets of hinged, multipanel wooden

shutters that fold across the almost 8-foot span of the window (fig, 2.25). Fig, 2.23. (Opposite) Hammerwood drawing room; current photograph (mantelpiece dates from earlier twentieth century). (Patrick Snadon; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

116

When they are closed, the shutters are secured by a pivoting wrought-iron bar. The openness of Latrobe's houses to the landscape through such large glazed doors and windows required ingenious mechanisms for closure and

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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East of the drawing room, in the arcaded link between the central block and the eastern temple-pavilion, was a conservatory exactly as Latrobe had

shown it in his perspective drawing (see fig. 2.4). The final room on the south front lay behind the temple portico of the eastern pavilion. It may orig-

Fig, 2.24. (Opposite) Hammerwood drawing

inally have served as a breakfast room and family dining room. It perhaps also functioned as Mrs. Sperling's sitting room or parlor from which she con-

frieze; mirror panels restored by current owners

ducted her household affairs. It is conveniently near the rear service wing for

in the late 1990s. (Patrick Snadon; reproduced

all these purposes. In his American houses, Latrobe advocated such a room on the ground floor, which, he said, gave the wife “her breakfasting parlor or

courtesy of David Pinnegar)

room; detail of mirrored pilaster, capital, and

housekeeper's room, if she pleases, [and] her kitchen, scullery, storeroom,

larders, [and] pantry snug around her.’#+ This eastern-most room at Hammerwood would have made a charming breakfast parlor. It opened through the temple portico onto the southern terrace and had in its eastern wall a large, arched window that overlooked the sharply falling landscape to the east, with its hills, vales, and morning sunrises. The idea of a Greek temple with an arched window in its flank represented a precedent for Latrobe's later use

of such a motif for the Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1798).

Fig. 2.25. Detail of Hammerwood drawing room showing hollow pilaster adjacent to east Venetian window, with concealed multihinge

shutters. (Patrick Snadon; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

Immediately behind this “breakfast parlor” is a large room that may have been the original kitchen. Although it had no direct communication with the “breakfast parlor,” it was conveniently connected to it through the conservatory. Under both these eastern rooms, Latrobe built masonry-vaulted cellar rooms, the front one probably for wine and stores; the rear one perhaps a laundry-washroom with a copper vat and stove flued into the south wall. These vaulted cellars meant that the rooms above could have masonry floors—a great

asset in a kitchen, where fireproofing and heavy wear are issues (the two vaulted cellar rooms survive). The original kitchen was apparently two stories high, which would have helped to stratify heat (see figs. 2.3 and 2.26).4 The service wing of Latrobe's and the Sperlings’ Hammerwood thus probably consisted of this lateral range of rooms immediately behind the north wall of the public rooms.

As Hammerwood functioned as the Sper-

lings’ secondary residence, this limited complement of service rooms would probably have sufficed. These rooms had their own service corridor, imme-

diately behind and parallel to the enfilade of the public rooms. The service corridor originally connected with the public rooms through the conservatory and possibly through the main stair hall.4° Three probable servants’ bed-

chambers existed above the service rooms, in the second story (fig. 2.27).

Hammerwood and Ashdown

119

The original second story at Hammerwood probably consisted only of the rooms in the main block of the house and those above the lateral service wing

(the latter with rather low ceilings). The second story of the main block contained three bedchambers and two basilican rooms. The smallest of these apsidal rooms, on the west, probably functioned as a dressing room, while the larger one, on the south front and with the best view of any room in the house, may have functioned as Mrs. Sperling's upstairs sitting room or dressing room.‘ Circulation on the second story occurred along a lateral, east-west corridor that rather awkwardly penetrated the central north-south spine wall rising from the ground story below. A small staircase to the third story, or attic, may originally have occupied the east end of the lateral corridor, although it is also possible that Latrobe created the rear service stair shown in the northern appendage. Like Latrobe's back stair at Ashdown, it rose from the first through the third stories, while the main stair went only from the first story to the second. The third, or attic, story of Hammerwood contained extra chambers and possibly nursery rooms for the Sperling children; small windows in the parapet lit all these rooms, which might also have been used by servants or by guests during large entertainments and hunting sorties. A summary of this hypothetical reconstruction of the original Hammerwood plans may be helpful. The Latrobe-Sperling period house was probably along, shallow composition with its principal public rooms aligned along the

Fig, 2.26. Hypothetical Hammerwood cellar

south, or garden, front. Although a main entrance existed on the north front, the many large, floor-length windows and French doors on both the south

plan (with first-story plan above, in gray) 1790s, Latrobe-Sperling period. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

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Existing Latrobe Cellar Rooms

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room could thus become an entry or reception space. In this regard, Hammerwood resembled eighteenth-century French and German garden pavilions and hunting casinos.** This turned the exterior spaces surrounding the house, especially the newly created south terrace, into “outdoor rooms,’ with richly varied prospects. Latrobe connected the public rooms of Hammerwood via a circulation enfilade running east and west on the north side of the rooms. To the north, behind this public enfilade, existed an equally shallow alignment of service rooms with their own east-west circulation enfilade, paralleling that of the public rooms and connecting to them at convenient points. Enfilades were an effective but, by the late eighteenth century, old-fashioned way of arranging circulation. At Hammerwood, they resulted partly from Latrobe's creation of the impressive south front and the consequent length and shallowness of the plan and possibly also from residual elements of the older house on the site. As the popularity of the enfilade waned in the later eighteenth century, along with the rigid hierarchical distinctions between social classes that it reflected, it was gradually supplanted by the more compact “circuit” plans of

smaller villas (such as those pioneered by Sir Robert Taylor, see fig. 1.4), with their circular arrangements of public rooms wrapped about a central staircore. In the “circuit villas,’ each public room typically had a different shape and a different prospect; these differing rooms and views resulted in highly scenic internal effects.

Fig. 2.27. Hypothetical Hammerwood second-

At Hammerwood, Latrobe employed an enfilade plan but updated it with the

story plan in 1790s, Latrobe-Sperling period.

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circuit villas, Latrobes Hammerwood plan represented a synthesis of the two types that might be termed linear scenery, or a picturesque enfilade. In this clever hybrid of enfilade and circuit villa planning, the rooms along the enfilade varied in their sizes, shapes, axial orientations, and landscape views. Beginning on the west, the library is a rectangle, with its length parallel to its east-west entrance axis and with highly controlled landscape views only to the west through its large, French doors. The dining room, entered mysteriously through a tiny, darkened passage within the wall poché, is a cross-axial space with its greatest length and its fireplace on the east-west axis but with its curved apse and southern landscape views on the opposing, north-south axis. The drawing room has its greatest length on the north-south axis, with fine southern views, but with a secondary east-west axis defined by its western fireplace and its great eastern window, which looks toward the temple portico of the east pavilion. In addition, its mirrored pilasters create multiple diagonal vistas. The conservatory lies on the east-west axis with fine southern views, and the little, square breakfast-parlor” looks to the east, but with a door onto the south terrace through its temple portico. The windows of each of Hammerwood’s public rooms framed distinct and different “landscape pictures’; that of the library to the west, that of the “breakfast parlor” to the east, and those of the dining

and drawing rooms to the south (fig, 2.28). Fig. 2.28. Analytical diagram of Hammerwood illustrating circulation enfilade through the principal rooms and views from the windows into the

landscape. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

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Despite deploying the scenery of the circuit villa to vary the picturesque effects of the rooms along the Hammerwood enfilade, Latrobe avoided any hint of circuit-type circulation, Had he inserted a real door between the dining and drawing rooms, for example (where a false door or niche shows in the

1865 record plan (see fig, 2.37), those rooms and the stair hall might have comprised an abbreviated circuit of rooms within the central block. The lack of such a connecting door may have resulted for reasons of gender segregation. Men traditionally remained after dinner in the dining room to drink, smoke, and talk politics, while the women withdrew to the drawing room. As Robert Adam remarked in contrasting French and English social customs, English men “indulge more largely in the enjoyment of the bottle,’ which, combined

with the more democratic nature of English politics and the frequent political conversations after dinner, “lead men to live more with one another and

more detached from the society of the ladies [than in France].’ Adam concluded that in England “eating rooms are considered as the apartments of conversation,’ in which the men pass a great part of their time and that, if possible, a room should be interposed between the dining room and that to which the ladies withdraw after dinner to prevent “the noise of the men from being troublesome.’*? The solid wall between dining and drawing rooms at Hammerwood may have served the same purpose as Adam's intervening room and perhaps facilitated the “hunting lodge” portion of the functional program for the house, enabling the men to carouse in the dining room after the hunt without disturbing the ladies. It perhaps also reflected Mrs. Sperling's aristocratic upbringing in Ireland, where the more democratic social customs and fluid mingling of genders embodied in the “circuit plan” may have been slower to penetrate than in England. Like earlier plans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hammerwood plan seems to divide itself into masculine and feminine wings, or suites, of rooms. [he western half of the house, containing the library, the dining room, and the entrance hall, constitutes a more “masculine” realm, while the eastern half, containing the drawing room, the conservatory, the “breakfast parlor,’ and the kitchen and service spaces, constitutes a more “feminine” one. The solid spine wall down the center of the plan reinforces this east-west, masculine-feminine division. And whereas the western wing opens primarily to the north and west to the approach road, the stables, and the kennels—a more active hunting and riding landscape—the east wing opens primarily to the south ter-

race—a more refined strolling and viewing landscape. Latrobe's early perspective drawing of Hammerwood reinforces this interpretation as it more

prominently depicts the “feminine” eastern wing with Mrs. Sperling and her children seated on the terrace before it. Latrobe's enfilade plan at Hammerwood, with its “scenic” variety of room sizes, shapes, orientations, and views, P probably Pp

Hammerwood and Ashdown

encouraged the occupants of Pp 123

the house to organize their entertainments in a sequenced, linear fashion, as opposed to the entertaining patterns of the circuit-villa plans, which accom-

modated simultaneous activities in the different rooms (conversation, cards, refreshments, music, and dancing), with a free flow of circulation among them. Although no accounts survive to document how the Sperlings conducted their entertainments during their short tenure, Hammerwood’s second family, the Dorrien Magenses, entertained on a large scale and apparently orchestrated their events as the plan dictated, in a linear sequence with marked elements of picturesque surprise. An account of one such event survives. In 1824, the family celebrated the coming-of-age of its heir, John Dorrien Magens, and a description appeared in a Sussex newspaper. In the evening after nine oclock, bonfires were lit on nearby hills and the guests for the ball began to assemble. The exterior of the house was surmounted by a white flag and illuminated by red and white lamps. “The eastern pavilion was converted into a tasteful ornamental tent, in which the hostess received her visitors,’ and the staircase, hall, and dancing room were “beautifully decorated with wreaths of natural and artificial flowers, amidst a dazzling blaze of light.” A band struck up at Io P.M. and dancing continued until midnight, “when a magnificent fireworks display took place.’ Then, at half past one, “the folding doors of the great library were thrown open, and produced a most enchanting and cheerful effect, the room was splendidly illuminated by festoons of lamps in the viranda

[sic], and fitted up with orange and lemon trees, and various exotics and flowers as a conservatory. A sit-down dinner was then served to more than two hundred people, “for all of whom ample room was provided in the library and dining room.” The party then returned to the ballroom, “where waltzes and quadrilles were resumed, and kept up to a late hour.’*° The “ornamental tent” that transformed the eastern pavilion into a reception space may have been on the exterior or interior.*! Guests were likely driven up to the south facade where they then entered the east wing through the temple portico or through the large windows of the conservatory. The “staircase, hall, and dancing room,” decorated ensuite in wreaths of flowers, surely referred to the staircase hall, the entrance hall, and the drawing room, which, converted for dancing with its mirrored pilasters, would account for the “dazzling blaze of light” reported by the newspaper. When at midnight the fireworks display took place, the company must have spilled out onto the south terrace through the numerous floor-length windows and glazed doors of the

south facade. When at 1:30 A.M. “the folding doors [i.e., double doors] of the great library were thrown open,’ it was found to be fitted up as an additional

124

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

dining room but decorated as a conservatory, perhaps with potted trees and plants moved temporarily from the actual conservatory in the east wing, which itself must have functioned mostly as a corridor and a place to retire and cool off from the dancing, The dinner for more than two hundred was served simultaneously in the dining room and the library, presumably on temporary trestle tables in the latter room. That the library was “illuminated by festoons

of lamps in the viranda,” suggests that a porchlike structure, perhaps even of temporary wood and canvas, was built outside the west-facing French doors.

This 1824 account shows that the spaces of the house were opened to visitors in a calculated sequence of events throughout the evening, corresponding with the available rooms and distribution of the plan. It demonstrates how Latrobe's linear sequence of rooms, each with picturesque elements of variety and surprise, influenced the staging of entertainments at Hammerwood. The lack of a symmetrical, centralized entrance; the absence of a basement story; and the proliferation of glazed, full-length windows and French doors enabled visitors to enter and exit the interiors at multiple points, cre-

ating great intimacy between the house and its landscape. In this, Latrobe with great prescience predicted the developing character of British villas and country houses for the next several decades. Another virtue of Latrobe's multiple entries and lateral circulation enfilade at Hammerwood is that they concealed from visitors the shallowness of the plan and the fact that the multiple units in the composition of the south facade did not correspond with the few, large rooms behind it. The landscape approach to the house from the southwest displayed for visitors the illusionistic monumentality of the south facade, while their entrance into any one of the multiple, asymmetrical entry points and their subsequent movement along the lateral enfilade effectively “disconnected” their experience of exterior and interior, leaving them no spatial cues whereby to understand that the actual rooms of the interior did not correspond with the compositional units of the south elevation. Architectural historians have interpreted Latrobe as a “rational classicist” for the boldness and economy of his simple geometries and for his reduced Grecian vocabulary and have seen Ham-

merwood as the first statement in this development.*? But Latrobe's intricate and artifice-filled planning elides the “rationality” of his classically simple and direct exteriors. Hammerwood sat astride a watershed in British country house design: its planning exhibited the asymmetry of later “picturesque” villas, such as those by John Nash, while its external composition maintained the decorum proper to classical country houses.

Hammerwood and Ashdown

125

The Old House and the New: Latrobe's Strategies of Transformation

Latrobe's achievements at Hammerwood seem the more impressive in that he incorporated significant parts of an earlier house into his new composition. The necessity of so doing—probably at the behest of his clients—challenged him and spurred his creativity. The boldness of Hammerwood’ exterior and the unorthodoxy of its plan may be in part attributable to this circumstance. Latrobe later stated that remodelings and transformations of older buildings generally were unpleasant for the designer but that such difficulties often produced more

creative results than the “regular but tame” course of wholly new

architectural design. Such limitations he called “the stimulus of difficulty.’ The older house at Hammerwood may have been extensive. In 1766, the

Paynes and Smiths (the intermarried families who owned the property through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) paid a window tax on a house of forty-one “lights” (i.e., windows), making it the fifth largest house in the East Grinstead area.** The new Hammerwood, after Latrobe's 1790s building campaign, probably contained around sixty to sixty-five windows, meaning that the

house did not increase much over 30 percent in size (though Latrobe may have demolished portions of the older house, so that the proportion of new fabric

could actually have been higher than 30 percent, even if the overall size was not). It is possible, from the existing fabric of Hammerwood and from the 1860s photographs and drawings of it, to hypothesize about the location and extent of the existing house and about Latrobes strategies for incorporating it into his new design. On the west wing, the sham temple portico and the completely blind arcade of the south front suggest that the architect possibly encased or “veneered” an existing structure with new construction. [he west

wall of the library, with its three French windows, is very thick; Latrobe may have increased its thickness, perhaps rearranging its openings. [he north wall of the library, with its outset exterior chimney, may have been built anew by Latrobe or may have been an existing flue wall. Next to the library, Latrobe also surely created the basilican entrance hall and its north, Doric portico.** In the central block, the fact that the elliptical-arched glazed door in the

west flank wall does not match Latrobe's window in the east flank (cf. figs. 2.14 and 2.34), that a portion of the west foundation wall is slightly out of line with the upper wall, and that behind the steps of the giant pilaster-frontispiece on the south facade the western half of the foundation wall is roughchiseled, while the eastern half is smoothed ashlar all suggest that portions of the east half of the central block may have already existed.*° Latrobe's belt course between the first and second stories of the central block may have concealed the addition of the second story, while the pilaster-frontispiece

126

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

may have concealed vertical joints joining new construction between the east and west halves of the central block. The fully glazed conservatory in the east wing, the “breakfast parlor” behind the temple portico, the “kitchen” behind that, and the room to the west of the “kitchen,” all seem to have been constructed anew by Latrobe, the last three because of the masonry-vaulted cel-

lars beneath them (though it is also possible that Latrobe inserted this vaulting within existing cellars or ground-story rooms of the earlier house). Variable wall thicknesses (as recorded in the 1865 first-story plan; fig. 2.37) suggest that the remaining three rooms of the early service wing to the west were probably preexisting, Even if part or all of the shell of the central block existed, Latrobe certainly reconfigured its floor plan and room distribution, presumably adding the apse and sideboard niche in the dining room and the mirrored pilasters in the drawing room. Latrobe surely also added both the second story and the attic to the central block. The evidence thus suggests that Latrobe created the powerful Hammerwood south facade through some new construction, through the encasing and concealing of old construction, and by deftly stretching the strongest imaginable Greek Revival forms across both to unify them. Latrobe's south facade at Hammerwood rises above a merely skillful integration of old and new architectural fabric: it pioneered a Greek Revival style of such boldness that the architects of succeeding generations rarely equaled and never exceeded it. If Latrobe's south front at Hammerwood is impressive, his achievement in integrating old and new construction in the floor plan is equally so. By

observing the variable wall thicknesses (as recorded in the 1865 first-floor plan; fig. 2.37) and by taking into account the exterior observations, it is possible to speculate generally about what portions of the house may have existed and what portions Latrobe added. When this information is distilled to a basic

conceptual diagram, it suggests that the spaces that became the library (in the west wing), the stair hall and dining room (in the west half of the central block), and the western portion of the rear service wing, all may have survived from the earlier house—the space of the drawing room (in the east half of the central block) may either have been built, or rebuilt, by Latrobe, or may already have existed (fig. 2.29). Latrobe's major additions and interventions thus seem to have been the sham temple portico and the blind arcade fronting the west wing; the basilican entry hall, door, and curving screen wall on the north; the dining-room apse and sideboard niche, and the drawing-room fireplace wall, mirrored pilasters, and Venetian window in the central block; the giant-order frontispiece in the center of the south facade; the conservatory

Hammerwood and Ashdown

127

and its glazed arcade; and the adjacent wing, with the vaulted cellars beneath. tions in the plan thus occurred within a deep and extending the 150-foot length

rooms of the end pavilion in the east Most of Latrobe's probable intervennarrow band of space, less than 10 feet of the house and included from west

to east: (1) the western temple portico, (2) the western blind arcade, (3) the dining-room apse, (4) the drawing-room fireplace, (5) the drawing-room Venetian window, (6) the conservatory arcade, and (7) the eastern temple portico. It seems that Latrobe drew this new “line of events” longitudinally through the center of the plan and, with the addition of the south pilasterfrontispiece and the north basilican entrance hall, unified a sprawling agglomeration of old and new construction and gained at one stroke an asymmetrical and event-filled sequence of rooms and a bold and symmetrical south facade. Latrobe had learned this sort of design process from his mentor, S. P. Cockerell, who displayed great dexterity in transforming older buildings. The sort of strategy and drawings that this process required is illustrated in Cockerell's surviving drawing for the integration of old and new construction

at Sezincote in Gloucestershire (ca. 1805) (fig. 1.8). As part of his design process for Hammerwood, Latrobe introduced into the plan and south elevation of the house the suggestion of a collection of small antique temples and basilicas reflective of the garden pavilions of picFig, 2.29, Schematic plan diagram of Hammer-

turesque parks (fig. 2.30). The conceit is that these little pavilions have been

wood showing possible Latrobe interventions seventeenth- to eighteenth-century house.

“plucked” from the landscape and integrated into the plan and the elevation of the house. Latrobe's inclusion of such antique temple and basilica forms

(Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

within his modern buildings is a design concept, or parti, to which he returned

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throughout his career; apparently, the idea originated with Hammerwood. Latrobe's achievement at Hammerwood is comparable to that of Robert Adam at Kenwood (1764-1779, for the Earl of Mansfield), which Latrobe

would have known through Adam's The Works in Architecture (1774) and perhaps at firsthand, as his friend Humphry Repton worked there in 1793.5” At both houses, the preexisting circumstances as well as the final results were

conceptually similar. At Kenwood, Adam began with an earlier house (built in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), which had a southern garden front and a detached conservatory to the west; both these circumstances perhaps resembled the preexisting conditions at Hammerwood. Adam linked the conservatory with the main house, refaced the south front of the main block and rearranged its room plan, and raised the roof of the main block by adding a third, or attic, story. On the east, he built a new wing, containing a great library-reception room, to balance the existing conservatory wing on the west (figs. 2.31, 2.32).°8 By contrast, Latrobe positioned the great

library at Hammerwood on the west (though the original space may possibly have been a detached conservatory like that at Kenwood) and built a new conservatory within the east wing. The wings of both Kenwood and Hammerwood had blank north walls; the Hammerwood conservatory wing on the east concealed the kitchen offices to the north in exactly the same manner as did the west conservatory wing at Kenwood. Other similarities between Kenwood and Hammerwood include the refacing and the creation of multiple-pavilion compositions on their south fronts, the placement of their libraries and conservatories in opposite wings, and their “gendered”

plans (the western portions of the Kenwood plan accommodated Lady Mansfield, while the eastern portions accommodated Lord Mansfield; at Hammerwood, this gender division was reversed, the western half of the plan

Hammerwood and Ashdown

129

Fig. 2.31. South front of Kenwood, Hampstead, near London, by Robert Adam, 1764-1779. (Patrick Snadon)

comprising a more masculine suite and the eastern half a more feminine one), Finally, at Kenwood and Hammerwood, the accommodation of earlier existing construction caused both Adam and Latrobe to develop spatial sequences characterized by asymmetry, novelty, and surprise. These effects constitute a type of planning related to picturesque landscape design, which is especially appropriate for interior circumstances that include the irregular and accidental effects resulting from the remodeling of existing fabric. Adam termed these effects “pictoresque”; Latrobe called them interior “scenery.’*° Although adding relatively little new fabric to Kenwood, Adam wholly transformed the old house into a successful thesis piece for his developing style. Latrobe accomplished the same at Hammerwood, where, while echoing Adam's Kenwood parti, he created a highly independent statement of his Fig,fo) 2 32. Analytical plan of Kenwood

showing

own new style, with bold Grecian forms and an intricate and artifice-filled

the earlier house and Adam’s additions of

floor plan. To Latrobe's credit and undoubtedly to the Sperlings’ delight, the

1764-1779. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams;

south facade of Hammerwood made nearly as grand a show as that of Ken-

Robert and James Adam, 1774)

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Although Hammerwood was one of the most daring English country houses

Hammerwood’s

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Completion and Afterward

the Sperlings finished Hammerwood, Circumstances conspired against both them and their architect. The British economy deteriorated throughout the 1790s due to instability accompanying the French Revolution and war between Britain and France, resulting in numerous English bank and busi-

ness failures. The Sperlings’ own outlays began to drain their resources. John Sperling led the family’s great distillery-building enterprise in Dublin (which included Harriet Sperling's brother-in-law and sister, Sir John and Lady D’Oyly, her cousin Gustavus Rochfort, and her brother-in-law Edmund and

her sister Mary Grange). Artist and diarist Joseph Farington ill-naturedly reported that the partners “overbuilt themselves at a vast expense,’ that the distillery failed, and that the D’Oylys lost £12,000, while the Sperlings lost £70,000, a large fortune for that period.®° Latrobes own bankruptcy, his failure to pay some of his workmen, and his abrupt exit from England, possibly complicated the Sperlings’ situation and may have caused disarray on the Hammerwood building site. Latrobe departed for America in November 1795; if the Sperlings had not already finished Hammerwood by this date, they perhaps went on to complete it without the architect's supervision. Then, between 1798 and 1800, the Sperlings gave up both Hammerwood and their London town house and returned to Dynes Hall, their ancestral home in Essex. In ca. 1801, the Dorrien Magenses, a London banking family, acquired the Hammerwood estate. In ca. 1805, a sympathetic traveler noted that Hammerwood was ‘another beautiful specimen of Latrobe's genius, in the pavilions of a house begun by Mr. Sperling, but not finished.’© It is difficult to know what might not have seemed “finished” at this date, and it is possible that the Sperlings left the house incomplete. But the balance of evidence suggests that the Sperlings did complete the house essentially as Latrobe planned it, at least the important south front and the public rooms behind it. The Dorrien Magenses seem gradually to have added to Hammerwood; perhaps the ca. 1805 visitor saw some of their additions underway and assumed that the house was “not finished.” Over the six decades of their ownership, between ca. 1801 and 1864, the Dorrien Magenses may have added to the house in an expedient, ad hoc

fashion as their family grew and they needed more space and services (fg. 2.33). Possibly they abandoned the original, Latrobe-Sperling kitchen in the east wing and built a new and larger one to the north. Eventually, they

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probably also built a new servants hall to the north, with extra servants’

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sleeping rooms in a new second story above and with a new staircase lead-

(black walls), with probable post-1800 rooms

ing up to them; also a housekeeper’s room east of the new kitchen, and a sec-

added by the Dorrien Magens family (hatched walls). (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

ondary, lateral corridor connecting it with the kitchen and the new backstairs. Possibly they later added new scullery, pantry, and larder rooms farther north of the new kitchen and two new laundry rooms to the east end of the house. The original, lateral, service wing of Latrobe and the Sperlings became mostly storerooms or passages through to the newer service rooms, except the large room at the west end of the old service wing, which was partitioned to create a passage on the south and a butler’s room on the north. The barnacle-like accretion of spaces under the Dorrien Magenses tenure reflects the increasing functional specificity and proliferation of service spaces typical of nineteenth-century country houses. The Dorrien Magenses also needed more bedrooms and probably obtained them by adding a low second story to the west wing, above the great

library and entrance hall (fig. 2.34; see also fig. 2.38). Possibly Latrobe had planned for the Sperlings a shallow-roofed observation deck for strolling and landscape viewing in this location, above an original one-story west wing. The new second-story bedrooms of the Dorrien Magenses perhaps used a small,

132

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

original staircase that rose from the landing of the main stair. These new bedrooms had windows only to the north and west; that they turned a solid wall

to the south and the fact that their ceilings would have been very low (no more than 8 or 9 feet in height), suggest that they may have been intended for additional servants sleeping rooms, although the bedroom to the west had a large western window with a handsome view. This second-story addition compromised the symmetry of the south front. The character of these additions suggests that the Dorrien Magenses probably relied on local builders rather than consulting professional architects. Because the Sperlings had intended Hammerwood as a part-time residence and a hunting-entertaining pavilion, Latrobe's plan must have seemed to later owners to be functionally limited and eccentric. It was well endowed with grand public spaces but short on services—especially by later nineteenth-century standards. Although the Dorrien Magenses’ additions of service spaces made Hammerwood a more functional country house, in an aesthetic sense, they let it “drift” considerably from the elegant, neoclassical pavilion of Latrobe and the Sperlings. ;

In June 1864, Oswald Augustus Smith (president and owner of Smith's Bank in London) and his wife, Frances Dora, purchased Hammerwood and began improvements that transformed the idiosyncratic pavilion of Latrobe and the Sperlings, with its functional additions by the Dorrien Magenses, into a substantial Victorian country house. The Smiths commissioned a set of photographs of the house (dated 1864) (figs. 2.14, 2.34-2.36) and retained

renowned Victorian architect Samuel Saunders Teulon (1812-1873) to design and supervise the remodeling. Teulon produced a set of record drawings of the house in ca. 1864-1865, showing it as it existed immediately before his remodeling (figs. 2.37-2.43).© (These photographs and drawings are a major source

for hypothesizing Hammerwood’ earlier appearance.) Teulon was probably the first professional architect at Hammerwood since Latrobe's departure seventy years before. His challenge was to preserve Latrobe's elegant, neoclassical house; to consolidate the useful functional additions of the Dorrien Magenses; and to add new spaces and services for the Smiths. Despite ‘Teu-

lon'’s nineteenth-century reputation as a Gothic Revivalist (and his twentiethcentury reputation as a “rogue” Victorian architect), his work at Hammerwood remained contextually and stylistically sensitive to the neoclassicism of Latrobe's original design. Teulon respected the integrity of Latrobe's impor-

tant south front while reorganizing and improving the Dorrien Magenses’ ad hoc service additions. He probably reopened the original stone quarry (as

Hammerwood and Ashdown

133

Latrobe himself may have done in the 1790s) to blend his new construction with the walls of the earlier house, so that the stone and its dressing methods match throughout. This gives Hammerwood great consistency of appearance. Teulon integrated his additions so carefully with the existing fabric that it is

difficult at first glance to discern them (figs. 2.44-2.46; plate 4). On the south front, Teulon preserved Latrobe's facade but raised the attic over the central block into a low third story. The proportions of this new story are similar to those of Latrobe's original attic at the nearby Ashdown, which Teulon may have observed. Teulon raised the low second story above the west wing by three stone courses and added a full second story above the east wing to balance it, thus restoring symmetry to the south facade. He lit these new second-story rooms with southern windows and capped all the pavilions and wings of the house with the same low-pitched, hipped roofs that Latrobe had originally given to the central block. In decisions that Latrobe would have approved, Teulon rebuilt the west-flank window of the central block to match the design of Latrobe's original Venetian window on the east and rebuilt the jack arches of the first-story end windows of the central pavilion to match those by Latrobe in the second story. Teulon thus “tidied up” and completed several things at Hammerwood that Latrobe himself was unable to do in his original building campaign. When one stands on the south terrace today, Teulons added stories are not intrusive and, from a near perspective, the house essentially displays the proportions given it by Latrobe (fig. 2.47). On the north front, Teulon rebuilt portions of the central block approximately 10 feet to the north of the original wall, eliminating an earlier shedroofed stair projection and creating a rear corridor lit in each story by pairs of flat-headed, tripartite windows (fig. 2.48; cf. fig. 2.36). This created a plan with a rear north corridor that must have been similar to that proposed by Latrobe to accompany the perspective drawing he created in the earlier phase of his design process (cf. fig. 2.47 with 2.4 and 2.9). Teulons north tripartite windows resemble the window shown on the east side of the central block of Latrobe's perspective drawing, leading to the speculation that some of Latrobe's drawings for the Sperlings may have remained with the house through its various ownerships and may have influenced Teulon during his remodeling.® Also on the north, Teulon removed most of the Dorrien Magenses added service rooms, rebuilding the kitchen-service wing to a full three stories and extending it somewhat to the north. He organized the new service wing along a centralized, north-south corridor that allowed for convenient circulation and generous quantities of light and air to the rooms on either side. This service corridor

134

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 2.34. Hammerwood from the southwest;

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Fig. 2.35. Hammerwood central block from the south; 1864 photograph.

(Courtesy of Sir John Smith, CH CBE)

Fig. 2.36. Hammerwood from the rear, or northwest; 1864 photograph.

(Courtesy of Sir John Smith, CH CBE)

Fig. 2.37. Ca. 1865 record drawing

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Fig. 2.40. Ca. 1865 record drawing of Hammer-

wood south elevation, probably from the

office of S. S, Teulon. (Courtesy of Sir John Smith, CH CBE)

Fig. 2.41. Ca, 1865 record drawing of Hammerwood north elevation, probably from the office of S. S. Teulon. (Courtesy of Sir John Smith, CH CBE)

Fig. 2.42. Ca. 1865 record drawing of Hammerwood west elevation, probably from the

office of S. S. Teulon. (Courtesy of Sir John South; Ce CBE)

Fig. 2.43. Ca, 1865 record drawing of Hammer-

wood east elevation, probably from the office of S. S. Teulon, (Courtesy of Sir John

Smith, CH CBE)

connects perpendicular to the new rear corridor of the central block, creating

convenient circulation along an extended “L” of new corridors. Teulon built a new cellar under the northern portion of the new service wing and left two of Latrobe's original vaulted cellar rooms intact to the south under the east wing. But he evidently truncated Latrobe's third vaulted cellar room to create a long brick-vaulted tunnel running beneath the central corridor of the new service wing and connecting his new northern cellars to Latrobe’ earlier cellars on the south. Teulon also rebuilt and enlarged the small

room behind the temple portico of the east wing (perhaps originally the Sperlings’ “breakfast parlor”) and made its floor level consistent with the rest of the Fig. 2.4.4. (Opposite, top left) View of Ham-

merwood from the southeast. (Michael Freeman photograph; reproduced courtesy

of David Pinnegar)

house, creating in its place a large, formal dining room. What had been the Sperlings’ conservatory in the east wing Teulon subdivided into a small sitting room and a passage to the south terrace. Inside the house, Teulon eliminated the apsidal ends of Latrobe's entrance

Fig. 2.45. (Opposite, center left) South elevation

hall and dining room and converted the dining room into a music room / par-

of Hammerwood after 1865 additions by

lor. He created a new staircase in the expanded northwest quadrant of the

S. S. Teulon for Oswald Augustus and Frances Dora Smith. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams / Iulia Ionesco) Fig, 2.46. (Opposite, bottom) Current firststory and cellar plans of Hammerwood after 1865-1866 additions by S. S. Teulon

for the Smith family (library bay and north porte-cochere added in later nineteenth

century). (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams) Fig. 2.47. (Opposite, top right) Hammerwood central block from south terrace. (Michael Freeman photograph; reproduced courtesy of David Pinnegar)

central block, thereby making it into a grander stair hall with a stair serving all the second-floor rooms.®* He wisely left Latrobe's handsome drawing room, with its mirrored pilasters, intact. In general, Teulon and the Smiths retained Latrobe’s Hammerwood

plan and its best features, but both

expanded and subdivided the house somewhat to accommodate the more functionally specific spaces required by Victorian social conventions. In less extensive additions, sometime between 1870 and 1893, the Smiths rebuilt the shallow Doric portico of the north entrance into a spacious, Doric porte-cochere. They also rebuilt the three large French doors in the west wall of the library as a bay window. In the early 1870s, the Smiths retained another notable architect, Richard Norman Shaw, to build the nearby Hammerwood

School-Chapel (a fine building of 1872 in Shaw's characteristic “Old English” style) and the Bower Cottages on the estate.®° They also had the stables remodeled. It is possible that Shaw did the stables and some of the later additions to the main house itself, such as the port-cochere and the library bay, or the Smiths may have employed other architects. *

*

*

*

*

Latrobe designed Hammerwood as a bold neoclassical house with unorthodox planning, grand public rooms, and minimal service spaces. [he Dorrien

Magenses, between ca. 1800 and 1864, made it more functionally convenient with a series of asymmetrical additions that complicated Latrobe's plan and

138

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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Fig. 2.48. Victorian-era photograph of Hammer-

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compromised his elegant neoclassical exterior. In the mid-1860s, the Smith

family and their principal architect, S. S. Teulon, restored symmetry to the south facade, while on the north, they rebuilt and expanded the service rooms and conveniences. The Smith family’s works at Hammerwood were professionally and sympathetically designed and made possible its survival as a functioning country house throughout the nineteenth century. Teulon’s work on the house in the 1860s and Richard Norman Shaw’s later work on the estate gave Hammerwood an extraordinary architectural pedigree. Few English country houses can boast an evolution that includes three such major architects such as Latrobe, Teulon, and Shaw, The Smith family left Hammerwood in 1901. Through the first half of the twentieth century, a series of sympathetic owners occupied the house and made only minor changes.°” During the Second World War, it served as a barracks and was afterward partitioned into eleven apartments. In 1973, members of the rock music group Led Zeppelin purchased Hammerwood, intending to convert it to a recording studio and living quarters. Instead, they abandoned it, leaving parts of the roof open, to deteriorate for a decade. In 1982, David Pinnegar and his family rescued Hammerwood in its eleventh hour. They have wisely restored it to its nineteenth-century architectural appearance and have made of it a family residence, a center for cultural activities, and an international destination for scholars and admirers of Latrobe. The preservation of Hammerwood is of the utmost significance, as it is one of Latrobe's greatest buildings. Its avant-garde use of Grecian forms, creative fusion of building types, picturesque planning strategies, and innovative relationships with its landscape, forecast the principal preoccupations of Latrobe's career and the major themes of British domestic architecture for years to come.

140

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Color Section I

English Houses

Plate 1. Alderbury House, Wiltshire, England,

rical floor plan, with rooms revolving around a

built for Salisbury merchant and mayor George

top-lit central stair. The north, or entrance, front

Yalden Fort and his wife Mary, ca. 1791-96.

has twin canted bays and continuous, parapet-

A handsome stone house, designed by Latrobe,

like chimneystacks in which multiple flues are

ca. 1791, while he worked in the office of London

grouped. The older Fort family house on the east

architect S. P. Cockerell. It has three different but

(left) became the service wing for the new house.

symmetrical fronts and an ingenious, asymmet-

( Michael Freeman pho)

late 2, View of Al d erbury House from the southw 7 (= st showingce the west front (left) Pp

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and south front (right), both facing the gardens.

( Michael

Freeman photograph)

Plate 3. Hammerwood, Sussex, England,

country house and Latrobe's use of “primitive”

ca. 1791-1795+. Designed by Latrobe for John

Doric orders on the end pavilions made it

and Harriet Sperling as a rural retreat for

one of the most progressive Greek Revival

hunting, entertaining, and horticultural pursuits.

structures in the British Isles for its date.

This view shows the south front as seen from

Victorian architect S. S. Teulon made sympa-

the original approach through the landscaped

thetic additions to the house in the 1860s.

park. Hammerwood

(Michael Freeman photograph)

is a grand, multipart

Plate 4. (Top) Latrobe's perspective drawing of

(Bottom) View of Hammerwood from the south-

a proposed design for Hammerwood, ca. 1791 or

east, showing Latrobe's Greek Doric end pavil-

1792; pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor. Note Harriet

ions and his final design for the central block,

Sperling and her children seated in the landscape to the left and Johns Sperling with his hunting dog and gun in the portico. (British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects)

with its bold, pilastered frontispiece. S. S. Teulon raised the second stories over the wings and the third story over the central block in the 1860s.

(Michael Freeman photograph)

Plate 5. Ashdown, Sussex, England, 1792-1795.

tripartite composition

Latrobe's elegant stone villa for Trayton and Anne Fuller, built in front of an existing Tudor manor house. (Top left) View from the south, across the Ashdown Forest. (Top right) The original south-

with balcony above. The house sits atop an

are the remains of the earlier Tudor manor house;

western approach. (Bottom) South, or entrance,

to the right are school buildings added in the early

front of Latrobe's vertical, villa-like facade with its

twentieth century. (Michael Freeman photograph)

and circular Ionic portico

earthen terrace created by Latrobe, with stone steps leading down into the landscape. To the left

Plate 6. Interior of Ashdown'’s circular temple portico with Latrobe's innovative dome, made of interlocking Coade Stone panels. This portico served as an entrance to the house and probably also as a semioutdoor sitting and dining room, open to landscape views south of the house.

(Michael Freeman photograph)

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ASHDOWN

nearby Sussex estate to be called Ashdown Park after the surrounding Ashdown Forest. Latrobe probably designed Ashdown late in 1792, construction began in the spring of 1793, and the house received its interior fittings and furnishings in the spring and summer of 1795, before the architect sailed for America. Latrobe supervised the construction of Ashdown virtually from start to finish—a rare occurrence among his domestic commissions. Latrobe came to the notice of the Fullers through his work for the Sperlings. Rudolf Ackermann, in his 1821 obituary of Latrobe, stated that the Hammerwood project “obtained for him the further patronage of Mr. Trayton Fuller, for whom he designed a house at Ashdown Park.’6* ‘Thus the Sperlings, as ambitious outsiders, came down to Sussex to build and brought with them their young London architect, who then began to attract the attention of the local gentry. ; The Fullers rose to prominence in Sussex with the local iron-founding industry. They received a family coat of arms in the fifteenth century and by the sixteenth century had settled in Waldron, eastern Sussex, where they operated an iron furnace called the Heathfield Foundry. In 1662, King Charles II placed them on the gentry list and by the early eighteenth century they had acquired extensive landholdings in Sussex. In the later eighteenth

century, the bulk of the Fuller property passed to the dashing John Fuller IV (known as “Jack” Fuller, of Rosehill at Brightling), the cousin of Trayton Fuller of Ashdown. John Fuller was a significant patron of art and architecture.®° Perhaps to distinguish himself from his better-known cousin, John Trayton Fuller (b. ca. late 1740s or early 1750s; d. 1814), called himself “Trayton.” Although he was a more modest and retiring man than his conspicuous cousin, Trayton Fuller shared his interest in architecture. In 1771, Trayton married his cousin, Elizabeth Fuller.’° She soon died, and in 1776, he married Anne Eliott (b. ca. 17508; d. 1836) of Sussex.71 On the death of his father, Thomas Fuller, in 1780, Trayton Fuller received a sizable inheritance.’? Anne Fuller also eventually inherited a fortune from her father, George Augustus Eliott (1717-1790), who had purchased and resided on the

Heathfield estate in Sussex. An army field engineer, he became an aide-decamp to King George II and then governor of Gibraltar, which he success-

fully held through a famous three-year siege for which, in 1787, he was raised

Hammerwood and Ashdown

14]

to the peerage as Lord Heathfheld, Baron of Gibraltar. He died in 1790 leaving Anne Puller a considerable sum of money. Anne and Trayton Fuller had been living at Lord Heathfield’s house, Bayley Park, in Sussex, but with her father’s death, the house passed to Annes only brother, Francis Augustus Eliott, who became the second lord Heathfield. This necessitated a move for the Fullers, which, combined with Anne's inheritance, motivated them to build Ashdown. Although Trayton and Anne Fuller were somewhat overshadowed by their wealthier and more conspicuous relatives, glimpses of their lives nonetheless emerge. Irayton Fuller was very much the local squire, serving as county magistrate and captain in the Sussex volunteers. His character shows through in his will, which stipulated that he be “buried at the least possible expense.’?3 If Trayton Fuller had a passion other than his family and farm, it may have been for his library, as he is known to have belonged to a local book society. Anne Fuller shared her husband's elegant but understated tastes. When they planned Ashdown in 1792, he was probably in his forties and she in her thirties. They already had several children—at least three sons and a daughter—whose accommodations formed an important part of the building program.” Ashdown was the family’s first independent home, and they planned it with unpretentious elegance. The combined modesty and elegance of Ashdown seems consistent with the Fullers’ social policy. They had an interesting middle course to steer. Both the Fullers and the Eliotts were important Sussex families; yet, Trayton and Anne Fuller were not the most prominent members of their respective clans. Though well off, they undoubtedly did not want to be seen as competing with

‘Trayton’s rich cousin, “Jack” Fuller of Brightling, or with Annes brother, Lord Heathfheld. Yet they needed a house that would uphold the Fuller and Eliott reputations in Sussex, with rooms of a size and elegance to accommodate visits from and entertainments for their grander relatives. This undoubtedly played a part in the refined but unassuming character that Latrobe gave to Ashdown. A fine eye to the appropriate expression of their position must have characterized all the activities of Anne and Trayton Fuller and the good taste and good sense of their policies became evident when, on the deaths of their grander relations, the Fullers’ children (though not the only possible heirs) inherited the combined fortunes of both families.” Shortly after the death of Anne’ father, around 1790 or 1791, the Fullers

left Bayley Park and leased a house called Kidbrook (near the village of Forest Row, about two miles west of the eventual site of Ashdown). The Fullers

142

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

rented Kidbrook for £300 per year and evidently resided there until the summer of 1795, when they moved into the completed Ashdown.’® By the autumn of 1792, the Fullers must already have formed plans to purchase a nearby estate called the Manor of Lavortye and to build their new house on it, Christian Ignatius Latrobe recorded in his journal in October 1792 that his brother, Benjamin Henry, had “business with Mr. Puller at Kidbrook.’”” This meeting suggests that the Fullers were consulting Latrobe about the designs for Ashdown, and it seems unlikely that they would have retained an architect for their house without a specific site in mind. Latrobe's consultations with the Fullers and his design process for Ashdown probably took place in the fall and winter of 1792-1793, preparatory to construction beginning in the spring of 1793. This chronology is supported by two sources. The first is an Act of Parliament of April 1793 authorizing the transfer of a portion of the Manor of Lavortye to Trayton Fuller

from its previous owner, John Newnham.’§ The second source is Trayton Fuller's “bills volume,” into which he pasted many bills and receipts relating to the construction of the new house and which reveals the building chronology of Ashdown in considerable detail. Even though it is not inclusive of all the expenses incurred in the construction process, Fuller's bills volume is valuable for the dating of Ashdown and for documenting its craftsmen and suppliers of materials. It reveals the Fullers to have been clients closely involved in the construction process. Although Latrobe inspected the work and occasionally signed his name to approve payments, Trayton Fuller himself controlled many of the disbursals and was personally involved in the purchase and cartage of building materials.79

Ashdown is three miles south of Hammerwood. From East Grinstead, one

Latrobe's Design Process

travels southeast to the hamlet of Ashurst Wood, then south to the village of Forest Row and finally, by the public road east, to the Ashdown drive. The house is sited on the crest of a hill, facing south over a gentle valley at the floor

for Ashdown

of which flows the River Medway. The Ashdown drive bridges over the river and approaches the house diagonally from the southwest (figs. 2.49-2.51). When the Fullers purchased the Manor of Lavortye estate in 1793, a Tudor house, probably dating from the later sixteenth century, occupied the site.®° Latrobe and the Fullers made the important decision to retain the old manor house and to build the new Ashdown in front of it, slightly to the south and east, so that the new house could take advantage of the fine land-

scape views and the desirable southern exposure, while the old house would

Hammerwood and Ashdown

143

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occupy the northern portion of the site and be adapted as the service block

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to contain kitchen(s), storerooms, a laundry, and servants’ rooms (fig. 2.52).

behind. (Patrick Snadon)

The retention of the old house affected many subsequent decisions Latrobe made in designing the new Ashdown. The old house was built on a hilltop site, presumably with little or no original grading or terracing. In a treatment reminiscent of that at Ham-

merwood (though on a smaller scale), Latrobe created an artificial earthen terrace on which to place the new Ashdown. This terrace extends in a horizontal plane from the ground-floor level of the old house approximately 80 feet to the south, where it then drops approximately 6 feet on its south and east sides in a steep slope to meet the original grade of the hillside.

A stone

stair ascends this slope to the south, on the central axis of the house (figs. 2.53, 2.54; plate 5). With this artificial earthen terrace, Latrobe created a platform for the new house, with a carriage turnaround approximately 30 feet deep in

front of it (the dimensions of the new house are 40 feet deep by 60 feet wide, while the earthen terrace on which it rests is approximately 80 by 80 feet

square). As at Hammerwood, the Ashdown cellars are masonry-vaulted and must have been partially excavated into the slope of the original hillside and partially built aboveground, then submerged by the creation of the new earth terrace (figs. 2.55, 2.56). Approximately 100 feet south of the house runs

146

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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a long east-west ditch, invisible from the house, which probably acted as a haha, eliminating the need for a fence to prevent farm animals from approaching the lawns. Like the park at Hammerwood, the Ashdown landscape is consistent with the theories of Latrobe's friend, landscape gardener Humphry Repton, including the open, parklike treatment of the hillside

south of the house (which slopes down to the river Medway) and the appropriation of distant views beyond the estate boundaries. The retention of the old manor house had an important effect on the functional distributions of the new Ashdown. Latrobe located the service spaces, including kitchen and servants’ rooms, in the old block, which meant that the new house need contain only the public rooms and the bedchambers of the family, hence its moderate size and villa-like appearance. The Fig. 2.55. (Top) Ashdown cellar plan with dotted

existence of the old house to the north also caused the new Ashdown to have

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only one principal facade, on the south, which acted as both an entrance and

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a garden front. Finally, the retention of the old house affected the circulation and spatial distribution of the new house in both its plan and section. The

vated). (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams/ Iulia Ionesco)

necessity to connect the old and new houses with an efficient circulation sys-

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tem dictated Latrobe's use of a central hall from front to rear of the new

masonry, groin-vaulted construction.

house and affected the placement of both the main and service stairs of the

(Patrick Snadon)

new house to the rear, or north, of the plan, so that they could simultaneously serve both the old and new blocks. The main stair, in the central hall of the new house, serves three levels; not only the first and second floors of the new house but also, at its landing, the second floor of the old house

(which, because of its lower first-story height, stands between the first and second floors of the new house) (see fig. 2.78). The adjacent service stair serves these three levels and also the third story of the new house. On the first story, the new house connects through to the old house at the back of the central hall. On the northwest, tucked between the new and old houses, Latrobe inserted a small, hyphen-like structure that acts as a connector and also serves as a western, or side, entrance (fig 2.57; see also 2.53). To the north, behind both the new and old houses, Latrobe evidently created a service

courtyard and a stable and carriage-house block (the court has been filled in with later additions, but a portion of the north wall of the stable survives). The windows of the new Ashdown open principally to the south, east, and west. The only north-facing windows are those in the second and third stories, which rise above the gables and roofs of the old house and Latrobe's first-story connectors to it. The competition between the old and new houses

for natural light along their shared walls (the south wall of the old house and

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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”7 He sent Louis DeMun to New Orleans to make soil borings for the Mississippi River Lighthouse.** Obviously everyone must have made drawings, but all drawings still remaining carry only Benjamin Henry Latrobe's name, except for a sheet sent to the Stier family of Riversdale in Maryland and signed by employee Adam Traquair; a column capital elevation for the Bank of Pennsylvania drawn by Frederick Graff, who signed it “under direction of the architect, B, H. Latrobe”; and drawings for the Mississippi River Lighthouse signed by Henry Latrobe.59 Latrobe described his policies regarding apprentices as follows: “The

course of study in the office of an Engineer [or Architect] is similar to that of the study of the Law. In the first year or two, no setvice of importance is received by the Principal from his pupil. Therefore no reward can be expected, and all that in four or five years of study is received of assistance is considered as compensation for instruction, and a fee or premium is generally expected besides. I have always received 200 guineas; but the premium is of no importance to me compared with the acquisition of talents and good morals; and I remit it, where I find the latter qualifications. Of course my _ pupils board, lodge and cloath themselves but | generally have the means of

putting a few hundred dollars P[er}] Annum in their way,’6° There is no evidence that he had any pupils or assistants while living in Virginia. He assembled his first staff in Philadelphia, but it was an ill-fated one. The most talented and probably the most productive individual was Frederick Graff, a carpenter and the son of a brick mason. Graff worked as clerk of the works at the Bank of Pennsylvania and as chief draftsman on the Philadelphia Waterworks. Subsequently, he established his reputation as an engineer by building the Fairmount Waterworks to replace Latrobe's original system. Graff must have begun work with Latrobe in about 1799-1800 and continued until about 1804.°? By early 1804, he was out on his own, and Latrobe was contracting with him on individual projects.” Latrobe considered Graff a friend and continued to correspond with him until at least 1817.64 Along with Graff, Latrobe employed two men about whom very little is

known: Thomas Brellait and John Barber. Barber disappeared in June 1800

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subsequent to his implication in financial irregularities related to the waterworks, taking with him an unknown quantity of cash and records from Latrobe's office, none of which was ever recovered.®* Brellait, perhaps involved with Barber in criminal activity, died soon thereafter.®* A fourth member of the office was stonemason Adam Traquair, son of stonemason

James Traquair, who arrived about 1800.” The Traquairs supplied carved marble mantels to Latrobe for years, and Latrobe wrote to Adam Traquair as late as 1816. The next group of men Latrobe hired proved to be his most productive and, ultimately, the most influential on the national scene: William Strickland, Louis DeMun, and Robert Mills. Collectively, they worked in his offices from 1801 to 1808, wherever Latrobe was located at the time: Philadelphia; Newcastle and Iron Hill and Wilmington, Delaware; and Washington, D.C.

Strickland was the son of carpenter John Strickland who worked on the Bank of Pennsylvania. Latrobe accepted him as a precocious, 13-year-old

pupil in 1801.°° Their relationship proved to be stormy, as Strickland’s volatile and sometimes erratic temperament probably reminded Latrobe of himself at a like age. Latrobe terminated Strickland’s employment in August 1805; Strickland himself remembered that he stayed until he was about 19, which would have been 1807.®° In any case, by 1808 Latrobe, now in Washington, D.C., was contracting independently with him for drawings to be made in Philadelphia.”° Latrobe admired Strickland’s work, calling him an “excellent draughtsman, perhaps the best of those I have educated,’ but the two men became estranged in 1818 over their competition entries for the Second Bank of the United States.7! Latrobe took on Louis DeMun as a pupil in about 1802.72 DeMun completed his full-time training in the office by the end of 1805, but Latrobe

wrote to him in early January 1806, soliciting his help in making additional drawings.7? DeMun was not an artist or designer with the talent of Strickland or Mills, but Latrobe had great respect for and confidence in him, sending him forth on a wide variety of tasks, including work on the Baltimore Cathedral, U.S. Capitol, and Washington Navy Yard.’ Latrobe offered him prospects for work as late as 1809.” Latrobe and Robert Mills had a complex and ambiguous relationship. Latrobe clearly admired Mills’s dedication and steadiness but found him uninspired, perhaps even dull.7° Mills entered Latrobe's Philadelphia office as a pupil in the summer of 1803.7” He had arrived from Charleston,

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

South Carolina, to work for James Hoban in Washington, D.C., beginning in about 1799 and continuing until about 1802, with time out to study in

Thomas Jefferson's library and make drawings of Monticello at intervals in 1801-1803. In December 1805, he returned to Charleston and attempted to establish his own practice.7® Unsuccessful, he reentered Latrobe's office in 1806, where he was a full-time employee until 1808; he continued with

construction supervision for Latrobe at the John Markoe House in Philadelphia until 1811. During this period, Latrobe also employed decorative painter George Bridport as a “principal assistant” and draftsman; Bridport worked on both the Waln House interiors and the Baltimore Cathedral in 1808.79 By 1809, when DeMun, Strickland, Mills, and Bridport had all gone their

separate ways and subsequent to clerk of the works John Lenthall’s death in the collapse of the Supreme Court vaults at the Capitol, Latrobe's younger son, Henry, had come to Washington, D.C. Seventeen-year-old Henry assumed Lenthall’s responsibilities and continued with them until he went to New Orleans to begin the waterworks in December 1810.8° Undoubtedly, Henry also served as a draftsman for his father, and he had certainly developed considerable professional skills by the time he completed his only extant signed drawings, those for the Mississippi River Lighthouse dated 1817. In 1812, Latrobe called on George Hadfield to make some drawings relative to the Capitol,8+ but no one else is known to have worked for him between 1809 and 1813. With Jefferson's departure from office in 1809, Latrobe lost his direct, high-level access to Federal work. Now absent from Philadelphia for several years, he had not been active in the cultivation of contacts there. The capital city never offered a wealth of residential, commercial, or local-government clients, so much so that Latrobe strongly considered moving to New York City.®? Instead, however, he settled on Pittsburgh and relocated there in 1813. Spending most of his time building steamboats, he never assembled an office staff, choosing to work instead with carpenter Henry Holdship on design-build projects.®? Back in Washington in 1815 as architect of the Capitol, Latrobe found himself under pressure to pay daily attention to the Capitol but received one of the largest commissions of his career, the Baltimore Exchange, and one of his most complex domestic commissions, Decatur House. The first man he attempted to hire is known to us only as M. de Surville, a French engineer to whom he offered a position in December 1815.84 However, de Surville

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soon decided to return to France.8* Latrobe next hired Guillaume Tell Lavallée Poussin.®® Poussin remained about a year, leaving in early 1817.87 Latrobe then hired Frederic C. De Krafft as a draftsman and William Blanchard as a half-time employee, both working on drawings for the Capitol.** Blanchard apparently remained until Latrobe closed his Washington, D.C.,

office in late 1817.89 Latrobe's elder son, John Hazleburst Boneval Latrobe, also worked for his father during this period, making drawings of the Capitol in 1817. While he was a student at St. Mary's College in Annapolis in 1818 and before his entry into West Point, he made drawings for his father’s Bank of the United States competition.°°

In 1817 Latrobe took on a final pupil, William Small, the son of Jacob Small, the Baltimore builder who constructed the Baltimore Exchange. Latrobe immediately put Small to work on drawings for the Capitol,*1 then took him to Baltimore when he opened an office there in 1818; Small managed this office into 1819, after Latrobe moved to New Orleans, and eventually became a prominent architect in Baltimore. Once in New Orleans, Latrobe never mentioned taking on any more pupils or employees.

Relationships with Artisans and Craftspersons Almost as important as his pupils and employees were those artisans and craftspersons whom Latrobe relied on to construct his buildings. Most of them worked on his public and commercial projects as well as his residences, with few, if any, specializing in residential work. These men and women can be divided into four groups: masons and sculptors, joiners and carpenters, plasterers and ornamental painters, and furniture makers and upholsterers. Little is known about the individuals who built Latrobe's residences in Virginia; he mentioned only Mr. Gracie, a “Scotch joiner”; Mr. Hill, a “ship joiner’; and Mr. Furgeson who made cornices, as workmen at the Pennock House.®? However, his correspondence contains many references to those whom he employed in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and a few to those in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, Latrobe preferred the masonry work of James Traquair and Thomas Vickers. Both men were involved with the waterworks and the houses for John Markoe and William Waln. Traquair also contracted,

along with John Miller and John Bennett, for the marble work at the Bank of Pennsylvania.®

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe used George Blagden, in Washington, D.C., as his superin-

tendent of stonework at the Capitol.°* At his house for John Peter Van Ness, he employed stonemason W. W. Birth, who also worked at the Capitol,%

and brick mason John Queen, who later became a foreman at the Capitol and did masonry work at St. John’s Church.°* Latrobe developed a high regard for carpenter Henry Holdship when

Holdship worked on the Philadelphia Waterworks, leading to their eventual partnership in Pittsburgh. Latrobe chose Philadelphia carpenters Joseph Worrell and Isaac Forsythe to build his Markoe House; both men had worked for him at the Bank of Pennsylvania.9” | In Washington, Latrobe described Shadrach Davis as having “the reputation of being perhaps the best Shipjoiner in the United States’®* and employed him at the Washington Navy Yard and as clerk of the works at the Capitol in 1815-1817. Latrobe also thought highly of Robert Alexander, a carpenter, the chief contractor at the Baltimore Navy Yard, and builder of Latrobe's New Orleans Customs House.°? As carpenter for the Van Ness House, Latrobe chose Ignatious Mudd.!°° For plasterwork, Latrobe most often called on William Thackara, who was active in both Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and William Foxton, who worked in Baltimore and Washington.'°! Thackara floated plaster at the Bank of Pennsylvania and the Capitol, and he executed the plasterwork at the Markoe and Waln houses in Philadelphia.1°? A Mr. MacGrath carved the Markoe House interior capitals.!°3 For the Van Ness House, Latrobe chose a Mr, Shields as his plasterer,1°* and Olivius Gram, who also worked at the President's House, carved the interior column capitals.1°5> Decorative sculptor Giovanni Andrei, who spent most of his time at the Capitol, carved the “Center pieces” for the Van Ness's three principal rooms.1°° Latrobe recommended Baltimore ironmonger William Nielson to make ornamentaliron items for the Van Ness House.'°”? Among decorative painters, Latrobe clearly preferred George Bridport who, in addition to working as a draftsman in his office, executed ornamental painting at the Capitol, President's House, and Waln House.!°8

Latrobe selected furniture-makers John and Hugh Findlay of Baltimore to make the President’s House furniture? and upholsterers John Rea,1?° Lewis Labille,"41 and Mary Sweeny??? for work at the Capitol and President's House. The furniture that Latrobe designed for the Waln House may have been made by Philadelphia cabinetmaker William Wetherill and

painted by George Bridport (see figs. 8.17—-8.18; plate 22).14

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Contracts and Fees Latrobe made explicit his idea of the proper relationship between architect and contractor. His primary concern was maintaining control of the con-

struction process, which he attempted to do by directing the flow of money and the distribution of drawings. Often he did not release or even complete drawings describing the next phase of work until they were required on the site.114 Fle wanted complete control over the hiring of workmen, wanted all workmen to be responsible directly to him, and wanted accounts to be paid only with his signature.1!5 The key to this degree of control over both money and action was a proper contract. However, despite all of his proclamations about necessary business procedures, Latrobe often failed to follow his own advice or adhere

to his own standards. In the case of his house for John Peter Van Ness, the contract was not signed until construction was well underway. This contract specifies that Latrobe was to provide design services, that he was to measure the work, and that he was to settle all accounts.!° Latrobe based his fee structure on practices that he claimed were prevalent in London and that had, he said, been sanctioned by the English courts.1!” He drew a distinction between projects, or commissions left unbuilt, and commissions that were carried through the construction phase; he wrote:“When drawings and estimates of buildings have been made and not exceeded 2% per cent on the estimate has been always allowed by the courts. But this is often too much, and an honest Man will make a charge adequate to his merits. The charge of § per cent on a work actually executed is much too small a charge for small works, and perhaps too much for immense public expenditures.’!® Latrobe outlined his fee structure in greater detail for both public and pri-

vate commissions in a letter to John Craig regarding additions to his house called Andalusia on the Delaware River near Philadelphia: 1. For consulting on any professional object and giving a written report, according to the difficulty of the subject, and the trouble of gaining the necessary information, never less than 5 Guineas (25$). I have made this kind of rule in order to avoid trifling applications from strangers, that I will do no business under this charge. When the object has been below what I thought worth this sum, I have let it pass unnoticed. 2. To public bodies when nothing is the result I charge 25$ for one attendance. If I attend oftener, 10$ for each, including any reports or rough sketches I may make. But here also the importance of the subject and extraordinary trouble may make a difference.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

3. For the design of a private house, delivering fair drawings and a description, but no working drawings 100$. For mere additions or improvements of a building a less Sum according to the trouble,

4.1 would rather never give working drawings or estimates unless I also make all the contracts and measure and value the work so as to obtain a controul over the expenditures. I have however been induced to do this for particular friends and have charged according to my trouble. But it is not the interest of any Gentleman to employ me unless he also gives me this controul over the conduct of his mechanics in which case, I charge 5 per Cent on the amount of the expenditures under my direction, and I believe this charge will in all cases be saved by the systematic conduct of the work.!!9 Regarding the donation of services, Latrobe wrote to Robert Mills, as Mills sought to contract with the state of South Carolina to design a prison:

1.) In the first place, do nothing gratuitously. The State of Carolina are infinitely better able to pay you well, than you are to subscribe your time and your talents, which is your subsistence towards the annual revenue of the State; for this is the actual effect of gratuitous professional services.... But further you ought not to go without a very clear understanding as to what is to be the reward of your labor. You know too well the course of my professional transactions to suppose that this advice is the result of a mercenary disposition. The gratuitous services on a very great scale which I have given to unendowed public institutions for the promotion of religious, or literary objects are well known to you, for you have had your share of the labor. But when a rich state is about to execute a project, from which great | public benefit is expected to result, compensation to those who assist in effecting that object is a thing so much

of course, that all I have said would appear

superfluous, if the example of the donation of time and talent, and expence had not in many instances been set by yourself.’?°

No matter the fee structure, Latrobe inevitably had to face the reality that architectural commissions did not hold the promise of fortune making, and he felt that only by accumulating a fortune could a man earn adequate respect in America. He wrote to his son Henry that “you are an

Engineer [or Architect] and must be one until you get to be a Man of fortune.’}21 It was the fortune-making potential of the New Orleans Waterworks project that transfixed him late in his career. He wrote to family friend Robert Mark that the waterworks represented “the most rational, certain, and rapid means of a very large fortune, that exists now in America.1”? This sentiment was only heightened by the economic hardships surrounding his departure from Washington into the volatile economic climate of

Reinventing the American House

2.03

Pittsburgh and steamboat building. Here he observed that “as I grow older I see daily more clearly the absolute necessity of freedom from pecuniary embarrassment. }?3 “Money, money, money,’ he admitted to Thomas Cooper, “is the game everyone is hunting, and in fact I have joined in the chase.’!*4 Latrobe had, of course, anticipated this attitude in 1796 when he first wrote back to England regarding his study of Cooper's emigrant prospectus, Some Information Respecting America.

Design Drawings, Renderings, and Construction Documents The instruments for Latrobe's practice of his art were his architectural drawings. He worked with plan, section, and elevation views, often arranging them orthographically, and with perspective views but not with axonometric ones. He sketched, drafted, rendered, and sometimes overdrew finished drawings, usually in graphite, and added computations, usually in ink. He began with carefully ruled pencil guidelines, even in his sketchbooks. He then defined elements with ruled ink lines, often added shadows using ink washes, and finally applied colors to represent the appearance of specific materials in elevation and to symbolize them in section. For this final step, he employed watercolor in the manner exploited by romantic painters throughout the eighteenth century, relying on its translucence to allow light to pass through the pigment and reflect off the white watercolor paper beneath. Latrobe made drawings on various types of paper. He often began in his sketchbooks or on sketchbook-sized sheets. He made presentation drawings on larger sheets of watercolor paper called “laid” paper that he obtained from both domestic and foreign sources. Like the paper in his English notebook, laid paper had a grid of lines imprinted into it during the production process, with one set of lines called “laid” lines. For working drawings that Latrobe anticipated might be eventually damaged or lost on the construction site, he used cheaper paper more desirable for its durability than its elegant appearance. He used multiple line weights and multiple tones of ink. Almost invariably he used very wide ink lines in plans to indicate the two adjacent walls in shadow as prescribed by an imaginary sun located either above and to the left or above and to the right of a drawing. He also drew relatively accurate cast shadows in elevations, sections, and perspectives.

Although he claimed to produce his designs quickly, he made no such

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

claims for his working drawings. In the case of those for Decatur House,

he commented that he had worked so hard on them that he had “hardly set foot out of the room” where he kept his drawing instruments.!25 He made complete sets of drawings to retain in his office as a record, as well as complete sets for the contractor. The most common method for making such

copies was “pricking, that is punching tiny holes through original drawings and into a sheet underneath, and then using the prick marks to guide a drafted line.1?6 Very few of Latrobe's preliminary office drawings remain. He made no sketches for building designs in his journals and only a few in his sketchbooks. He included many sketches in his letters, most of them illustrating construction details and procedures. In his sketchbook 11 he included a record drawing of Green Spring, the plantation house of William Ludwell Lee, as he found it when preparing for modifications to the property in 1796 and a“ View of Captain Pennock’s House, Lambert's Point,’ made when he was preparing a design for Pennock’s new house on Town Point in Norfolk, Virginia (figs. 5.18—5.20, 5.22).!27 All of his studies for Robert and Henri-

etta Listons House appear in his sketchbook vi (fig. 5.60).!?8 He made a site plan sketch for the John Markoe House in his sketchbook 1x!#9 anda plan and elevation drawing for this house in his sketchbook x (fig. 5.57).13° As do modern practitioners, Latrobe complemented his drawings with written specifications. Although none of his residential specifications is known to exist, those for the Louisiana State Bank do remain. Although they do not conform to current specification divisions, they would be quite comprehensible to a modern builder. Latrobe subdivided them as follows: site work, brickwork, marble pavement, carpenter's work, roof, back buildings, plastering, painting and glazing, balconies and ironworks, centering,

and general remarks. In these divisions, he specified methods by which work was to be carried out, not the results. Because early-nineteenth-century working drawings were not nearly so detailed as those today, he included many dimensions in the specifications; and because these working drawings did not typically include structural detailing, he also included the sizes and locations of many structural elements. Finally, because the country had no established building materials standards, he had to define his own, using such terms as “the best country bricks,” “fresh lime,” and “sharp clean sand.’

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Financial Management Despite his defects as a businessman, Latrobe was very concerned with the realities of working within the budget prescribed by his clients. This concern demanded accurate cost estimating, although his methods were not nearly as detailed as those he used when measuring and valuing; that is, he developed only comparable square-foot prices based on completed projects. He estimated construction costs by means of a projected cost per “superficial” foot, that is, per square foot and per cubic foot. His methods were straightforward, but his square-foot costs do not seem to have taken into account the number of floors. For example, at the Markoe House with its two living floors and a cellar, Latrobe calculated that one floor plate contained about 2,300 square feet and multiplied this area times six dollars per square foot to get an estimated cost of $13,800.13! In contrast, the carpenters working on Latrobe's Adena, the Chillicothe, Ohio, home of Thomas and Eleanor Worthington, provided a detailed “Bill of Prices,”13? with these prices itemized by individual task, a more typical modern technique for accurately estimating construction costs and analogous to Latrobe's method for measuring and valuing. In another case, he calculated that a brick house 30 feet wide by 48 feet deep had 1,440 square feet.173 Using a figure of $6 per square foot, he estimated that this house would cost $8,640. Then, on the basis of a total height of 53 feet, he calculated that such a house enclosed 76,530 cubic feet. Dividing this figure into the total cost of $8,640,

he calculated that this house would cost 1% cents per cubic foot (actually about 11%). Even in this case he did not account for differing levels of finish on the various floors, cellar, and garrets.1*4 The Markoe House eventually cost $8 per square foot, a 33 percent increase over Latrobe's original estimate and an increase that would be considered contractually unacceptable today had the client not agreed to such an eventuality beforehand, which the Markoes may have done.'#* In any case, Latrobe claimed to be very accurate in his estimates, saying that for such projects as the Bank of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Waterworks, and even the Markoe House “it could be found that whenever I had made an estimate I had never exceeded it.”!3° Once working drawings were completed, Latrobe considered either bidding or negotiation for establishing a construction contract to be best arranged by the architect. He left no doubt about his preference between the two methods, saying of the bidding process, that “it is objectionable, and for

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

this very obvious reason which is still stronger in all other cases that the lowest bidder, will probably be the most ignorant, or the least responsible, or the least conscientious of the bidders, and that therefore the chance of disappointment, will be exactly at the same ratio of the cheapness of the contract.’437 He was willing to go to great lengths to circumvent this process, even where it was required by law, so that he could select his builders indi-

vidually and negotiate a contract with them. He wrote to John Markoe on December 1, 1808, almost a year after the design process on his house had begun, that he would come to Philadelphia to see that the “house shall be completely contracted for.” Negotiation allowed him to hire those craftsmen whom he felt could properly execute his designs. For example, he contracted directly with mason

James Traquair “for and on the part of John Markoe to carry out marble and freestone work.’!38 In this contract, he described the extent of the work on the exterior and the setting of chimney pieces on the interior and prescribed the sequence of partial payments. The final phase of Latrobe's architectural services was construction supetvision, which he considered essential in seeing his designs properly executed. However, clients often misunderstood this phase, as they confused it with general superintendence by a builder who remained on the site managing the work or with the role of a clerk of the works, an agent of the client and architect for a very large project who also remained on the site during the entire construction process. Latrobe explained that he would not regularly oversee “the workmen as they are at labor.’ Rather, he would make intermittent but regular site visits necessary for day-to-day decision making, quality and price

control, and, eventually, for the final settling of accounts.43° He and John Peter Van Ness argued heatedly over this issue during the construction of Van Ness’s house. When projects were located nearby, Latrobe made inspection visits himself. In the case of the Markoe House, he lived in Washington, D.C., during its construction in Philadelphia and had heavy responsibilities at the U.S. Capitol. Consequently, he delegated responsibility to Robert Mills and relied on copious correspondence with him, including sketches and a steady stream of drawings, to see the work completed. Latrobe used a similar combination of letters, sketches, and drawings to direct clients and their builders at remote sites that neither he nor his employees could visit. Latrobe employed a detailed system of measuring and valuing construction work, in today’s terms the process by which the architect inspects

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the work completed and makes a request for payment to the client on behalf of the contractor. He described his system as follows: “The only rational mode of measurement and valuation is to fix the price according to the difficulty of the work, and then to charge what actually exists, instead of

making a cubic allowance for a superficial labor . . . [the method he used for his own preconstruction cost estimating]."!4° For instance, Latrobe described two means for measuring a masonry arch. He disapproved of simply determining surface area. In such a case, he said, an arch spanning 50 feet would be valued at considerably more than one spanning 40 feet, while the actual construction cost would vary only moderately. Instead, his practice was to value the arch construction itself, including the centering, separate from any surrounding walls or the opening provided by the arch.!#! Following such a procedure, he quite literally measured the amount of work done by a specific trade, such as $3.50 per cubic foot for “laying up dry walls” and $4.00 per cubic foot for walls “laid in Mortar” and $.20 per foot for “dressing soft stone.’ He systematically listed such sums in his “measuring book” of which Robert Mills had a copy while carrying out construction supervision on Latrobe's Philadelphia houses. !42

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Chapter Four

Latrobe's First Explorations of the American Context

WHEN

BeEnjJAMIN Henry LATROBE set foot on American soil, he was an

English architect with little working knowledge of his adopted country. He was adept at developing clever building plans and accompanying elevations; he was thoroughly grounded in the principles of French distribution, or intricate room arrangement, and dégagement, the subtle interweaving of servant and served spaces; and he had experience in architectural practice in England, both as an employee and as a sole practitioner. Virginia forced Latrobe to explore the American architectural scene, and the results of this exploration, if not yet fully resolved, anticipated important things to come when he moved on to Philadelphia. In order to meet the design requirements of American clients, he had to understand daily life and social behavior as well as local building materials, construction methods, environmental conditions, and even the structure of the local building industry, This he set out to do almost immediately, recording much of what he observed in his sketchbooks and journals. In some cases, his design decisions pointed to his past, as at William Ludwell Lee's Green Spring, where he displayed an attitude toward building preservation and cleverness with building renovation that is understandable only in terms of his English background. In others, they pointed forward, as in his design for a keeper's house at the Virginia State Penitentiary, where he began his longstanding critique of the ubiquitous American central-hall plan. His folio designs for Mill hill, a temple-form house, and an asymmetrical house and an unfinished scheme for a rotunda-plan house were all apparently executed without clients. Mill hill is a sprawling English country house adjusted to certain peculiarities of Virginia manners; the temple-form and asymmetrical houses make use of planning devices, traceable to S. P. Cockerell, that yield complex axial and oblique views and layers of space; and the rotunda-plan house presents the first evidence of Latrobes interest in a domed space as a symbol of American democracy, even in domestic surroundings. His

three town houses for Captain William Pennock, John Harvie, and, perhaps, John ‘Tayloe follow a similar pattern, with certain elements and design strategies still distinctly English or French and others clearly a part of Latrobe's developing notion of what an American house needed to be.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

British and European Reflections Latrobe's first Virginia “commission,’ the William Pennock House! in Nor-

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folk in 1796, reveals the degree to which he was able to put his distinctive British and European training and education to use immediately in solving

An Anglo-French Town House

parochial, uniquely American problems. The unusual conditions under

on a Difficult Site

which he took on this project foreshadowed the difficulties that he would

encounter in establishing an appropriate architect-client relationship in a country where the perceived need for expediency often made notions of professionalism seem irrelevant. This project also illustrates the degree to which his European approach to building construction would be misunderstood in a provincial setting. Latrobe arrived in the city during prosperous times and found the merchant class in ascendance, including Captain William Pennock. Pennock, who served at various times as Navy agent and superintendent and owned a fleet of sailing vessels, had purchased prime real estate along Main Street and near his wharf on the eastern branch of the Elizabeth River. Situated between the Customs House and Market Square, the site was surrounded by mixed residential and commercial development. Latrobe included the site in his 1796

sketch (fig. 4.1) made from Smith's Point to the northwest and at the foot of modern-day Botetourt and Freemason streets. Unfortunately, this part of the city witnessed a series of devastating fires at the beginning of the nineteenth _ century, and the Pennock House may have numbered among the casualties. Latrobe took on the project under unorthodox circumstances that he described as follows: “This design was made in consequence of a trifling Wager laid against me by Captn. Pennock that I could not design a house which should be approved by Mr. Luke Wheeler; which should have only 41 feet front (enlarged to 43 feet in Latrobe's final folio drawings]; which should contain on the Ground floor, 3 Rooms, a principal Staircase, and backstairs;

and, which was the essential requisite, the front door of which should be in the Center.’? The impetus for this wager can be traced to the 41-foot dimension and the presence of Luke Wheeler. Pennock owned property with a street frontage too narrow to accommodate a typical central-hall plan, which would have required at least 50 front feet, and too wide for a side-hall town house, which would have consumed only about 30 front feet. Wheeler, a merchant and director of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company, for which Latrobe carried out a survey, and later an alderman and mayor in Norfolk, occupied alot adjacent to Pennock.? Latrobe visited in the Wheeler home, noting in

Houses for the Virginia Landed Gentry

211

his journal that he tuned Wheeler's pianoforte.* Pennock’s odd-sized parcel demanded a unique design solution if it were to include a central entry and a locally acceptable collection of first-floor functions and were to accommodate Wheeler's image of an appropriate Virginia urban dwelling. One could hardly imagine a less desirable situation in which to finda newly arrived professional man: practicing architecture in order to win a bet! Yet the ironies of the Pennock project do not end here. Latrobe gave Pennock only “very small scale’ drawings. Then, unbeknownst to the architect, Pennock set out to build his house using only these modest instructions. Not surprisingly, they proved soon enough to be inadequate and work came to a standstill. Hearing of Pennock’s dilemma, Latrobe made a site visit and found to his distress that “No part of the plan had been accurately set out. The front was totally altered. .. . [N]o two sides of the bow window were equal, or set out from the center. . . . {I]n general it was necessary to accommodate the original plan to the blunders committed by the workmen, to combat their prejudices and obstinacy, and to inform their ignorance as well as I could.’”> These problems paled beside those created by Pennock’s total disregard for Latrobe's

site plan. The architect wrote: “(I intended] to have built the house upon a small rise in the Garden, and to have occupied the street by two small and re

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ornamented stores, which would have yielded a very good rent.’¢ Instead of following these instructions, Pennock and his builders had moved the house forward to the street front on the south end of the site, compromising privacy, views to the river, and even internal circulation patterns. Pennock probably ignored Latrobe's site plan—likely the first, formal site plan in the history of

American domestic architecture (fig. 4.2) because he and his builders could not appreciate or even recognize its more French than English organization. If he had, he would have understood the interrelated components: the onstreet stores acting as avant-corps, or gatehouses, the garden court or cour with carriage drive and turnaround, and the freestanding, south-facing main house, the French corps-de-logis, placed back on the site. The only concession to American practices was a rear kitchen wing to the northeast and adjacent to Town

Back Creek (now covered over to become City Hall Avenue). Latrobe intended for this Francophile site plan to provide the context for a facade design of quite different inspiration; he obviously derived it from such buildings as the block of London houses on Grafton Street near Berkeley Square, which had been designed by Sir Robert Taylor. The Pennock House front facade, as rendered by Latrobe (fig. 4.2, front elevation), differs from its English precedents only in its lack of a tall, mural wall surface between the

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first-and second-story windows, which, on Grafton Street, concealed Taylor's

deep, wood-and-plaster vaulting (fig. 4.3). ‘To understand the Grafton Street facade designs, it is first necessary to consider the various acts controlling building construction in London in the eighteenth century. This legislation sought to mitigate the loss of wooden structures to fires by reducing facades to dominant masonry planes, devoid of flammable, projecting wooden elements. For instance, the acts of 1707 prohibited the use of prominent wooden cornices on brick facades, and the acts of 1709 directed that window frames be set back 4 inches from the outside face of masonry walls. Because these laws were often ignored, Sir Robert Taylor and George Dance Sr. collaborated on a conflation of the pertinent legislation, produci ng the Building Act of 1774. Its successful enforcement led to the virtual elimination of projecting wooden elements. The resulting simplicity produced a type of rational design that was based more on pragmatism than ideology. In the specific case of windows, architects and builders began not only to set double-hung frames back in masonry walls but also to conceal them partially behind masonry curtains at jambs and heads, leaving visible only thin strips of the wooden frames. Latrobe recommended such windows exclusively in his masonry domestic work. Surely William Pennock had no idea that his facade design had been shaped by building codes in London. To him, its thin window frames, simple masonry sills and belt courses, deep entry-portico projections, and modest, unornamented roof fascia probably only appeared inappropriately austere, especially when compared with such Norfolk merchant homes as the still-extant house built for Pennock’s business partner, Moses Myers, with its

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prominent window casings and denticulated cornices.”? Consequently, Pennock’s builders modified and enriched the facade detailing according to local practices, eliciting from Latrobe the complaints that “all the sash frames, instead of being in reveals, were solid, and placed on the outside,’ and the cornices were made “tastier” and “finer” than he had intended them.® Perhaps the most significant aspect of Latrobe's design is the relationship

Fig. 4.3. 6 Grafton Street, London, ca. late 1780s or

early 1790s, by Sir Robert Taylor. (Patrick Snadon)

of the facade to the plans (fig. 4.4) and their implications for his development of an American house type. The plan distribution provides the first evidence in Virginia of Latrobe's reinterpretation of the Taylor-Cockerell planning principles. Consequently, there was still further irony attached to Luke Wheeler's wager; it challenged Latrobe to do exactly what he had been trained to do best in S. P. Cockerell’s office: accommodate a complex functional program requiring an asymmetrical distribution of spaces behind a deceptively simple, symmetrical facade.

Houses for the Virginia Landed Gentry

21s

The two flues on the ground-story plan indicate at least a partial cellar, but no cellar-story plan is known. The internal spatial order of the ground story, with its compact plan of multiple room shapes, anticipates the dynamic, picturesque arrangement of several of Latrobe's most significant domestic

designs

of the next two decades, those he called his “scenery”

houses. The nexus of this plan is the conjunction of three rooms and the principal stair hall, a void that is similar in spatial conception to the cell around which Cockerell often chose to revolve his rooms. Here Latrobe reduced this void to a curving, diagonal passageway leading from the stair hall to the dining room. This short passage, cut through the poché of the internal longitudinal bearing wall, occurs between two transverse enfilades,

one in front connecting the office, principal stair (rising only to the second story), and service stair (ascending all the way to the third story), and the other to the rear connecting the dining room, parlor, and passage to the kitchen offices.

Fig. 4.4. Pennock House. Latrobe's ground and chamber story plans, 1798-1799(?). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Latrobe's distribution was ultimately confounded by Pennock’s situation of the house on the street and not behind the “stores” and a garden forecourt. He wrote that “I have arranged all the communications along the entrance front; whereas, had I known how much interest would be taken in what was going forward on the street, I should have given the ladies a good room in front.’® He separated the front office, stair hall, and service stairs by means of their narrow partition walls placed asymmetrically behind the screen of the symmetrical front facade, with its requisite central entry. The narrow plan forced Latrobe to place the drawing room on the chamber story, a decidedly unorthodox placement for America, and above it a floor with two more chambers and a servant's room adjacent to an enormous nursery.

The perspective that Latrobe drew of the Pennock House stair hall (fig. 4.5; plate 8) offers the first evidence of his search for a systematic interior architecture. [his system required that spaces be defined by an inviolate grid of horizontal and vertical lines that responded to traditional functional and ornamental datum lines and constructional practices and that rooms be classified hierarchically according to function and so coded by means of appropriate ornamentation. Although Latrobe openly discussed his theoties of ornament, he remained silent about his development of such an internal grid system. Consequently, it can be understood only from the close observation of his work. The stair hall's volume is defined horizontally by a rigorous series of continuous datum lines: base molding, chair rail, belt

216

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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course—an exterior feature brought into the interior that becomes the fascia of the large second-story landing or gallery and cornice. Equally rigorous are the door casings: a reductivist grid regulated by corner blocks, a very early use of this motif in America. At the entry door, these corner blocks become the imposts from which the semicircular arch of the fanlight springs. The ceiling is divided into two parts corresponding to the gallery

218

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

and the two-story hall, and the division is reinforced by the pattern of orna-

mentation: linear, reeded plaster moldings anchored by pairs of corner blocks with rosettes. Within this field, Latrobe placed a central ceiling rosette and surrounding fans. Latrobe carefully subdivided the floor into a plain boundary, a rectangle beneath the stair, and an orthogonal grid of tiles. The surface appears to be wood, meaning that the tiles would have been painted on directly, or the sur-

face could have been a fabric such as a painted canvas floorcloth. In England, Latrobe would have used stone. Latrobe used recessed-panel doors and window jambs throughout, as well as a plain handrail and balusters without a newel post. He made the lower panels of the ground-story doors correspond to the horizontal datum lines of the chair rail. He later complained that the builders had ignored his suggestions for wooden ornament and had “introduced the heavy wooden taste of the last century,’ meaning, presumably, the neo-Palladian taste typical of Sir Robert Taylor and his contemporaries or buildings in the earlier eighteenth-century Queen Anne Style, such as the London house in which the Latrobes lived on Fetter Lane.?°

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Houses for the Virginia Landed Gentry

219

America of Latrobe's systematization. Bulfinch's ornament, while superficially similar to Latrobe's, is freely distributed over plain fields and depends for its cohesion only on a similarity of decorative motifs and a respect for conventions. It is also useful to compare Latrobe's interior architecture to that of Robert Adam, who designed complete interiors: walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows, fixtures, and furnishings. Adam unified these elements through a coherent aesthetic vision, which he both studied and presented by means of extremely detailed elevation drawings related orthographically to their plans. Latrobe employed some Adamesque ornament early in his career but more importantly, followed Adam in creating unified interiors. However, Latrobe was more concerned with a total architectonic vision than with a balance of universally applied ornament. In fact, the Pennock ceiling, with its dependence on applied ornament, seems awkward and unconvincing when compared with Adam's work. The front entry consists of a projecting portico supported by two Doric columns modeled on those at the Temple of Apollo at Delos, which had been

illustrated by J.-D, Le Roy in his Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Gréce (1758); Latrobe had sketched Greek orders from Le Roy in his English notebook. This was Latrobe's first use of such archaic severity in America, but it was a practice he would repeat consistently. These columns have thin bands of fluting only at the tops and bottoms of their shafts. The exterior stair was

Fig. 4.6. Perez Morton House, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1796, by Charles Bulfinch. Photograph of the drawing room.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

220

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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designs. The six-panel entry door stands between pilasters that one assumes, because they are not visible in the elevation drawing, matched the order of the columns; the pilasters carry the semicircular fanlight composed of concentric rings of muntins infilled with circles. The result was unconventional in

America at the time: simple geometries (circles not ovals or ellipses), masculine proportions, and bold unornamented three dimensionality, Entering the stair hall, one confronts an even more unconventional scene. An appreciation of the stair configuration requires a comparison to other

English and American examples of the period. For instance, the stair at Sir Robert Taylor's 4 Grafton Street rose first from front to back, and the floorto-floor height allowed for the insertion of a full-size door beneath the land-

ing. Several of Sir John Soane’s house designs of the 1780s, including those for Burn Hall and Letton Hall (fig. 4.7), both illustrated in his Plans, Elevations, and Sections,41 contain stairs located along a central, longitudinal axis that rise initially back toward the front entry, with floor-to-floor heights that again allowed for transverse passage under them. If so configured in plan, but with lower floor-to-floor heights in a house without vaulting, Latrobe's stair at midflight would not have had adequate headroom beneath it. Consequently, he displaced the stair laterally, adjacent to the corridor of entry space, so that transverse passage could occur in front of the initial stair run

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then under the second. Furthermore, Latrobe designed his stairs and landings in wood, which is made evident by the thin, wooden partition walls that surround the stair hall and provide support for the stair and landing construction. He always preferred stone stairs, which had to be cantilevered out of thick masonry walls or built atop masonry walls or arches. In two respects, the appearance but not the material of the stairway and landing is reminiscent of the likely original configuration of the English Ashdown stone stair: the supporting of the lower flights by a crucklike wooden beam resembling a masonry segmental arch and the cantilevered upper-landingbecome-balcony with its curvilinear cutout. Overall, the Pennock House interior is extremely impressive for its high level of development so short a time after Latrobe arrived in America and began his inquiry into the proper form for an American house. He would produce his most refined essay on this theme of systematized interior architecture some twenty-five years later in the entry hall to the house he designed for Stephen Decatur in Washington, D.C. Coincidentally, Decatur’s wife, Susan, was the daughter of Luke Wheeler.

Houses for the Virginia Landed Gentry

221

GREEN SPRING

Through his contacts in Norfolk, Latrobe soon widened his sphere of

influence to include nearby Williamsburg. In late July 1796, he made his way A Remodeling in the Manner of S. P. Cockerell

to Green Spring, the country estate of William Ludwell Lee located some six miles outside the city.1? [wenty-one-year-old Lee, who had inherited Green Spring from his father in June 1795, proved to be an impetuous and recalcitrant client. Eventually, Latrobe made two proposals for improvements to the existing Green Spring House and one proposal for a new structure once Lee had “entirely pulled down his old mansion.’!3 The projects came to naught because of disagreements between architect and client, and Latrobe wrote in frustration “I found it impossible for me to bend my ideas, to a compliance with his mode of procedure with his workmen. I therefore declined any further connection with him.’* Lee eventually erected a new building some 300 yards behind the original Green Spring House site.!* Although nothing is known about the form of Latrobe's proposal for a new building, a drawing for one remodeling scheme does remain. It illustrates his concern for the existing building and affords insights into his attitude toward what would today be called historic preservation and adaptive reuse, an attitude reflecting his building renovation experience in the office of S. P. Cockerell. At the end of the eighteenth century, Green Spring House measured some 95 feet wide and 24 feet deep plus an ell, making it the largest domestic structure built in Virginia in the seventeenth century, easily twice as wide

as the much-celebrated Bacon's Castle.’* Its linear plan looked back (fig. 4.8) to English medieval precedents but was distinctive for having a central doorway leading into the center of the dedicated entry space of a three-room plan, instead of into one end of a large hall or principal room of a two-room plan. Its thick masonry bearing walls probably had splayed window openings on the interior. Latrobe produced a perspective sketch of Green Spring House and its

surroundings as seen from the southwest (fig. 4.9) and wrote in his journal that “(the house] ... is a brick building of great solidity, but no attempt at grandeur. he lower story was covered by an arcade which is fallen down. The

porch has some clumsy ornamental brickwork about it of the stile of James ist.17 He wrote at greater length about its history, noting that it had been erected by Virginia Colonial Governor William Berkeley and had been the site of a Revolutionary War engagement and a meeting place for the Virginia General Assembly; moreover, he believed it to be the oldest house in North America.1® Consequently, he disagreed with Lee's intention to demolish everything and rebuild nearby, concluding that “the antiquity of the old

222

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 4.8. Green Spring, James City County, Virginia. Plan as Latrobe found it. (Michael Fazio from T. T. Waterman, Mansions of Virginia, 1945)

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Fig. 4.9. Latrobe's sketch of Green Spring House,

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and the number and spacing of the openings in this service wing do not agree in plan and elevation. The elevations are comparable to the Pope Villa, as it was built, but with quite different proportions. The principal and, therefore, taller story of the Pope Villa is the second story, with the entry and service story below at grade, Latrobe's preferred arrangement in his rational-house parti. The principal tall stories of the commandant’s quarters and officers’ quarters are the ground or entry levels. The front elevation achieves its full expression by reflecting the interior, tripartite arrangement, an arrangement derived from Latrobe's well-documented spatial, structural, and climatic concerns. The three-bay rear elevation reflects the back-to-back basilican-form rooms and the passage between them, a refined version of the denied-central-axis parti that Latrobe used in residential plans from Hammerwood in England to the Van Ness House in Washington, D.C., that follows in this chapter. He unified these elevations by adopting a rigorous system of geometric proportions, in this case, based on squares. [he elevations conform to slightly elongated double squares with each of the tripartite windows also a square. The plan of the commandant’ quarters is also composed of four squares (fig. 6.60), one at the dining room, one at the drawing room, one straddling the back-to-back apses, and one in the hall, with a thin strip of additional space beneath the arch at the hall’s northwest end. Plain water tables and belt courses define the floor levels on the exterior. At the ground-story windows, Latrobe prescribed plain lintels supported by corner blocks, making, as at the Markoe House, ornamental elements into apparently structural ones. Conversely, he exposed the rafter ends, making structural elements ornamental. In an inset drawing adjacent to the plan of the officers’ quarters, Latrobe proposed an optional wing extending northwest from the west corner of the commandants quarters, matching symmetrically a similar wing attached to the officers’ quarters. [his optional wing was to provide offices for the commandant and his clerk, each office covered by a single groin vault. A small plan sketched in pencil beneath the principal-story plan of the commandant’s quarters explores the possibility of moving this wing to the buildings southwest end wall. If this had been done here and also at the officers’ quarters by rotating the kitchen-pantry wing to the northeast end wall, it would have produced two, secondary, five-part compositions, interlocking with the primary,

five-part composition of the entire, linear range of buildings (fig. 6.61), but the wings would not have defined the yard. Although the corresponding elevations of the commandant'’s and officers’ quarters are identical but in mirror image, the plans of the two buildings

4.50

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Fig. 6.60. Allegheny Arsenal. Geometric

mandant’s quarters is dominated by the three, symmetrically distributed basilican-form rooms, while the ground story of the officers’ quarters contains only rectangular rooms of various sizes fitted asymmetrically into the regu-

analysis of Latrobe's plans and elevations of the

commandant's quarters. (Michael Fazio)

lar block to accommodate multiple living and dining arrangements for married and unmarried officers. These conditions recall Latrobe's conscious use

of artifice at his English houses such as Hammerwood (Chapter 1), where, like the layout of the overall arsenal complex, a symmetrical, five-part principal facade masks often radically asymmetrical interior conditions. It is unclear whether any parts of the arsenal complex were ever completed to Latrobe's designs. ‘The early site plan followed his recommendations, as indicated in an 1830 map, but with the commandant’s and officers’ quarters reversed,137 ‘The buildings as built were similar enough in spirit to have been influenced by his proposals. ‘The arsenal continued operating until 1926, when the government sold it at public auction. The buildings remain, some quite radically altered.

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Latrobe's “Best House” ‘THe Van Ness MANSION

Latrobe described his large residence designed in 1813-1815 for John Peter and

Importance of the Commission

Marcia Van Ness on block 173 of the engraved Ellicott Plan of Washington, D.C., as the “best house I ever designed.’138 As son-in-law of David Burnes, one of the district’s original landowners, Van Ness inherited some five hundred acres along the Potomac on both sides of Tiber Creek, including block 173 on which Burnes’ cottage still stood. The son of a Revolutionary War hero, New York state senator, and judge, Van Ness studied at Columbia College, read the law, and was elected to the House of Representatives on the

Jeffersonian Republican ticket in 1800. Once in Washington, D.C., he met and married Marcia Burnes. Land rich but often cash poor, he still died the wealthiest man in the District and one of its most influential,13°

Fig. 6.62. Block map showing Latrobe's buildings around Lafayette Square and the President's

Marcia Van Ness was revered in the capital beyond any other woman of her day. This veneration arose largely from her altruistic behavior following

House. (Michael Fazio)

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Marcia Van Ness, and the Van Ness House had to accommodate a Washington society in which women played a distinctive role. Not only did the city

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appeared to be even in the highest quarters so little attention to ceremony...

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

[that] it is possible many things might be permitted there, which would be objected to elsewhere. 14° Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of Samuel Harrison Smith who founded the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, was long an observer of Washington society and a contemporary of Marcia Van Ness; she believed that Washington women assumed “a station in society

_ which is not known elsewhere. On every public occasion . . .as well as [in] the drawing room, they are treated with marked distinction . . .I think the man-

ners are here different from those in other places... [T]he ladies and gentlemen stand and walk about the rooms, in mingled groups, which certainly produces more ease, freedom and equality than in those rooms where the ladies sit and wait for gentlemen to approach to converse. 141

Latrobe's relationship with John Peter Van Ness was not always cordial or even civil. Van Ness was accustomed to a position of authority, such that Latrobe eventually characterized him as an “insolent brute,14? but Latrobe certainly contributed to the conflict. He admitted that he harbored “aristocratic feelings,” that he was considered to be stubborn and hard to control, and that he gave many the impression that he was “imperious and haughty. 147 Furthermore, Latrobe refused to concede that he ever had too many projects to manage them all satisfactorily, and this became a major source of disagreement between the Van Nesses and their architect. Latrobe persevered with the commission because of its prominence, anticipating that his grand vision would be “pretty well exhibited at Washington.’1*4 At the time of its construction, the Van Ness House had little competition in the city. Among private residences only William Thornton's

house for John Tayloe (now known as the Octagon), which was located three blocks to the north and which strained Tayloe’s considerable financial resources, was comparable in scale and grandeur.1** In fact, the three principal, ground-story rooms in the two houses were close to one another in size. Furthermore, the Van Ness House was part of an urban ensemble that

Latrobe assembled around and near what became Lafayette Square (fg. 6.62). This ensemble included the President’s House to the south of the square as well as Stephen Decatur’s house (1817-1819) at its northwest corner

and St. John’s Church (1815-1816) on its north side. The site was also familiar to Latrobe because of its proximity to his proposed route for the Washington City Canal and his design for a national university, which he planned for the western end of the mall in view of block 173. In many ways the Van Ness House was a private domain comparable to the public

“smain of the President's House. Construction of the President's

Capital City and Expanding Democracy

453

Gate Houses

Stable

| =
this mantel’s Adamesque ornamentation is inconsistent with Latrobe's taste but could have been requested by the Van Nesses. Latrobe projected wooden columns painted in scagliola for both the “stairs” and the “hall.” It is unclear exactly where he intended to place a second set of columns, as Codman showed only two, and these were located in the chamber-story hall at the head of the stair.!°° He advised Van Ness to lay down

“good [wood] floors clear of large knots’ and anticipated that they would be covered with carpets in winter and “matts or oil cloths” in summer.197 Still extant is the stable block (figs. 6.72—6.73), an impressive building in its own right. Square in plan with three arched openings that once led to

Capital City and Expanding Democracy

Fig. 6.72. Van Ness stable. Early-twentieth-

century photograph (opposite) and postrelocation to the northwest corner of the block and post-restoration photograph (bottom) showing current conditions, both from the southeast. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division and Michael Fazio)

467

Fig, 6.73. Van Ness stable. Reconstructed west elevation of the probable Latrobe design. (Michael Fazio)

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stalls—for which ventilation louvers are still visible low on the south wall, a carriage bay, and probably a harness room, this structure is covered by a

pyramidal roof and once had a tall (but probably not so tall in Latrobe's time as seen in the twentieth-century photographs) octagonal cupola that served as a plenum to exhaust hot air. Although this stable must have always had roughcast walls, the present material is not original and was probably applied at the time of the building's relocation in 1907. Likewise, the present standing-seam metal roof is a twentieth-century substitution. [he most dramatic change to the structure, however, has been the removal of the cupola in favor of a low ventilation monitor. The sawn-off stumps of the vertical posts that defined the cupola’s corners remain inside the roof structure. The stable originally stood directly west of the house along what is now 17th Street. By 1820, a wall enclosed at least the north side of the site and a

walled-in yard extended from the west side of the house to the stable (fg. 6.74). It is not known who planned these walls. On the basis of this discussion of buildings and site, three motivations seem likely for Latrobe's categorization of the Van Ness Mansion as his “best house.’ First, the Van Ness Mansion was located on an extremely prominent site in the nation’s capital and was part of a complete architectural ensemble

468

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

from gatehouses to house to stable, an ensemble over which Latrobe had total design control and a site at which he carried out complete construction supervision. This was, in fact, the only such case among all of his American residential commissions because elsewhere he either removed himself from

involvement moved away and Markoe Pope Villa).

because of decisions made by his client before his residences were finished (as in houses) or never visited their remote sites Second, it was grand in both exterior and

(as at Sedgeley) or the case of the Waln (as at Adena and the interior scale, in the

rational simplicity of its exterior envelope, and in its high degree of interior finish, probably including an entry-hall floor of stone. It was so large and so grand that Latrobe probably saw it as comparable to some of the great houses he had known in England, and it was, in fact, modeled on one of them and one of them to which Latrobe may have made significant design contributions. Lhird, the Van Ness Mansion’s interiors exhibited not only luxury but also consistency and variety and even scenery. Although it was not a rational house in the manner of the almost-square first Waln proposal and the Pope Villa as built, with their scenic routes up from ground to principal story, the Van Ness Mansion had an extremely sophisticated plan, one that made a “show” and made possible lavish entertaining. Furthermore, although the house had no oblique scenic views, the transverse axis through the large openings between the three principal rooms created layered spaces covered | by wood-and-plaster vaulting. Finally, the house may well have had scenery in the manner of the Markoe House, with its views through columns from the ground or principal story up to the chamber story, and because the location of only two of the four Van Ness interior columns is known, it seems likely that the other pair would also have contributed to this effect. Of all Latrobe's domestic design and construction experiences, this one had to have been the most contentious. He took on the commission a month or so before he moved to Pittsburgh in late October 1813 and better than a year after the end of his work as Surveyor of the Public Buildings.'®* As was so often the

Conflict during Construction

case, the financial arrangements were murky, this time because of a debt that Latrobe already owed Van Ness for rent on one of his city properties and because Van Ness bought materials and paid the workmen himself, making it impossible for Latrobe to know the full construction cost and, therefore, estimate his fee accurately. At the time of his departure, Latrobe attempted to put the best face on a perilous financial situation that would lead him to bank-

ruptcy in January 1818, saying to Van Ness that he had “more outstanding

Capital City and Expanding Democracy

469

claims than I can hope in my absence to get in for many Years, and some incumbrances still remain to be discharged.” °° He also assured the Van Nesses that he would have ample time to complete the design work while in Pittsburgh and recommended that they plan on a square-foot cost of at least $6. Latrobe later claimed that he “drew the outline of a design” a few days

before he left Washington, but that when John Peter Van Ness did not receive the drawings because of problems with the mail, he sent Latrobe an abusive letter.!7° Situated in Pittsburgh in December 1813, Latrobe was still Be G04. Van News Home, See en ache

making excuses to Van Ness.171 Although he assured him that the drawings were completed, he claimed still to be looking for an appropriate way to con-

Eeperance de Hetsant of dhe complex tom the north in ca. 1820. (André Azieres)

vey them in mid-January 1814.17? From then on, the design process, which included at least two complete proposals, still took better than a year and a

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

half, during which time Latrobe abandoned Pittsburgh to become once again architect of the Capitol in Washington, D.C?” It was not until November 1815, two years after the project had commenced, that he could report having “set out” the location of the house on the site so that construction could begin.‘ By February 1816, he was making arrangements for subsurface site work: cellars, foundation walls, and a cesspool.!”* As excavation and masonry work proceeded, he made plans to construct a lime house and the stable so that they could be used as a shop and warehouse space.1”° In May, Van Ness advertised for bids on brick and stone.” Architect and client disagreed over construction of the gate lodges and gate piers. Van Ness wanted and got them erected immediately; Latrobe recommended waiting so that they would not be damaged by carts entering and leaving the construction site.1”® Concurrent with other site work, the gate

structures and all the excavation were completed in late June.!79 At this time, Latrobe also finished drawings for making all the doors and windows.18°

By early June 1816, the cellars were excavated, and masons John Queen and W. W. Birth were ready to begin work on July 1.18! Then, Latrobe and Van Ness began arguing over the amount and form of Latrobe's compensation; the two men had not yet entered into a formal contract!1®? ‘Their harangue continued for better than two years, resulting in Latrobe's fee finally being paid in Washington, D.C., real estate.1®? Carpentry was underway in August 1816 as Ignatius Mudd completed sash, flooring, base, surbase, and grounds, erected the centering for the vault below the portico, and set the floor joists in the masonry walls of the cellar.184 In mid-September, the house was “nearly ready to receive the roof.’1®> However, work did not proceed rapidly enough as far as Van Ness was concerned. He attributed this problem to Latrobe's infrequent visits to the site and frequent absences from the city.1®° This perception could only have been exacerbated by Van Ness’s membership in a new troika headed by ex-armyofficer Samuel Lane and charged with supervision of construction at the Capitol and President's House and by Latrobe's having recently won, with Maximilian Godefroy, the competition for the design of the Baltimore Exchange, an enormous project that required a significant commitment of his time and often necessitated that he leave Washington. Although it is difficult to determine adequately Latrobe's culpability, it is clear that he had a plethora of business commitments outside his federal responsibilities as he tried to recover financially from his removal to and return from Pittsburgh. Samuel Lane seemed determined to hold him

Capital City and Expanding Democracy

471

accountable to his own standard of professional conduct, perhaps fair, perhaps not.187 Participating as a commissioner, Van Ness, acutely aware of Latrobe's distractions, demanded to have him at the site on designated mornings, a not unreasonable request, but one that Latrobe felt to be impractical.1®® Related antagonism between the two men escalated to such a point

that the client fired his architect, not once but twice, on m July 1817 and 23 September 1817, but rehired him each time. At the beginning of 1817 and a new year’s building campaign, masons were at work on the north wall of the house and the vault under the portico. Plans were made to provide the fill necessary for the ramped access drive in early April.1®° By the summer of 1817, the house was enclosed, plasterers were at work,1% the discussions were underway between Latrobe and Marcia Van Ness regarding the interior ornamentation,’*! and moldings were being applied in the principal rooms.19? Correspondence does not make clear when the Van Nesses occupied the premises, but it must have been in early 1818,

Epilogue

While the house apparently served the Van Nesses well, the prominence of the site eventually proved to bea

liability. Subsequent to Van Ness's death in

1846, it was sold to Richmond newspaper editor Thomas Green. In 186s, at the time of the Lincoln assassination, the rumor circulated in the capital that

Green and his wife had been involved with the John Wilkes Booth conspirators in a plot to abduct the president and imprison him in their tomblike wine cellar.19? Although the Greens were exonerated, their house never regained its status as a social center. Still, in the early 1870s the buildings remained intact, and the grounds had matured to a level of verdant luxuriance. However, by the 1880s, the house stood vacant before being converted first into a German beer garden, then a florist’s nursery, and finally headquarters for the city’s street cleaners. Extant photographs from the 1890s show the grounds as adapted by the Columbia Athletic Club, which required

the removal of much of the landscaping (fig. 6.75). In 1903, Columbiana University, now George Washington University, purchased the property, placed its engineering school in the house, and further developed the grounds as athletic fields. In 1907, the federal government assumed ownership of the site,

moved the stable, razed all the other buildings, and built the present PanAmerican Union building to the designs of Paul Cret. A mantel from the David Burnes Cottage and some door hardware from the Van Ness House remain in the collections of the Columbia Historical Society.

472

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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Fig. 6.75. Van Ness House. Aerial view of the

site in the early twentieth century. (U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland)

Chapter Seven

Latrobes Final Years in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New Orleans

LATROBES TIME SPENT in Pittsburgh did little to further his career or to right his listing financial ship. His return to Washington, D.C., represented the denouement of his travails for the federal government, and his stop in Balti-

more, where he supervised construction of his (and Maximilian Godefroy’s) design for the Baltimore Exchange (unfortunately destroyed), was brief. Latrobe's architectural practice ended in New Orleans, as did his life, as he vainly attempted to design and build the city’s water-supply system and finally to become a wealthy man. Despite the unraveling of his professional life during this period, he erected two houses in the national capital that display his full powers as a domestic designer, and his final building in New Orleans reveals him to have been an innovator to the very end. Although the interior arrangement of the Washington, D.C., house that he designed for Ann Casanave is unknown, its exterior form and its setting are well documented. With it, Latrobe demonstrated that his rational-house prototype was adaptable to a then-suburban site and to a cottage-scale residence. Susan and Stephen Decatur presented him with something of a final examination on what he had learned about American domestic design when they purchased property at the northwest corner of Lafayette Square and determined their complex programmatic requirements. It is ironic that Susan Decatur had been born Susan Wheeler, daughter of Luke Wheeler. Luke Wheeler had challenged Latrobe twenty-one years earlier to design his first American house for Captain William Pennock in Norfolk, Virginia, a project, like Decatur House, with unusual site conditions and an unexpected spatial organization. Still standing on a prominent site at the corner of Royal and Conti streets in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Latrobe's State Bank of Louisiana, with its second-story residential space, is placed here as a coda to his career as a domestic designer. Its most important elements, an exotic array of ground-story masonry vaults, are discussed in the essay on “Latrobe as Architect-Engineer” that follows in Chapter 8.

476

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

A Cottage-Villa for a Single Woman It seems likely, based on formal characteristics, that Latrobe designed the

CAaSANAVE HousE

house once standing at the corner of 14th and C streets, N.W. In a letter to his father-in-law, Isaac Hazlehurst, Latrobe wrote of his “3 Capital houses”

(presumably Van Ness, Casanave, and Decatur). In a June 1817 letter to his son, Henry, Latrobe described his recent residential designs for Marcia and

John Peter Van Ness and for Ann Casanave as “the best in the district.”? Notley Young, son of Daniel Carroll and one of the original Washington, D.C., proprietors, willed several squares in the city to his granddaughter, Ann Casanave, including square 232.3 Casanaves husband, Peter, died in 1796.

Washington, D.C., historian James M. Goode has contended that she then built on the northeast corner of square 232 in 1802, causing some to suggest that Latrobe's 1817 project for her was a remodeling of and additions to an existing building;* the house's odd, offset plan, as seen on subsequent maps of the city, does lend credibility to this hypothesis. However, a circa 1828

sketch by John Rubens Smith, showing the Casanave House beyond the east facade of the Capitol, depicts a structure in splendid isolation and without any appendages. Because no Latrobe drawings for the Casanave House survive and because it was demolished in 1913 to make way for the Ireasury Department's Bureau of Printing and Engraving, city maps and photographs must be used to determine its configuration. Both the house's perimeter outline and place-

Fig. 7.1. Casanave House, Washington, D.C., 1817. Site plan, based on an 1887 plat map and a 1903 Sanborn Insurance Company Map.

(Michael Fazio) C Street

ment on the site are unusual. On an 1887 plat map, the plan is composed of

two offset rectangles (fig. 7.1).5 The front rectangle measures about 20 feet ducing a maximum visual effect along 14th Street, with a parallel (probably service) wing behind but projecting to the north well beyond the front section. This configuration could suggest that the rear section already existed when Latrobe arrived and that this earlier house faced C Street. Latrobe's

14th Street

deep by 47 feet wide (some 940 square feet) and straddles two city lots, pro-

summary of construction costs totaling $5,600 confirms an enclosed area of something less than 1,000 square feet based on his typical estimate of about six dollars per square foot for a residential structure without elaborate fittings. A 1903 Sanborn fire insurance map shows all of this construction rising to two stories with the only one-story section being a small porch at the

southwest corner. An exterior photograph looking northwest (fig. 7.2) shows this one-story porch and the two-story front section, but the angle of view leaves most of the rear section obscured.® On the basis of the fenestration

Last Houses

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pattern and close-set chimney locations, the plan of the front section would appear to have been a narrow hall with single rooms astride it on the ground story, a distribution not unlike the front half of the ground story at Decatur House, but with the fireboxes in the interior walls, probably meaning enfilade

doorways at the front and/or rear of the hall (fig. 7.3). The arched fanlight of the front entry might suggest a curvilinear geometry for the plan, similar to the principal stories of the Pope Villa and commandant’ quarters at the Allegheny Arsenal, but the flue walls would have made back-to-back basilican units impossible. It is difficult to say where the stair may have been or how the spaces in the front section related to those at the rear. Furthermore, the idea of a central-hall plan contradicts Latrobe's longstanding aversion to this layout. Unfortunately, Latrobe's correspondence with Ann Casanave mainly concerns the settling of accounts and so sheds little light on the internal arrangements or even on the construction process.’ A reconstructed elevation shows a building quite in keeping with

Latrobe’ preferences and practices. Certainly the wooden entry porch (fig. 7.4) with its giant Venetian motif of mixed trabeated and arcuated con-

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struction, which Latrobe always reviled as illogical, was not his work.® The entry frontispiece, which the porch largely concealed, was, in fact, very much

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like that of the Decatur House but with the semicircular transom instead of

university was to face. The southern remnants of the Mall opened up to the west. B Street, one block to the north, defined the southern edge of the Mall. Maryland Avenue, one block to the south, arrived at an angle from the northeast and the Capitol. Maryland Avenue and the extension of 15th Street

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The reconstructed elevation must be interpreted on the basis of its distinctive context. In Ann Casanave's time, block 232 stood quite close to the banks of the Potomac, some distance from most residential development that had occurred north of the Mall. Block 232 stood, however, at an apparently propitious location, one, in fact, onto which Latrobe's proposed national

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Fig. 7.3. Casanave House. Reconstructed groundor principal-story plan and front elevation.

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along the southern extremity of the Mall converged at the Potomac and continued across Long Bridge, the principal connection between the Federal City and Virginia to the west. Latrobe and Ann Casanave had chosen a site with access to the most prominent points in the city, a site that would benefit from the future parklike setting of the southern development of the Mall, and a site that offered views and access out across the Potomac. Latrobe had designed a small suburban cottage-villa for a single woman, but one with an

Last Houses

479

impressive facade befitting a “Capital” house. An 1834 engraving shows the Casanave House and a few others in a hamlet-like wooded area at the foot of the bridge.° Several of the house's other features argue persuasively for Latrobe's authorship: the emphasis on wide expanses of mural wall surface, the related austere geometry, the two flue walls appearing as tall planar chimneys, the distinctive window-head treatment—the use of a plain lintel with corner-block supports, and the tripartite end-wall window with a segmental-arch head comparable to those at the Van Ness House. As prescribed in Latrobe's details Fig. 7.4. Casanave House. Photograph of the facade and later entry porch in the early

for Decatur House, the shutters were set back against the recessed sash frames. Latrobe, it would appear, designed this modest house for Ann Casanave by

twentieth century. (Rambler Collection, His-

drawing inspiration and even specific elements from his two larger residential

torical Society of Washington, D.C.)

designs of the same period, the Van Ness and Decatur houses.

480

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

A Rational House with Complications Deceptive in its apparent simplicity, this house for Stephen and Susan Decatur

Decatur HousE

presents something of a conundrum. Its orientation on the site set before Latrobe problems that defied resolution according to his established design theories. Later modifications to the house have been made at various times, and the present owner, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has only recently allowed subsurface investigations.1° These problems are exacerbated by the scarcity of related correspondence and an incomplete understanding of Commodore Stephen Decatur, who, for an early-nineteenth-century naval hero of the highest order, remains an elusive, almost shadowy, figure.4 Regardless of these problems, the events leading the Decaturs to build seem clear. In 1815, subsequent to naval exploits in the War of 1812 that earned him a great reputation and substantial prize money from the U.S. government, Stephen Decatur became a member of the three-man Board of Commissioners of the Navy Department, the highest position then open to a commissioned officer.!? Leaving his sea command with some reluctance, he came to the Federal City where he set out to establish himself financially and socially, including the purchase of considerable property in the city and the building of

the first house on President's (now Lafayette) Square.!? At a time when James and Dolley Madison were reoccupying the President's House, the square became one of the city's most prestigious addresses, and the Decaturs produced an entertainment environment that was unexcelled in the national capital.’ By the time of his work on Decatur House, Latrobe had no doubt about the proper distribution of rooms in an American residence, including a strong preference that the main facades face north and south. However, the

Decaturs chose to build on the northeast corner of their block (fig, 6.62) and on the west side of President's Square, making an east-facing front facade inevitable and a south-facing, preferably blank party wall likely to allow for future adjacent construction. Evidence suggests that Latrobe proposed at least two schemes and that substantive changes in his accepted design were made well into the project's construction phase.

On 4 June 1817, Latrobe transmitted to Stephen Decatur sealed bids from “Mr. Meade,’ probably Simeon Meade, builder of the Casanave House, and “Mr. Skinner,’ likely Richard Skinner, the carpenter who had erected Latrobes

nearby St. Johns Church. He left it open for Decatur to approach others, saying: “T believe that the drawings and description [which have not been found] are sufficient to enable any other intelligent Mechanic to contract.” While he

Last Houses

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had not opened the bids, Latrobe projected the construction cost to be “"IO-11,000$,15 The bids came to naught, however, and work on the site did not begin until after January 1818, with Decatur, not surprisingly, “anxious to com-

mence [construction] as early as the season will permit.’!® Latrobe produced all of his dated construction drawings from January through April 1818. He wrote in April that he had “seen Commodore Decatur often” but had “hardly set... foot out of the room” where he kept his drawing instruments, so constantly had he been at work on the commission.” Once begun, construction took only about twelve months, suggesting that there were never elaborate

interior finishes, and the Decaturs were able to occupy the house in January 1819.18 Paint analysis has revealed that none of the interior walls were painted during Stephen Decatur’s lifetime. The plaster needed to cure for some twelve months before pigment could be applied, and Decatur died only fourteen months after he and his wife occupied the premises. To understand Latrobe's vision, it is necessary to reconstruct his design process. Given his normal rate of progress and given that he had drawings

ready for bidding in June 1817, he probably began work sometime between mid-1816 and the beginning of 1817, What then happened between June 1817

and January 1818? The fall of 1817 was a tumultuous time for the Latrobe family. On 3 September 1817, Henry Latrobe died while at work on the New Orleans Waterworks. His father's ongoing conflict with Samuel Lane, the Commissioner of Public Buildings, led to the architect's resignation at the Capitol in November. Latrobe declared bankruptcy in December and moved to Baltimore the following month, which led to the loss of his polygraph and the absence of subsequent correspondence between him and Decatur in Latrobes letter books and made it unlikely that Latrobe participated substantially in construction supervision.!® Yet, while these events may have caused him to suspend work during the fall, they do not explain why the project as bid did not go forward during the summer of 1817. The most likely explanation must be that the Decaturs found the bids unacceptable or otherwise changed their

minds in June and asked Latrobe for substantial design revisions. The Decaturs’ intended use of the house must also be considered. In his

letter of 4 June 1817, Latrobe commented that “if the house should be occupied by a foreign Minister, I would also recommend the addition of a slight one story room, back, for a servants hall,” suggesting that the Decaturs were concerned with their house’ attractiveness as a rental property. Stephen

482

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Decatur may have hoped to return to a sea command and take his wife with him, a practice then accepted in the U.S. Navy. If so, they would have needed

to rent the house, which would help to explain Latrobe's initial cost estimate of no more than $11,000. As constructed, the building included some 2,300 square feet on each of three floors plus a full cellar, meaning, if the budget remained the same, that it was to cost at most some $4.80 per square foot according to Latrobe's usual methods of calculation, a sum those he typically reported for speculative buildings.2° The have sought a compromise: a house spacious and impressive ish entertaining but still rentable and buildable at a price with a part-time home and real-estate speculation.

comparable to Decaturs may enough for lavcommensurate

An understanding of Latrobe's design intentions must come from an analysis of the floor plans, first of his drawn versions, then of the house as

built, and beginning with his unusual drawing for the cellar. It (fig. 7.5) represents the ground-story walls superimposed on those of the cellar (a technique Latrobe had also used in his 1806 drawing for design 5 of the Baltimore Cathedral), includes a partial transverse section, and was obviously intended to show masons how the wall configuration changed at the transition between the two floors.

Latrobe organized the cellar (fig. 7.6) by means of a transverse corridor, its orientation predicated on a service entry opening from an areaway and bulk-

head to the north, This corridor runs to the beer cellar, with other storage rooms along either side. Four fireplace foundation walls are visible, as are four half-windows that would have opened into areaways. Two of the windows appear in the section as does Latrobe's proposed barrel vault over the bottledwine cellar that would have supported the masonry floor of the entry hall. However, while the ledges for receiving this vault remain in the wine cellar’s sidewalls, there is no evidence that it was ever constructed. Latrobe intended to light this space by means of two splayed, slit windows at the front wall, making the front porch, or stoop, width less than it is today, and this porch would have been accessible from the front rather than the sides, as it is today. Although the interior stair shown on the cellar-story plan corresponds to that on Latrobe's surviving third- or chamber-story plan (fig. 7.13), it is puzzling. First, its winders carelessly encroach on the rear wall. Second, the initial treads and the word “Stairs” are superimposed, making it clear that the word came first, before the stair plan was overdrawn. Third, it is difficult to see how this stair could have accommodated the door opening on the ground story. In any case, it seems likely that the stair's design was still in flux when

Last Houses

483

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Latrobe drew the plan, and someone overmarked the treads with an a wavy graphite line, as if to rule out this configuration. Likewise, the “Wood Door” and its areaway on the north facade are hatched over as if they too were to be eliminated, which they were.

See fig. 7.16

On the ground story above (fig. 7.6), Latrobe turned the primary axis of entry 90 degrees, making it a longitudinal organization (fig. 7.7): a double-pile,

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dual-compartment, central-hall-like configuration with the space in the northwest corner subdivided to accommodate the kitchen offices and the service stair. As such, the design appears to be another Latrobe critical interpretation of the

Butler’s Pantry Dining Room

ubiquitous American double-pile, central-hall plan that the Decaturs, anticipating renting the premises, may have felt to be the most universally acceptable arrangement for prospective tenants. As he had at the Steward’s House for the

Kitchen Office

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proposed U.S, Marine Hospital, Latrobe developed three separate circulation

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vaulted entry that serves as a foyer, a central “rotunda” that acknowledges the

compartment (fig. 7.8; plate 19) is a completely designed environment, with its plaster ceiling mimicking masonry vaulting to the point that Latrobe called the continuous molded frieze above the doors from which the vaults appear to spring an “imposte moulding.’ A single fue on Latrobe's chamber-story plan suggests that the north-side niche was to contain a freestanding cast-iron stove,

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paths, in this case for the owners or renters, guests, and servants, Latrobe divided the front hall-compartment into three parts: a barrelcross-axis established by a door to the left, and a half-domed apse that makes a transition to the rear hall-compartment and its principal stair. This front hall-

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Around and through this stair compartment, ground- and principalstory circulation flows (fig. 7.7). On the ground story, a central, longitudinal axis connects the front entry to the rear yard. A second longitudinal axis connects the two south rooms: the potential minister's offices if the house were rented out. A transverse axis connects the front hall-compartment to the southeast room. A central, transverse enfilade connects the southwest room with the vestibule at the foot of the stair and is terminated by a niche or sham door on the north; Latrobe's drawing is ambiguous, but the niche seems likely, as there is no sham door listed on his ground-story door schedule. Finally, a rear service enfilade extends along the rear wall and terminates at the service stairs. The front hall-compartment at Decatur House is divided into expanding and contracting spatial cells formed by pilasters, reveals, and niches. Latrobe's “imposte, or frieze molding, wraps around it uniting the heads of all the doors and forming the spring line for the pendentives, which rise to support the disk ceiling, suggesting a low, suppressed dome. It is one of the most sculptural and consistently integrated spaces in any American Federal period house and a mature example of Latrobe's “interior system’ of spatial ordering. It is obviously similar in perimeter outline to such masonry-vaulted

486

Principal Story

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Ground Story

compositions in public buildings as his director's room at the Bank of Pennsylvania and his Supreme Court and Senate Chamber vestibules at the Capitol. The Decatur House compartment has also been compared with Sir Robert ‘Taylor's hall at 35 Lincoln's Inn Fields in London (fig. 7.10) but has more kinship to S. P. Cockerell’s chamber-story corridor in his additions to Wyndham House, Salisbury, where the corridor's height was governed by floor levels in the existing structure; consequently, it had to accommodate constrained dimensions and did so by means of the same arrangement of imposte, or frieze, molding; pendentives; and flattened domes.?! Some insight into this restricted situation at Decatur House can be gained by closely studying

Fig. 7.8. Decatur House. Photograph of the

front hall-compartment (door opening on the right not original and now filled in), (Michael Freeman photograph)

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ment (fig. 7.9; plate 18), where he noted that “the floor of the Joists over the Hall lies from East to West the Joists to be only 3 x 7, supported as in the section below. The joists of the Drawing Room are to be 3 x 14—By this means 7 inches in height is Obtained for the Center of the Hall in addition to the height of the Story.’ Accordingly, Latrobe obtained sufficient depth for his suspended wooden vaulting without significantly lowering the ceiling height of the space. Contrary to common practice, he arranged the ceiling joists to span the length of the entry. While this configuration may appear structurally uneconomical, it was not and was advantageous technically. The four pilasters on the north and south walls are structural, carrying pairs of transverse beams that, in turn, are notched into and partially support the floor joists above them, such that these joists are effectively divided into three separate spans, the

488

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

longest span in the center being less than 9 feet. Latrobe then suspended his plaster-on-lath vaults from the joists by constructing cruck-beam-like arch-

shaped wooden ribs spanning (or “springing”) north to south. If the joists had spanned north to south, attaching them to the erratically spaced wooden ribs would have been inconvenient, as all of the members would have run parallel to and, therefore, had to have been scabbed on to one another. Why all of this elaborate structural manipulation? The explanation involves the front facade proportions and internal functional requirements. Vaults of dramatically changing heights, as at the Markoe House, would have made for an inappropriately small vestibule space adjacent to the south rooms if they were used as offices, while higher vaults would have created unacceptable facade proportions. The results of such high vaults can be seen

Pilasters

at Sir Robert Taylor's 3-6 Grafton Street and 35 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Lon-

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don (fig. 7.10), where the vault depths are shielded externally by very tall mural wall surfaces in the former and by panels between pairs of belt courses in the

Library

Front Hall-Compartment

latter; either condition would have been quite out of place in Federal period Washington, D.C. Latrobes drawn plan of the ground story apparently suffers from a problem of propriety. Because he indicated no kitchen on the cellar-story plan, he intended to place it either in a back building or on the ground story, and, as

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he tended to avoid back buildings, except stables, a rear kitchen seems unlikely.

door schedule indicates six doors for the “Kitchen Offices,’ and it does not seem reasonable that the kitchen support spaces would have been located

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inside the walls of the house, with the kitchen alone in a back building. Yet, while appropriately placed adjacent to service spaces, a kitchen located in the northeast corner of the house would have had a window opening onto Pres-

ident’s Square (Lafayette Park), an almost unimaginable arrangement, but the most likely one. Telling evidence of this configuration is an 1820 inventory made subsequent to Stephen Decatur’s death.?? It and a detailed analysis of it appear on www.bhlatrobe.info. This inventory appears to identify, on the ground story, the southeast room as Decatur's library, the southwest room as a family dining room, the northwest rooms as kitchen offices, and the northeast room as the kitchen. Furthermore, recent paint analysis of early finishes in this northeast room has revealed “excessive amounts of grease-like residue,’ on the first layer of paint, and the removal of plaster in selected locations has uncovered a tall, wide cooking fireplace, the smoke-stained outline, or “ghost,”

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of the original mantel, and evidence of earlier shelving.?? Most recently, subsurface investigation of the floor construction has revealed that the joists along the north side of the room and adjacent to the original cooking fireplace were dropped about three inches below those to the south, possibly to allow for a brick floor atop them.”* This arrangement would have been an economical version of the masonry-vaulted floor construction that Latrobe constantly advocated but rarely achieved. Across the rest of the room, a mortarlike material was packed in between the flooring and subflooring, probably as a fire retardant. Although it is impossible to say conclusively that this room served as a kitchen during the Decaturs occupancy, it was certainly used as a kitchen very early in the house's existence.

Fig. 7.10. Entry at Sir Robert Taylor's 35 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1757. (Greater

London Council)

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

In addition to having a propriety problem, the ground story contradicts Latrobe's stated theories of domestic design. While he preferred only service

functions on this level, he had to locate family (or ministerial) spaces here, and while he preferred ornamentation to be minimal at the entry and to increase as one moved to the more significant rooms, he applied the most articulation at Decatur House in the front hall-compartment. The motive for this compromise seems obvious: providing a proper vestibule for the suite of offices to be used by a renting minister. One can only admire Latrobe's flexibility in adapting his preferences to his clients’ specialized demands. He produced a plan that, in effect, places a side-hall town house adjacent to a walledoff service “wing.” The former served the family or a minister without any awkwardness in the patterns of circulation. In the Decaturs’ day, guests

would have proceeded axially between the family-ministerial and service domains up the stair to the principal rooms, an experience not unlike the threading of the entry route through the ground-story spaces of the Pope Villa but without the scenery. And the three-bay facade successfully conceals this asymmetrical internal functionality, compromised only by the single kitchen window opening onto President's Square. Because Latrobe's second- or principal-story plan for Decatur House has not survived, it is necessary to speculate about it by projecting the ground_ story plan upward, while assuming that the room distribution as designed corresponds fairly closely to that as constructed, and by examining the existing fabric for evidence of changes. The bearing walls of the ground story, as drawn, do correspond to walls of the principal story, as built, yielding the reconstructed principal-story plan in figure 7.11. Latrobe again depended on both longitudinal and transverse axes to organize this level (fig. 7.7) but, following S. P. Cockerell, revolved the spaces pinwheel-like around a spatial core formed by the stair landing; it is a layout that facilitates the flow of guests around the circuit of public rooms, while allowing the servants to reach these spaces in an efhcient, radial pattern.?* At Decatur House, this arrangement yielded a dining room in the northeast corner, a large drawing room in the

southeast corner, a parlor (or bedchamber) in the southwest corner, and a butler’s pantry and the service stair in the northwest corner. Within these rooms as they survive, however, there are enigmas. First, the daylighting conditions conflict with Latrobe's preference for north and south light. The major rooms face primarily to the east. They could not be easily lit from the south because the adjacent vacant lot might eventually be built on

(which it was) and were not easily lit from the north because Latrobe preferred

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and two full pilasters at its south end that, although they do not reach the ceiling, define a narrow band of space in front of the fireplace. This subdivision does produce a large, rectangular space having two pairs of doors on its west side aligned with two windows on its east side and yields four symmetrical interior elevations as Latrobe always preferred. However, when Latrobe

defined bands of space like the one to the south, he usually allowed for lateral circulation into them so that they could function as service corridors, as in the dining room. This band at Decatur House has no lateral access and seems too shallow to have accepted columns forming a screen in front of the

fireplace.?” Subsurface investigation of this feature has yielded no additional evidence of a dropped soffit or entablature or of columns.”® The longitudinal axis of this drawing room becomes the transverse axis

of the adjacent, rectangular dining room (fig. 7.7), which Latrobe also divided

into two spatial units. In January 1818, according to his drawing-room door

492

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

schedule, he intended to connect these two rooms with a pair of double

doors. By April, he had another scheme in mind, but one that the Decaturs did not accept: a pair of bronze green, eight-panel rolling doors with wide center stiles. He proposed to set the doors in an 11-foot by 8-foot opening divided by two column mullions through which the doors would pass,

rolling on wheels recessed into the floor (fig. 7.12). He further proposed to marbleize the columns in pale tints of orange and blue, to ornament them

Big, 7.2. Decatur House. Latrobe's drawing

with lyres at their capitals, and to apply half pilasters in the jambs. He also proposed cockleshell door pulls.

for rolling doors, 1818. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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By drawing one door in the open position, he allowed for a view into the east end of the dining room, where he sketched in perspective a portion of the room decor, including the fireplace, mantel, overmantel mirror, and draperies on the front window; on the visible end of the mantel, he included

a classical urn, perhaps intended to be an oil lamp. He applied a nautical blue wash over this environment. Also visible is a portion of the ceiling, showing two concentric, curving lines inside orthogonal lines, a pattern comparable to the ceiling of the front hall-compartment on the floor below. These curving lines must be arcs of circles, as shown in the reconstructed reflected ceiling plan in figure 7.11, and would have celebrated the location of a dining table in the center of the room. At the west end of the room, a sideboard niche originally stood behind a secondary band of space; a small portion of the niche wall and its base still remains. This band served as a corridor accessible from both servants’ spaces to the west and the principal-stair landing to the south.?° According to Latrobe's principal-story door schedule, doors were to appear on both sides of the niche. One of these doors led to the service stair and the other to the butler’s pantry. The 1820 inventory includes large quantities of silver, much of it awarded to Decatur for his naval exploits, and diarists of the period commented that the Decaturs were unusual in having enough silver to serve a meal; this silver would probably have been stored in the butler’s pantry.*°

For the chamber story (fig. 7.13), Latrobe returned to the transverse corridor organization of the cellar. His plan includes one bedchamber on the west side, with an adjacent dressing room above the principal stair, and two bedchambers on the east side, both adjacent to dressing rooms and astride a double-apsidal space that could have been the ladies’ salon or an elaborate dressing room for Susan Decatur. The circulation pattern is straightforward, with only a transverse axis in the corridor and cross-axes uniting the southeast bed-

room and the salon or dressing room (fig. 7.7). As on the ground story, Latrobe used an enfilade for service access along the back wall. Within the transverse corridor, he repeatedly noted “borrowed light,’ where he intended to admit daylight through transoms above the doors. The stair on this level connects down to the principal story and up and down to servants rooms at mezzanine

levels (fig. 7.16). Sir John Soane used such mezzanines at Tendring Hall, where he packed three stories plus a garret level of servants’ spaces against the service stair in a house with only three stories elsewhere, and S. P. Cockerell also used service mezzanines at Admiralty House in London.*! Latrobe first advocated such a device in his unbuilt first proposal for the Waln House.

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Several of the chamber-story walls in Latrobe's plan do not align with the walls of the principal-story below, which allowed him to make each level distinctive spatially but meant that some loads could not be transferred directly to the foundations. While extensive 1960s’ modifications in Latrobe's attic have obliterated much of the original construction, remaining U-shaped wrought-iron hangers suggest that he, or the builder, chose to suspend some chamber-story partitions, presumably to avoid deflection in the floor joists where they did not sit atop walls below. Latrobe or the builder employed a similar system of walls hung from roof construction at

Adena (1805-1806) in Chillicothe, Ohio. Even with this system of tension supports, however, some of the chamber-story floor joists at Decatur House have deflected. Latrobe produced several sheets of construction details for Decatur House, at least one sheet for windows and three sheets for doors. The sheet for windows shows the installation of a window frame into roughcast-covered masonry walls (fig. 7.14.) with conventionally attached, recess-panel, interior shutters and louvered or Venetian exterior shutters. Latrobe positioned the frame in the location he had preferred since his emigration from England: set back in the wall behind a brick curtain such that only about half the width of its perimeter stiles and rails was visible on the outside. The frame components, with abundant quirked moldings, were to be assembled in a conventional manner.?? Latrobe chose to hinge the interior shutters by means of conventional butt hinges and to rabbet the shutter panels so that the hinges’ outer faces would sit flush with the wood, once again a conventional installation. His attachment of the exterior shutters is a more complicated and unorthodox matter. The elaborate hinge with its bent inner leaf resulted from the setback of the frame. The English rarely used exterior shutters, so it seems very likely that this design was Latrobe's own. Furthermore, since we have no evidence that he had used exterior shutters on his American domestic projects before, this exterior-shutter configuration would seem to have been a Washington, D.C., innovation that he employed only at his houses for the Van Nesses, Decaturs, and Ann Casanave and should have been especially useful for sun control at the Decatur and Casanave houses, with their east-facing principal facades. | Latrobe's location of the frame so deep in the wall created two problems: how were the hinges to be attached to the house, and how was the shutter to be allowed to open? If the frame had been placed near the front face of the

wall (without its deep, quirked, cyma-reversa exterior trim), as was the case

496

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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Furthermore, Washington, D.C., like Chillicothe, Ohio, and Lexington, Kentucky (the sites of the other extant Latrobe

houses) did not experience repetitive waves of dramatic remodeling and even destruction and rebuilding that transformed and swept away most of

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Latrobes American domestic architecture. Certainly the height limitation imposed by the presence of the Capitol was important, meaning that developers were not so prone to demolish older, smaller structures in order to build to great heights and increase ground rents. Moreover, the generic quality of the house probably contributed to its preservation. Its plain facade, centralhall-like plan with large rectilinear rooms, and the absence of elaborate ornamentation made it rapid and economical to build and adaptable to changing patterns of occupation. Ironically, its deviation from Latrobe's established theories probably helped save it from destruction. Documentary research, fabric analysis, and construction are continuing at Decatur House. The elevator added in the northwest corner of the house has recently been removed and the partition walls in this area largely restored to their Latrobe-Decatur configuration. The northeast room on the ground story is now interpreted as the original kitchen. Building fabric uncovered here during subsurface investigations has been left visible and setves as evidence of the evolving program of preservation and partial restoration in this space and the related process of reinterpretation. Where this evidence was sufficient, some former construction, such as a vent pipe from the front hall-compartment stove and shelving and the brick flooring, has been replicated. In other cases, where evidence is less conclusive, such as signs of a former bake oven, images on Plexiglas panels have been introduced in front of remaining wall construction to suggest the possible earlier configuration. A new mechanical system has been installed and the entire structure has been made to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act and life-safety codes, including the introduction of a new elevator in the rear ell and an associated handicapped lift that makes the second, or principal, story of Decatur House accessible. Visitors now enter through the former carriage house and stable at the rear of the site, with new-collections storage now located beneath this structure. Permanent exhibition space has been constructed on the second floor of the rear ell and contains displays on slave life at Decatur House and the general topic of urban slavery. Research will continue on Decatur House's complex history, meaning that the restoration philosophy and the house’s related interpretation to visitors will, in turn, continue to evolve. Presently, the intention is to place much more emphasis on the Latrobe-Decatur period but continue to include the broad social history associated with the time when the house served as rental property for various dignitaries and the many years when it was owned and occupied by the Beale family.

508

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

A Residence over a Masonry-Vaulted Banking Room Although Latrobe's La Banque de l’Etat de la Louisiane or State Bank of

STATE BANK OF LOUISIANA

Louisiana (fig. 7.22) was certainly not built as a residence in the conventional sense of that word, it included, as did many New Orleans buildings, living quarters for employees on the second story, and the existence of this second story influenced the unique arrangement of vaulted spaces below. At intervals during his development of residential types in America, Latrobe had returned to some form of rotunda parti, his most sophisticated proposal being that for the Pope Villa, where he suppressed a second-story dome beneath a hipped roof and reached it by way of a circuitous route filled with scenery. At the State Bank of Louisiana, he lowered a suppressed dome to the ground story and made it the centerpiece of a remarkably diverse set of masonry vaults. On the second story, Latrobe placed a dining room, pantry, drawing

room, parlor, and chambers (with the kitchen in a back building).*° Changes have taken place on this second story over time, including the addition of two bathrooms, but most of the original walls seem to remain. Spatially these rooms were never very distinctive, with their brick bearing walls and linear, wooden partition walls; equal-height, flat ceilings; and central-passage organization. Latrobe's only comments about the almost completely orthogonal arrangement of these walls, so unlike the vaulted plan below them, concerned the transfer of structural loads. He wrote in his specifications: “Where the partitions do not rest upon the Vaults below, they must be supported either upon piers of Bricks, or upon posts from the lower walls, especially the partitions that extend on each side of the Corridor, or central passage, in as much as they are intended to carry the roof of the building.” The second-story living quarters precluded the creation of any twostory banking spaces and the introduction of any light from above into the

ground story (fig. 7.23). In order to fit the necessarily grand, ground-story rooms of the bank within a foor-to-floor height of just over 24 feet, Latrobe had to devise a set of vaults unlike any then existing in America. In fact, subsequent to his death in 1821, no one followed the promising trajectory of structural investigation that he established at this New Orleans commercial building. These vaults are discussed in the essay on “Latrobe as ArchitectEngineer” that follows in Chapter 8. In designing and constructing them, Latrobe created a then unique fireproof masonry platform, comparable to

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the masonry-vaulted kitchens he always wished to insert into the basements of his domestic structures, atop which he constructed what was in effect a wood-partitioned house. As such, the bank serves as a fittingly original architectural solution with which to conclude these detailed discussions of Latrobe’s most significant domestic designs.

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Chapter Eight

Latrobe

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International

and National Architectural Scenes Ir Is PERHAPS TAUTOLOGICAL to say that an architect can become successful only if clients provide commissions. Benjamin Henry Latrobe's image of a successful architect was cast in England, where he saw building designers serve the crown, the landed gentry, and the emerging middle class. The crown’s Office of Works provided not only professional plums for a few individuals and a continuity of training for many others but also a place where the Surveyor General could appoint or influence the appointment of protégés to lesser surveyorships.+ Latrobe held one such position as Surveyor of the London Police Offices, which he probably obtained through the efforts of Sir Charles Middleton. It was this circle of appointed surveyors who constituted Latrobe's principal competitors, such men as his employer S. P. Cockerell, who was Inspector of Repairs to the Admiralty and Surveyor to the Victualling Office,

and Sir John Soane, who was Surveyor to the Bank of England. The most successful of these London architects were also able to garner commissions from among the landed gentry, Robert Adam being perhaps the most notable example. However, the odds that Latrobe could have created such a celebrated fashion as Adam among the socioeconomic elite were long, meaning that his best opportunities lay with men of commerce and lesser landowners such as the Sperlings and Fullers in Sussex, his first domestic clients. Hammerwood (ca. 1792-1795), built for the former, and Ashdown (1792-1795) (plates 4, 5), built for the latter, speak to Latrobe's precocity and to his interest in giving architectural identity to upwardly mobile families. In so doing, he made original, notable contributions to late-eighteenth-century domestic design and to the relationship of house to landscape and forecast the subsequent Greek Revival and the associated “Plain Style,” which was especially appropriate for a rising middle class in an increasingly democratic society. Latrobe's emotional and financial reasons for emigrating from England are discussed previously in some detail. There may have been additional, specifically professional motives for his departure, and these must be considered within the context of surveyorships and patronage. While talent and training certainly determined who would be chosen for projects, so inevitably did politics. Latrobe's most powerful supporter would have been family friend Sir Charles Middleton, eventually Lord Barham, who served, at the height of his power, as First Lord of the Admiralty. However, Latrobe

514

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

confessed to having humiliated himself before Middleton as a result of carelessly made remarks.? Although Latrobe recounted that Middleton went out of his way to put him at ease in subsequent meetings, the incident made Latrobe so uncomfortable that he could no longer even converse with this important man, let alone look to him for patronage. A related and even more serious problem was Latrobe’ allegation that he had refused to conspire in the machinations of Henry Dundas, a relative of Middleton, who served as Secretary of State for Home Affairs in 1791-1794. Dundas, Latrobe claimed, had solicited his participation in a scheme to defraud the public treasury during his tenure as Surveyor of the London Police Offices. If true, Latrobe would have been so compromised that he could not have continued his surveyorship at a time when he found himself cut off from Middleton. Subsequent to his immigration, Latrobe attempted to shape a career for

himself in Federal period America modeled on the successful careers he had observed being made in England. He first took aim at the landed gentry, then at the American merchant class, but often found himself involved with a common species of men in the young nation: those on the make, particularly through speculation. While such men were anxious to build and to impress, they were highly susceptible to economic failure, and their inclination toward innovation, while consistent with Latrobe's, often led to the erection of buildings that were found to be unorthodox by subsequent occupants and so were given new functions, radically altered, or demolished. Although the tradition of architectural surveyorships was not widespread in America, such a position did exist at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and

President Thomas Jefferson, though not a patron in the European sense, was deeply committed to the realization of an architecture befitting the developing republic. Although he could not have predicted it, Latrobe left England in 1795 at a time when building construction had begun a decline that would not end until the conclusion of the various wars with France in 1815.4 He found his way to the center of power and architectural opportunity in the American government at a time when the economy of the United States was expanding and an enlightened amateur architect was about to become president. In largely rural Virginia, Latrobe quickly began establishing a network of prominent contacts. However, the existence of a significant stock of Georgian period residences built by major families probably made it difficult for him to obtain an adequate number of new, large-scale domestic commissions. He was only slightly more successful in modestly urban

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Richmond, where there were merchants as well as landowners, leading to his removal to Philadelphia. Here he came closest to duplicating the formula of London architects like Soane who established diversified practices. However, Latrobe's understandable desire for reasonably reliable longterm income, comparable to Soane's surveyorship at the Bank of England, eventually pushed him on to Washington, D.C., and the position of Surveyor of the Public Buildings. On a modern map, one sees the sites for most of Latrobe's houses lying along Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to Philadelphia. As time went on, it was the exception to the rule for him to take on work elsewhere, but when he did, it was most often the result of Jeffersonian political connections, witness his selection to design Adena in Chillicothe,

Ohio (1805-1806), built by Thomas Worthington, a U.S. Senator and the state's sixth governor; the Senator John Pope Villa in Lexington, Kentucky (1810-13); and Ashland (1813-1814), the Lexington home of Senator Henry Clay. All three men were members of Jeffersons Democratic-Republican Party. By way of comparison, Latrobe was almost completely unsuccessful in obtaining commissions in Federalist New York and New England. An examination of the geographical distribution of other Federal period building designers is instructive. It should come as no surprise that most of Latrobe's professional competitors also operated in larger cities. Washington, D.C., with all of its public work, was the most tempting, attracting Pierre

LEnfant from France (1754-1825), Stephen Hallet from France (ca. 17601825), James Hoban from Ireland (ca. 1762-1831), William Thornton from the West Indies (1759-1828), George Hadfield from England (1763-1826), and

eventually native-born Robert Mills (1781-1855) and Charles Bulfinch (17631844), though the latter worked principally in Boston. Maximilian Godefroy

from France (1765-18402?) and, for a brief time, Joseph Ramée from France (1764-1842) settled in Francophile Baltimore, and native-born John McComb (1763-1853) operated in New York City. Probably because of family connections, William Jay from England (ca. 1793-1837) focused his attention on much smaller Savannah, Georgia. While Latrobe's almost constant movement between locales may seem impetuous, only Bulfinch, McComb,

and Hoban can be said to have been financially successful in any one location | over a long period of time based on their architectural practices, and even this condition is misleading. Bulfinch was subsidized by political office and the related support of his friends, and McComb

and Hoban were at least as

much builders as they were architects.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Even though these other men were present, Latrobe evolved his American theories of domestic design and his domestic style largely in isolation. It would be 150 years before the country had any architectural schools where building designers might be assembled and, unlike early-nineteenth-century London, it had no architectural clubs or ongoing regime of exhibitions,

Latrobe was fond of depicting himself as a professional island amid a troublesome sea of builders and gentleman-amateurs, which was not really the case.

A member of the first group of Latrobe competitors, builder-

designer James Hoban was consistently old fashioned, favoring to the end of his career the heavy English Palladianism that Latrobe disdained. Although he and Latrobe constantly parried during their contact at the President's House and Capitol, there is no known instance where Hoban bested him for a commission. Latrobe did lose the New York City Hall competition to

New Yorker John McComb (in association with French architect Joseph Mangin (?—after 1818), but McComb never ventured farther south, kept busy by such Federalist clients as Alexander Hamilton. As for the second group, the gentleman-amateurs, perhaps only Thomas

Jefferson, the most extraordinary example of the type, held a panoramic view over the international architectural scene comparable to Latrobe's. However, he was more client than competitor, being the only president to embrace fully Latrobe as the designer most able to give built form to the radical new

democratic ideals. Jefferson's strength as creator of the Declaration of Independence and of his own deservedly celebrated home was his ability to synthesize a large body of profound ideas. Beginning as an admirer of Palladio

but becoming a French eighteenth-century “modernist,” Jefferson the domestic architect was most fascinating for his unique exercise in design process at Monticello, comparable to the noble experiment of the American democracy: using his house as a lived-in laboratory for the testing of his ideas about

domestic planning. In addition, Jefferson, trained in surveying by his father, defied his gentleman-amateur status through his constant manipulation of site topography; only Latrobe among Federal period designers did so as well.

Likewise, only Jefferson, Latrobe, and Joseph Ramée simultaneously developed building and landscape so that the two designed components purposefully interacted.

Although he lacked the intellect of a Jefferson, William Thornton did have design ability, certainly more than Latrobe gave him credit for. As a man without organized architectural training, however, Thornton was predictably narrow in his design proposals. For example, his schemes for the Tayloe

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

517

eel

ARS

ea angi ‘yoye

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Fig. 8.1. Tudor Place, Georgetown, Washington,

House, now known as the Octagon (ca. 1797-1799), and Tudor Place (1805)

D.C., 1805, by William Thornton, Exterior

(fig. 8.1) are variations on the same theme: a central rotunda or temple embed-

photograph of the front facade. (Michael Fazio)

ded in a transverse rectilinear block or layers of blocks. Apparently based on LEnfant’s design for the U.S. Capitol, as indicated at a small scale on the engraved plans of the city and illustrated in a sketch attributed by some to

LEnfant, by some to Thornton (fig. 8.2), this parti proved to be a flexible one. For the Capitol, Thornton employed it almost exactly as LEnfant specified. At Tudor Place, he embedded a temple in the central block of a Palladian fivepart scheme, and at the Tayloe House, he used a circular entry vestibule as a hinge about which he rotated rooms back to either side in order to accommodate the obtuse angle formed by adjacent streets. Though much celebrated in the Federal City, however, Thornton's work was not influential elsewhere, and most of his design production occurred in the final decade of the eighteenth century, as he spent the last twenty-five years of his life as a bureaucrat overseeing the operation of the U.S. Patent Office. The third and by far largest group among Latrobe's potential competitors were actually those men who had received some formal architectural training. Only Stephen Hallet, who had been educated in France and produced sophisticated designs for the Capitol, had left the scene by the time of Latrobe's

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1803, although Pierre LEnfant’s career was in rapid decline. More important to Latrobe were Maximilian Godefroy and George Hadfield, with whom he had considerable amicable professional contact. Joseph Ramée crossed Latrobe's path briefly in Baltimore; Charles Bulfinch did so in Washington, D.C.,, late in his career, while William Jay remained isolated from them all in Savannah. Unlike Latrobe, however, none of these men succeeded in establishing and managing a“modern’ architectural office, that is, one with a dedicated group of long-term employees, a fee schedule, contracts between architect and client, and the like, and none developed a following or trained celebrated successors as did Latrobe. These men were split in their allegiances to French and English traditions. Stephen Hallet had been French to the core. The character of Pierre LEnfant’s output was erratic, and he never demonstrated more than rudimentary knowledge of domestic-building design. Godefroy was visibly French in his handling of monumentality and symbolic form but never displayed the kind of planning sophistication that distinguished the French hétels and the related work of Latrobe and apparently never designed an American house. Ramée's most notable contribution to American design, during a brief and insular career in the United States, was his emphasis on the planned landscape context. In America only four years and with most of his architectural production directed toward upstate New York, his only

prominent residential design was that for Calverton near Baltimore (1816) (fig. 8.3), but its exaggerated composition found no emulators. Fig, 8.2, U.S. Capitol, ca. 1793, sketch by William

Thornton (?) or Pierre LEnfant (?). Design for the west front. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

oto

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Fig. 8.4. (Right) Ezekial Hersey Derby House, Salem, Massachusetts, ca. 1800, by Charles Bulfinch. First-floor plan. (Michael Fazio from Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Institute, Salem, MA)

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Fig. 8.3. (Top) Calverton, Baltimore, Maryland, 1815-1816, by Joseph Ramée, Exterior photograph. (Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

Among the Anglophiles, Charles Bulfinch initially followed English Palladianism, producing wide, old-fashioned compositions, then emulated the work of Robert Adam, and through these sources even looked back to Inigo

Jones. In some of his midcareer houses, he flirted with the French hétel model, but his plan drawings of the period are thin-lined, without either Palladian rigor or French intricacy. He eventually developed his own, unique, nonaxial version of the central hall, using its circulation to separate service spaces and side-loaded stairs from the principal rooms, as in his proposal for

Fig. 8.5. Third Harrison Gray Otis House,

the Ezekial Hersey Derby House in Salem, Massachusetts, of 1800 (fig. 8.4).

Boston, 1805-1808, by Charles Bulfinch. Second-,

One must look to the third and last of his houses for Harrison Gray Otis,

or principal-, floor plan. (Michael Fazio from

built in Boston in 1805~1808 (fig. 8.5), for the clearest evidence of the clever

Great Georgian Houses in America, 1933-1937)

circulation patterns and subtle hierarchies that confirm his status as ulti-

mately the most original designer of domestic layouts (except Jefferson at Monticello) in the Federal period after Latrobe. In addition, though he maintained the old-fashioned five-bay elevation, he produced an elegant, attenuated facade type with relatively generous expanses of mural wall surface and the principal floor at the piano nobile level, such that his composition

3

for the last Otis House has become the standard textbook illustration for an urban house in the American Federal period. On this front, it was he and not Latrobe who carried the day, Bulfinch's forty-year-long career exceeded Latrobe's by better than a

decade, with the much-celebrated Lancaster (Massachusetts) Meeting House of 1815-1817 at its apogee, a building that became the model for countless Protestant churches throughout America. His 1818-1830 tenure in Washington, D.C., as architect of the Capitol was actually the denouement of his professional life, where his political acumen and willingness to compromise enabled him to succeed where Latrobe had failed in accommodating the Congress. George Hadfield, however, was even less able to navigate the bumptious American scene than Latrobe with whom he had much in common in terms of professional training in London. Hadfield, who had worked for

James Wyatt, produced clean, elegant, clear plans and elevations that appear like stripped-down versions of Palladian compositions, some with a French sense of monumentality. None is more monumental than the Custis-Lee

Mansion (1803) (fig. 8.6) with its massive Doric columns that still dominate Arlington Heights, Virginia, above Washington, D.C. His house design of 1820-~1826, traditionally but probably inaccurately associated with Commodore David Porter, a close associate of Stephen Decatur, is a more subtle

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‘____}

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Fig. 8.6, Custis-Lee Mansion, 1817, by George

Hadfield, Exterior photograph. (Michael Fazio)

but also monumental assemblage of portico, retreat arches, and severe win-

dow openings in a serene field of mural walls. More orthodox than Latrobe's

houses, this plan composition (fig. 8.7) is rigorous in the extreme. Probably because of his ability to produce such results, Hadfield was the architect in America whose talent Latrobe most appreciated.

Like Latrobe and Hadfield, William Jay also arrived from London, Born in circa 1794, making him 30 years younger than Latrobe, he emigrated in 1818. He clearly drew on English precedents, with a strong reliance on the central hall for family and public as well as servant circulation, and he exhibited a marked interest in the use of the orders to define spatial boundaries, as in his

William Scarborough House of circa 1818 (fig. 8.8). Like Latrobe, he preferred the modern, three-bay elevation, but with strongly horizontal proportions and raised on a partly exposed basement with a prominent external stair, both

of which can be seen in his Telfair House of 1815-1820 (fig. 8.9). While his designs exhibit originality, Jay never became a distinctively American architect, maintaining the Regency taste that he had absorbed in England, and his influence never extended beyond the Tidewater area of Georgia and southern South Carolina. Attempting to characterize Latrobe's domestic designs or components of them as English or French belies his remarkably varied experience and training and his notable powers of synthesis; and one can speculate that it

52D)

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 8.7. House design, Washington, D.C., 1798,

by George Hadfield. First-floor plan. (Michael Fazio from the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

|

Fig. 8.8. (Bottom left) William Scarborough House, Savannah, Georgia, 1818-1819, by William

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Jay. First-floor plan. (Michael Fazio from Library =

of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,

Historic American Buildings Survey) Fig, 8.9. (Bottom right) Telfair House, Savannah, Georgia, ca. 1815-1820, by William Jay. Front elevation. (Michael Fazio from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey)

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10 ft.

was easier to accomplish such a synthesis in America where French and English traditions were not so distinctly delineated. Although he obviously admired and studied French designs, he departed from French practice by limiting the amount of dégagement, by not accumulating service spaces in the center of his plans, by placing his principal stairs in more prominent locations than was the French custom, and by preferring a rectangular to a square plan in order to face long facades north and south. Furthermore, S. P. Cockerell’s office had probably been the most strongly disposed toward the French manner of plan distribution of any in late-eighteenth-century London. Latrobe's divergence from English domestic-design tendencies is discussed in the section titled “Latrobe's Originality as a Domestic Planner.’ Once Latrobe was established in America he advanced well beyond his experience with Cockerell. While Cockerell had produced subtle plans with some of the complexities of French hétels, he had continued to mask them behind pared-down, neo-Palladian facades; Latrobe proposed an alternative. Latrobe practiced in America for just over twenty-five years. During that time, he carried out a fairly methodical investigation of the problem of domestic design for the young Republic. While there were exceptions, such as his Van Ness House, which was partly based on a building produced in the office of S. P. Cockerell, he concentrated on his conception of a rational house, which arose in Virginia and appeared highly developed in Philadelphia in one of his initial schemes for the Waln House in 1805.

At Hammerwood

and Ashdown, at the beginning of his career as an individual practitioner in England, Latrobe helped to pioneer avant-garde Greek Revival fashion, emphasizing, for instance, a Doric order from Paestum and the Ionic order

from the Erechtheum as illustrated by Thomas Major and J. D. LeRoy. In democratic America, the progressive rhetorical qualities of the Greek Revival probably meant less to him, and the pragmatism and desire for economy felt by many of his American clients led him to a domestic architecture of unprecedented plainness and elegant austerity. Moving beyond his initial responses to the American context by exploring classical form types, picturesque sequences, and lighting character, he had, by the end of his career, consciously and comfortably become a fashionless designer. How did Latrobe's work evolve as compared with the evolution of English domestic design from 1795 to 1820? Some perspective on this question can

be gained by reviewing the career of Sir John Soane during this period. Soane was 11 years older than Latrobe, born in 1753 and dying in 1837, while Latrobe was born in 1764 and died in 1820. Soane’s surveyorship at the Bank

524

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

of England beginning in 1788 and his position as clerk of the works at the Royal Chelsea Hospital after 1807 meant that he took on few private commissions in his later years. Like most young architects, however, he began as

largely a designer of houses, and it was houses that he emphasized in the 1788 publication of his work Plans Elevations and Sections of Houses, Lodges, Bridges, etc. in the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, et caetera. While Latrobe would certainly have seen Soane's projects exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1788 and 1795 and could have visited Soanes buildings built before his departure from England in 1795, it was Soanes publication to which he would have had ongoing access, To better appreciate Soane’s published designs, it is worth remarking first on several projects by him for casinos or small lodges designed in the 1770s, each with an embedded circular room at one facade.> Comparable to the designs of many others, both French and English, their plans have quite active perimeters but are basically orthogonally and axially organized. Of quite a different character is Soane’s unbuilt design for William Pepper of Great Dunmow of 1784, which consists of a simple rectangle subdivided as a pinwheel with four spaces connected tangentially to the stair hall. Soane explored these two organizational ideas, orthogonal-axial and pin-

wheel or tangential, in his published houses. He included Burn Hall (1783), Letton Hall (1783), and ‘Tendring Hall (1784) in his Plans Elevations and Sections. Burn Hall is the most complex, with, as was Soane’ practice, principal rooms found behind any and all of the four facades. It includes a central stair hall, largely perimeter circulation, almost universally symmetrical interior ele-

vations, a slot of space at the base of the principal stair with smaller spatial cells at each end to which principal rooms are connected tangentially, a service stair with compact adjacent servants’ rooms, and bow fronts on three facades. By reversing the direction of the principal stairs so that traffic could pass under them, Soane retained the open, longitudinal axis of the older, larger, hall-saloon plan type, fusing it with the newer circuit-villa plan. In its graceful complexity, Burn Hall has the greatest affinity with Latrobe's later houses. Letton Hall is slightly less vigorous, having a square plan with a central, longitudinal axis, three rooms tangential to the principal stair, a kind of dégagement of service stair and servants rooms, and a bow front only at the principal entry. Tendring Hall, the latest and perhaps the most celebrated of the three, is almost Palladian in its gridlike rigor, with bows at the front and rear facades united by a single longitudinal axis and a perimeter circuit, but without tangentially related spaces for which Soane substituted two arcing

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

525

passages leading from the stair hall. During the 1780s, it would seem, Soane moved away from oblique views and pinwheel organizations while he continued his preference for gridlike, axial, orthogonal planning into the 1790s at such sites as Tyringham House in Buckinghamshire (1792-1797). Throughout his career, he preferred to extend central, longitudinal axes through his plans from front to back. In summary, Soane and Latrobe were comparable in their cleverness and elegance of planning, their dismissal of the open front-to-back central hall, and their preference for symmetrical interior elevations built on often asymmetrical plan distributions. Unlike Soane, however, Latrobe preferred to face all of his principal rooms to the south. He commonly created, then denied, central, longitudinal axes. He emphasized changing directions and oblique views and shifted walls about to produce asymmetrical, sometimes

pinwheel-like plans (still with individually symmetrical interior wall elevations) and picturesque effects—his “scenery. His development culminated with the incongruent floor-plan organizations at the Pope Villa in Lexington,

Kentucky (1810-1813), and Decatur House in Washington, D.C. (1817-1818). How

did Latrobe view himself within this Anglo-American profes-

sional context? A reconsideration of his approach to making radical revisions at the President’s House sheds some light on this question. He recognized

that James Hoban had based his competition-winning scheme on the Georgian Leinster House in Dublin, Ireland, as it stood after modifications made

in about 1780 by James Wyatt, modifications that left its circulation pattern and interior room elevations confused. Hoban simply appropriated the post-Wyatt published plans, without casting a critical eye on the modifed results. In comparison, Latrobe was able to draw on his extensive English experience and a broad knowledge of current architectural literature and, most importantly, to view such celebrated buildings as examples of types to be examined critically and to view himself as the equal of the most talented English designers. Finally, when attempting to measure Latrobe’ effect on the American architectural scene, one must consider his professional progeny. When one

sets out to trace a lineage for American architects, Latrobe, with Jefferson as his client-patron, appears at the origin of a long and fruitful development. If one wishes to play a kind of genealogical game, it goes something like this: Of Latrobe's his two most prominent pupils, Robert Mills and William Strickland, it was the Strickland line that was most productive because Strickland employed Thomas Ustick Walter, who employed Richard Morris Hunt,

526

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

who employed Frank Furness, who employed Louis Sullivan, who employed Frank Lloyd Wright. But it was Mills’s buildings in Washington that, one can argue, set a standard for the scale and typological choices in the national capital and, in turn, at sites throughout the country: the Egyptian obelisk of the Washington Monument, the Ancient Greek Doric temple portico of the Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery), the Italian Renaissance

palazzo of the General Post Office (recently remodeled as a hotel), and the giant Ionic order ancient Greek stoa of the Treasury Building.® While valid, however, these measures only reflect the rarified effect of a limited number of celebrated designers and canonical buildings. Perhaps more interesting, and if there were sufficient local data, perhaps more impressive, was Latrobe's influence on parochial designers for many years after his probably shocking insertion of radical design proposals into established, sometimes provincial contexts. The Pope Villa offers examples, and Latrobe's major innovations here were internal: the houses complex planning and concomitant hierarchical sequencing of interior spaces. These innovations had little, if any, effect on subsequent regional domestic production, nor could they have been expected to, as they were inside the house where people beyond the Popes social and political circle had no access. Purthermore, Latrobe's innovations were so contrary to Kentucky customs that later owners of the house aggressively remodeled them out of existence or at least out of view. What other clients and builders in the region did emulate, however, were unique exterior features that Latrobe introduced—those features that were readily seen and easily copied. These included the overall form— a large square with a hipped roof and nearly flat upper deck surrounded by a balustrade. This form appears at many later houses in the region, and the roof type appears on houses with both square and rectangular plans. For the Pope Villa's front entrance, Latrobe designed a typical door of the period with adjacent sidelights in wooden sash reaching nearly to the ground; however, for the back or service door, he separated the sidelights from the door opening with brick piers, perhaps because such wide, durable jambs would better accommodate the heavier and more careless traffic of the servants, and placed the sills at the level of adjacent windows. This service door and sidelight composition was adapted as the frontispieces for later houses in Kentucky such as the Rowan family house, called Federal Hill

(completed ca. 1818 near Bardstown). It is impossible to say absolutely that the Pope Villa influenced these examples, but the timing certainly suggests

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

527

so. Probably the greatest impact of the Pope Villa on later Kentucky houses, however, came from its introduction of three, great, tripartite windows in the front facade. This motif appeared in literally dozens of later Kentucky houses well into the 1850s—so many, in fact, that the triple-windowed Greek Revival house became a uniquely Bluegrass villa type and may still be found all over central Kentucky. Unlike the Pope Villa, however, which was designed with triple windows only on its principal or second story, these later Kentucky houses have triple windows on both the first and second stories—reflecting a confusion about their expression externally of Latrobe's unorthodox internal planning. At the Pope Villa, the triple windows on the second story, with single, small windows on the first or service story, expressed Latrobe's spatial hierarchy. The triple windows in the later houses fronted both the major public rooms and the bedchambers, which contravened Latrobe's expression of hierarchy and made the windows a purely formal device. These local influences and borrowings were then almost always visual, external, and piecemeal, as the local designers and builders did not understand the totality of Latrobe’s domestic theory and design process. In this light, the only way that Latrobe could have had a more pervasive influence on American domestic architecture would have been to publish his building designs and theories, something he seems to have planned to do right up until the end of his life. However, he had greater popular success in influencing furniture design, as is shown in the subsequent discussion of Latrobe and the arts of interior design.

Latrobe's Originality as a Domestic Planner In what is probably the best-known survey of the period, William Pierson Jr. has identified a “rational phase” of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury American neoclassicism and situated Benjamin Henry Latrobe in it,

specifying the characteristics of this work as “simple massing and unbroken walls” with limited amounts of ornament, often incised.” Although such categories are convenient, they threaten to oversimplify complex thought processes and related actions and equally complex intellectual and physical contexts in which these processes were developed and these actions carried out. Though many of Latrobe's “rational” houses may appear to be reductional, his design thinking and his planning process were not.

528

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe conceived of his rational house plan as a logical response to environmental, functional, and social requirements. He distributed his principal rooms along the south side of a wider than deep plan, leaving the north side for entries, stairs, servants’ rooms, and storage. He preferred to have three

contiguous principal rooms to facilitate entertaining and preferred to locate them on the principal story above a ground or basement story that housed the kitchen directly beneath the dining room. Within these rooms, he sought a hierarchy of ornament from least ornamented entry to most lavish ladies’ salon. He composed all interior room elevations symmetrically and organized all of their elements according to a grid of horizontal and vertical datum lines. He preferred interior stairs for safety in bad weather and provided the most up-to-date technology from iron firebox liners or “stoves” to Argand lamps and water closets. He introduced natural light not only through windows in exterior walls but also through skylights and series of internal sash and transoms. He sought to cover kitchens with fireproof masonry vaults and to suppress their floors for additional ceiling height. He worked out intricate systems of internal circulation that separated servants from guests and family in the manner of French dégagement. His elevations often varied from facade to facade, and while his use of sham windows may seem antirational in twentieth-century functionalist terms, such a device was consistent with the lessons that he had learned from S. P. Cockerell working on commissions such as Alderbury House. In Latrobe's mind, achieving external symmetry using sham windows in front of, say, efficiently arranged chimney flues, as at Decatur House, was obviously a rational design decision. In sum, Latrobe's rational house would not have been possible without broad Enlightenment thinking, but since all architecture is ultimately local, it was also a creation of empiricism and must be judged according to standards established by pragmatic Americans. While recognizing that Latrobe was a product of the Enlightenment, we have attempted to be inclusive in our examination and catholic in our interpretation of his work. For example, consider Talbot Hamlin’s problematic view of Latrobe as a tragic genius, which we feel was overly influenced by Modernist polemics. It appears to us that his state of mind did indeed parallel those of some twentieth-century Modernists, like Le Corbusier, who felt themselves to be misunderstood architectural prophets, but in more complex ways than Hamlin recognized. Unlike Le Corbusier who flaunted his position among the artistic avant-garde, Latrobe sought to remove himself, in the minds of his clients, from the status of artist to that of professional architect.

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Colin Rowe has analyzed Le Corbusier's canonical Villa Stein at Garches in one of the century’s most celebrated architectural-theory essays, “The

Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947). Here Rowe has considered the similarities and differences between Le Corbusier's design and Palladio’s Villa Foscari. Le Corbusier had, of course, developed the “free plan” and “free facade” using his system of “pilotis.” In truth, however, the French had explored the separation of floor plate from floor plate and of internal room distribution from external facade composition at least since the mid-eighteenth century, and Le Corbusier's flexible grid of structural columns detached from partition walls and his intermingling of service and principal spaces paralleled the earlier French dégagement, albeit with radical twentieth-century innovations in the manipulation of the third dimension. As Rowe documents, what Le Corbusier set out to do was multilayered—simultaneously synthetic and analytic; we would argue that what Latrobe set out to do was as well. Among the questions that have arisen during the writing of this book has been the role that Latrobe allowed his houses to play in the broader development of his design thinking, Did his process of house design influence his process of larger public-building design or vice versa? Did he use relatively rapidly designed and built domestic structures as laboratories for testing theories that he could then apply in his higher profile public work, with its often exasperatingly long design and construction phases? The answer is no doubt yes, in a general sense, but no, in a particular one. Latrobe's specialized theories of domestic design were not secondary to his overall architectural thinking but were first derived from sophisticated design theories in England and France and later developed by him as a parallel but largely isolated intellectual phenomenon in America. A case in point of this development was Latrobe's distaste for and methodical critique of the American central-hall plan. His derogatory comments about this ubiquitous plan type can be found throughout the preceding chapters, but a summary here of some of the design results will illustrate the evolution of his counterproposals. While still in England, Latrobe designed Ashdown to have an embedded circular-temple vestibule leading to a central hall without any overt sign of designed-in criticism. However, even this central hall has two zones: one in front of and adjacent to the first run of the stair, intended for public circulation and connecting laterally to the public rooms on either side, and another under the landing to the stair, intended for service circulation. Three of Latrobe's American proposals demonstrate his strategy for remedying what he considered to be the central hall’s serious design defects, even

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

though these were “defects” not simply accepted but preferred by most American clients. At the keeper's house for the Virginia State Penitentiary in

Richmond (1797-1800) (see fig, 4.21), he made a virtual architectural pun by turning the central hall at the ground level, which he called a “thoroughfare” or “turnpike road,” into the entry drive for the complex. The result represents an ironic twist on the late-eighteenth-century French notion of architecture parlante. At the U.S. Marine Hospital's steward’s house, intended for a site in

Washington, D.C. (1812) (see fig. 6.12), Latrobe became much more subtle and ingenious in his criticism. For the unarticulated American central hall, what he dismissed as a“common sewer,’ he substituted an almost mannered, threecompartment sequence, served by discontinuous runs of stairs that stacked service, visitor, and occupant movement and allowed for service circulation from both below and the rear. At the Markoe House in Philadelphia

(1807-1808) (figs. 5.63 and 5.66), he developed an ingenious set of pivoting doors that allowed for the conversion of the three-compartment longitudinal hall into a circuit with a transverse passage between the principal rooms. Addressing the issue of service in so original a way constitutes one of his most important contributions to American domestic design, but appreciating his originality requires a comparison of his strategy with those devised by English and French architects and by American builders. The English eighteenth-century system of served and service spaces was most often based on Palladian principles of hierarchy and symmetry. Ideally, service functions in larger country houses were placed in symmetrical wings. This meant that these functions were visible externally but, because the wings were lower and less articulated, they were read as secondary to the central block containing the principal public spaces. In the smaller villas, like those of Sir Robert Taylor, kitchens and other service spaces were often suppressed into a rusticated basement, still following Palladian principles of hierarchy, as, conceptually, they both remained inferior to but literally raised up the public spaces above them. This English basement was raised partially out of the ground, facilitating the introduction of light and ventilation. On the principal floor above, servants shared circulation spaces with the family and guests, and such a house usually had a grand exterior stair rising from the ground to the principal floor. While not all smaller English villas of the period fit this description completely, it was obviously an ideal to which designers aspired. In contrast, the French sought to conceal service spaces and to segregate and control servants circulation through dégagement within the main block or

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

531

corps-de-logis. Creating this dégagement meant removing or disengaging service spaces and related circulation from the rest of the house so that servants were more or less “invisible” to the family and guests. Most often the French placed kitchen and service spaces in a basement sunken partially or completely below grade. Within the most often centrally located dégagement on the principal floor, they compressed the servants’ spaces and circulation and minor family spaces such as toilets and dressing rooms. They allowed themselves internal asymmetry, but without compromising either the symmetrical facades or the axes and enfilades through the principal rooms. It was an exquisite system but one that required considerable design ingenuity and did not easily allow for change over time. The American system was at once the most expedient and the most flexible but also the least sophisticated. American builders simply packed the services into a wing or ell and positioned it adjacent to, usually at the rear of and usually to one side of, the main block, where it was hidden from public view. In a 4 October 1816 letter to Christopher Hughes, Latrobe ridiculed this arrangement, which he called the “frying pan plan” because “on opening the front door you see the contents of the frying pan in a distant perspective on the kitchen fire." He found this plan type to be unacceptable because it lacked compactness, made servants too intimate with rear chambers, made for a highly visible but visually undesirable rear yard, shaded the rear facade, and produced inefficient circulation. However, to most Americans, this solution was ideal: easy to expand, reconfigure, or move the most often wooden parts almost at will, in a country more attuned to change than to tradition. To a trained designer like Latrobe, however, this solution was crude, so much so that he constantly battled with his clients over its use; consider his house

design for John and Mahitabel Markoe, which illuminates the evolution of his thinking about both service and the central-hall plan. Here, Latrobe initially internalized all functions, locating the kitchen in the basement, which he partially raised above the ground; next he moved the kitchen and some

kitchen offices and the service stair to a rear service ell, which required rotating the butler’s pantry; then he tucked everything back inside, maintaining the rotated service space, now labeled “Pantry and China closet,’ to produce the final scheme. That the kitchen was finally placed inside is suggested by the

basement windows seen in nineteenth-century views and photographs (figs. 5.70, 5.71) and is verified by an 1811 insurance survey. While he vacillated on the location of Markoe service spaces, he seized immediately here on a surrogate for the central hall, which changed little

532

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

conceptually over the course of the project's extended design phase. A highly developed version of the Ashdown parti, it began, in the first of the three schemes, as a sequence of octagonal entry vestibule, tight cross hall, oval stair

hall (in the manner of Sir John Soane), and cross-hall rear lobby. This sequence evolved into a circular entry vestibule, eventually built as a projecting semioctagon, tight three-part cross hall with pivoting double doors and

disk ceiling, circular stair rotunda (its transverse axis intended for service circulation), and rear Imperial stair. It was so exaggerated but so effective as a means for controlling crowds of guests that the house eventually and not so ironically accommodated a tavern. Not only did Latrobe adopt elements of the English and French domestic planning systems but he also elegantly fused and even advanced them by minimizing and simplifying the use of dégagement and by placing the kitchen and kitchen offices beneath the spaces they served on the principal story. He eventually lifted the partially sunken English basement completely out of the ground so that one entered it at grade, but still called this level a basement, and placed the principal and service stairs inside it; consequently, arriving servants did not have to carry supplies down a flight of steps, and the family and guests did not have to ascend by exterior stairs made wet or slippery by rain, ice, or snow. [hrough this distinctive basement, with the kitchen and kitchen offices and less formal family spaces compacted by means of dégagement, he threaded the route leading to the principal rooms on the floor above and used this planning necessity to serve much more than functional needs, as movement along it in three dimensions created what he described as “scenery.” Latrobe inherited this term “scenery” from the Picturesque movement in painting and landscape design and from Robert Adam, who first used it in print and in an interior-architecture sense to describe his remodeling of Syon House in 1762-1769.° In landscape-planning theory, picturesque effects could arise during the design process through the controlled interaction of carefully created interventions with the existing natural context. Designers saw themselves as “improving” on nature by applying the principles of art in an opportunistic fashion. Adam saw his interventions at Syon House to be a parallel exercise, where he created a new built environment by applying the principles of his art to an existing architectural context, one with distinctive room shapes, varied ceiling heights, and level changes. Instead of considering these preexisting conditions to be limitations or hindrances, he viewed them as opportunities and allowed the interaction of the old and new to produce fortuitous, sometimes unforeseen and even surprising architectural phenomena.

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

533

Latrobe's ability to create interior “scenery” had much more specific origins, traceable ultimately to the work of Sir Robert Taylor. Taylor developed a compact, vertically proportioned, vaulted villa type with elegant, top-lit central stairs and with adjacent service stairs serving as radiating points for servants’ movements; some of these service stairs rose from sunken basement kitchens. Around these cores, he arranged “democratic” circuits of public rooms on the ground floor, with chambers above defined by partition walls incongruent with those below. Taylor extended the spaces of his principal rooms into the trapezoids of canted bays and subdivided these spaces by means of column screens within them and a variety of vault profiles above them. He wrapped his rooms with bold, astylar exterior walls, prismatic by virtue of the canted bays, that displayed contrasting plain and heavily rusticated surfaces; because of the asymmetries of his plans and the incongruities of his floor plates, he relied on artifices to maintain decorum in his facades. The “circuit” and the use of artifices were passed on to S. P. Cockerell, whose domestic commissions were mostly remodelings of and additions to existing houses. While Latrobe was influenced by Taylor indirectly through Cockerell, he still carried out domestic planning exercises that reflected many of the older architect's predilections. For instance, Taylor's late neo-Palladianism manifested itself in Latrobe's five-part plans for Hammerwood (1792) and for Mill hill (1796), intended for an unknown site in Virginia; his plain wall surfaces reappeared in the bulk of Latrobe's work, from the Harvie House in Rich-

mond, Virginia (1798) to Decatur House in Washington, D.C. (1817-1819); even the influence of his extremist astylar polygonal domestic essays can be seen in such Latrobe designs as that for an unidentified asymmetrical house,

intended for an unknown site in Virginia (1796). Working in a variety of styles, S. P. Cockerell built intermediate-sized villas, often pragmatic responses to precise programs and complex existing contexts, His fairly simple, almost commonplace exterior envelopes, with facades usually individually symmetrical but without dominant centers and often manneristically unrelated to adjacent facades, conceal a cleverness and intricacy of asymmetrical planning, mindful of French theories of dégagement, that represent his principal and largely unrecognized contribution to English domestic design. His plans make use of simple room shapes but often have denied central axes and asymmetrically located stairs and corresponding offset cells of space from which service circulation radiates, producing bipolar and pinwheel layouts, but with rooms still connected sequentially in an ambulatory Taylorian circuit.

534

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe's unconventional American rational-house plans and sections created equally unconventional elevations but remarkably simple ones given that they masked intricate interior distributions. His principal artifice in achieving this simplicity was the use of sham windows, but with the second floor as the principal floor, the fenestration on this level threatened to overwhelm that on the basement floor below; and the absence of rustication, common in English examples, made it impossible to read the lower

floor as subservient (other than from its diminished window sizes), as had been the case in the insula / palazzo tradition begun during the Italian Renaissance. Latrobe's elevations were unprecedented, even strange as far as subsequent owners of both the Pope Villa and Decatur House were concerned, so much so that they added first-floor bays and verandas at the former and first-floor hoodmolds at the latter to make these elevations more conventionally hierarchical. When Latrobe wrote that elevations were to be the “very last thing to be thought of” and that they were to be “created by the interior,” he was rationalizing in both senses of the word: he advocated the logical reflection of the interior organization on the exterior and he dismissed the unconventionality of his compositions by depicting them as inevitable. With this analysis of Latrobe's design thinking in mind, it is possible to

examine his domestic plans collectively (fig. 8.10) and thematically but with certain caveats. Because some plans are missing and because little in the way of design sketches remains, it is impossible to be sure that all of Latrobe's evolving thinking about domestic planning can be illustrated. Even if the data are considered relatively complete, it is erroneous to assume that Latrobe ever worked with any conscious concern for identifiable categories and certainly not for a completeness of taxonomies. Rather, it is clear that he designed to fit the requirements of the situation and of his clients. Even so, and this is the salient point, it is quite apparent that there were certain domestic design ideas

that most interested him and that he felt to be most promising and appropriate in America, and it is equally apparent that he pursued these ideas if not methodically and systematically then at least consistently, If the rational house was his principal theme, then the rational house with

scenery was his most important variation on that theme. His eventual exploration of this theme and variation resulted from experimentation with com-

binations of (1) rotunda-plan houses, (2) Palladian multi-part-plan houses, (3) external-projecting-bay-plan houses, and (4) tangentially related—space or pinwheel-plan houses.

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

535

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The Rotunda Plan Houses

Latrobe’ only use of this configuration in England occurred at Ashdown (fig. 2.76), where he embedded the rotunda in the front wall for it to serve as the principal entry. Once in America, he immediately tried out an internal rotunda plan, perhaps as a democratic symbol, in his scheme for an unidentified rotunda-plan house intended for an unknown site (1796-1797) (fig. 4.13). He also proposed a central rotunda for the Tayloe House, intended for an unknown site (ca. 1796-1797) (fig. 4.22), in the specialized form of a tribune, a rotunda entry at Riversdale, located between Washington, D.C., and Balti-

more (1800-1801) (fig. 5.23), possibly to serve the specialized function of a picture gallery, and a rotunda on the front wall of Sedgeley, near Philadelphia (ca. 1799) (fig. 5.4), to serve, like Ashdown, as the entry vestibule. In his radical proposal for the Liston House, another project intended for an unknown site

(1800) (fig. 5.21), he placed all of the functions within a single domed cylinder. The circle of the rotunda in plan appealed to Latrobe for its formal ability to unite several adjacent spaces and to offer both orthogonal and oblique views

into them. At the Pope Villa (fg. 6.18) with its suppressed rotunda, he produced his ultimate residential example of this visual experience.

The Palladian, Multi-Part-Plan Houses

In England, Latrobe developed Hammerwood as a central block with pavilions attached by means of arcaded wings but subverted the Palladian hierarchy by placing public room functions in the wings and by contradicting externally the internal room boundaries. It was the relationship of the pavilions to the central block in such a composition with which he continued to experiment. Once in America, he employed pavilions at Mill hill, the Tayloe House, the Harvie House, Sedgeley, and the Waln House in Philadelphia (1805-1806) (figs. 4.12, 4.25, 4.27, 5.2, and 5.53), the Craig House near Phila-

delphia (1807) (fig. 5.47), and Ashland near Lexington, Kentucky (cat. figs. 34-35). At Hammerwood, while he chose not to project the pavilions forward in plan, they are still very imposing by virtue of their massive Doric columns. At Mill hill and the Harvie House and, much later, at Ashland, he did push their pavilions forward on the entrance fronts, causing them to interact strongly with the central blocks when each ensemble was viewed from the front, while at Andalusia and Adena, he eliminated the connectors, placing the pavilions in contact with the central block. At Mill hill, the Harvie House, and Ashland, the central blocks projected dramatically on the garden fronts, often the south fronts, enhancing landscape views and the benefits of a southern orientation. Latrobe carried out related investigations at the Tayloe House and at Sedgeley, with four and probably three pavilions, respectively,

538

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

and the Waln House, with only two front pavilions, diminishing the relative

size of the pavilions in all three cases to the point that they were principally enframing elements of picturesque composition.

In England, Latrobe developed Ashdown to have a projecting circular-temple front and, while in S. P. Cockerell’s office, worked on Alderbury House (fig.

The External-ProjectingBay-Plan Houses

1.53) near Salisbury, Wiltshire (ca. 1790-1795), which has twin canted bays on the entrance front. Once in America, he explored the projecting canted bay in a number of forms. He used two of them on the entrance front of Mill hill and

on the garden front of his proposal for Riversdale (fig. 5.23), from which he later derived his design for Clifton in Richmond (1807-1808) (cat. fig, 19). In his unidentified asymmetrical house proposal, he positioned canted bays to project from two, adjacent facades, and at the Pennock House in Norfolk, Virginia (1796) (figs. 4.4 and 4.17), he situated one canted bay to project at the rear, and he probably influenced the inclusion of one or both canted bays at Ashland in Lexington, Kentucky. He eventually employed an embedded octagon for his

entry at the Markoe House (fig. 5.70), which yielded a projecting canted bay on the exterior. Finally, he included projecting bow fronts in the keeper's house for the Virginia State Penitentiary, one of his proposals for the Waln House

(fig. 4.21), and at the Meany House in Philadelphia (1807) (fg. 5.51). What do all of these experiments with projecting bays reveal about Latrobe line of inquiry? The projecting canted bay had been a device muchadmired by Sir Robert Taylor and even by S. P. Cockerell, but Latrobe's use of it must be viewed in a different light because of his concurrent interest in and development of interior scenery. These projecting bays did not serve simply as light-catching devices and landscape-viewing lenses, their traditional English

usage throughout the Late Middle Ages and into the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and beyond. Rather, Latrobe manipulated them as external compositional devices that could interact with one another and with the block from which they projected as someone viewed them from various locations.

While projecting exterior canted bays were commonplace in the English

The Tangentially Related—Space

work of both ‘Taylor and Cockerell and their contemporaries, as were adjacent rooms with varied geometries accommodated by poché in the work of

or Pinwheel-Plan Houses

Robert Adam and others, Latrobe's conceptual development of these spatial ideas can be interpreted quite differently from the work of these men. His interior juxtaposition of lath-and-plaster circular, square, rectangular, and basilican-form rooms, cushioned by thin-wall poché, can be partially interpreted as

Some Perspectives on an Architect's Career

539

the picturesque results of exterior-canted and bow-front bays moved inside; and this bringing of exterior architecture to the interior was a common phenomenon in his broader creation of systematic interiors. This composition

idea appeared very early in his American work. To produce his unidentified temple-form house design, intended for an unknown site (ca. 1796-1799) (fig.

4.18), he rotated one basilican-form room to lie at right angles to another, yielding oblique interior views. He explored a related idea at the Pennock House, where he positioned three rooms and a stair hall all to have tangential relationships via a short, arcing diagonal corridor, yielding a not fully developed, but clearly pinwheeling, plan. It was Latrobe's combining of these two sets of ideas, his juxtaposition of a variety of room shapes and placing of multiple spaces tangent to a central spatial cell, often a stair hall, that produced complex entry sequences replete with constantly changing oblique views. His development of the juxtaposed room idea can be seen in the sequence of Sedgeley, the Waln House, the Markoe House, the President's House reno-

vation in Washington, D.C. (1803-1807), and the commandant'’s quarters at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh (1814). Depending on how its reconstruction is interpreted from verbal descriptions, Sedgeley’s plan could have been Latrobe's first attempt to unite a rotunda with two basilican-form spaces

placed back to back (fig. 5.8). The most likely plan for what Latrobe called his “other” proposal for the Waln House (fig. 5.51), a proposal that was rejected, includes juxtapositions that must have produced a fully pinwheeling distribution, where the rooms on the principal floor lay tangential to a spatial cell at the rear of the entry hall. The also rejected “first” proposal for the Waln House called for three principal rooms rotating around a central stair hall. A likely configuration for the Waln House as built unites three basilican-form rooms arranged back to back (fg. 5.54). The commandant'’s quarters is similar as is the Pope Villa, but with the basilicas rotated to align their principal axes at right angles to the longitudinal axis of entry. This plan type, in turn, is

similar to Latrobe's proposal for the President's House (fig. 6.4), where he inserted basilican-form spaces defined by both walls and many columns. The

most complex variation is found at the Markoe House (fig. 5.62), where the expanding and contracting central-hall surrogate serves as a cushion of dégagement between two variations of the basilican-form room. To bring closure to this discussion of Latrobe's domestic planning, consider for a final time his three extant American houses. They offer variety because they were designed for very different circumstances: Adena as a

countryseat and Decatur House as an urban house and Senator John Pope's

540

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

residence as a suburban villa, Analyzing them also requires a return to the issue of servants spaces and their relationship to principal rooms. Adena is a rational house with a gridlike plan completely lacking interior scenery (fig. 5.27). It does include pavilions defining the entry court and a stoalike colonnade that frames the view to the north and Mount Logan. It is oldfashioned and Palladian in its relegation of most of the service functions to the pavilions. While extremely geometric and elegant in its execution, remarkably so for a building constructed so far into the American hinterland, it is the most conservative of Latrobe's extant houses, the combination of an S. P Cockerell precedent with various Virginia planning traditions and distinctly Latrobeconceived functional and spatial distributions. Although it is unlike most of Latrobes work in its organization astride a central axis beginning in a stair hall, it does contain other planning devices that he used repeatedly: transverse enfilades, incongruent floor plates, and multiple disparate elevations. Decatur House presented Latrobe with his ultimate domestic-planning challenge in America. It was modified some during construction, and the discussion that follows concerns Latrobe's drawn proposal. It is even more complex than Adena, with four differential plan organizations responding to four sets of functional requirements, the most important of these plans for

the present discussion being the principal story (fig. 8.11), where three principal rooms related tangentially to the principal stair landing produce a pinwheel configuration. Latrobe placed the service functions in the cellar, on the ground story, and in the attic story and intended to serve the principal and chamber stories from spaces located on mezzanine levels. He discussed with his clients the adding of a back building, possibly connected and possibly detached, for servants, in case the house were to be rented. On the basis of only a cursory examination, the design strategy might appear to be one of vertical hierarchy as in English Palladianism. However, a closer examination of the ground story makes clear that Latrobe quarantined and concealed the service spaces—kitchen and kitchen ofhces—from the public portions of the

plan, using his distinctive variation on French dégagement (fig. 8.12). He planned for the ground-story public and family spaces to operate not on a central-hall plan but on a side-hall plan, like most Federal period, including Washington, D.C., town houses—a type with which the Decaturs would have been completely familiar. He used the service spaces to buffer the public rooms from the noise, traffic, and service entries to the north; none of the windows of the public rooms opens in that direction, as the single operating north window on the principal story actually opens out from the slot of space

4%

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

541

Fig. 8.11. (Left) Decatur House. Principalrenyatrrreej Ppadatede

story plan showing service spaces shaded.

(Michael Fazio from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic

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at the rear of the dining room, which would have been used by the servants as an access corridor and by guests as part of the circuit. He opened the windows of the public rooms out onto the more genteel space of the President's Square on the east and had complete design control over the rear yard on the

west. Facade diagrams (fig. 8.13) illustrate that, like the French hétels, Decatur House has asymmetrically distributed service space or dégagement concealed

Fig, 8.13. Decatur House. (left) East elevation

behind the regularity of the symmetrical east and north facades, with the

showing services space shaded. (center) North

asymmetrical west facade normally unseen by the public.

elevation showing service spaces shaded. (right) j West elevation showing service spaces shaded. Oiichacl Estee Uibiety ofa

Pope Villa, where he suppressed the second-floor rotunda under a hipped

Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey)

roof, making its discovery before entering the culminating back-to-back, basilican-form drawing and dining rooms, a potent and portentous scenic

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Latrobe's ultimate development of the domestic rotunda took place at the

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event. Almost all of the service spaces, including the kitchen, its floor designed to be depressed about 2 feet, and adjacent wash and bake house, are captive within the ground or basement story of the square plan, with the L-shaped entry and principal-staircase sequence completely buffered from servants

and their traflic (fig. 8.14). Fronting these service spaces, Latrobe initiated his most highly developed scenic entrance sequence. He began with an embedded temple, changed directions once, then again by way of the stairs, introduced a column screen or portico, then collected all traffic within the suppressed rotunda, and finally opened doors on the diagonals into the back-to-back basilican-form drawing and dining rooms. The tangential relationships of the final three spaces preserve the old Taylorian circuit among principal rooms and allow for the accommodation of varied room shapes through thin-wall poché. Amid incongruent floor plates, square-, circular-, and apsidal-plan rooms, and a temple leading to a rotunda and finally to two basilicas, Latrobe created a nuanced integration of his rational-house theories and his conception of interior scenery. He also pushed all service spaces back to be shielded by the rear bays of the flanking elevations so that he could maintain external symmetry on all four facades and produce internal asymmetry

only at servants’ spaces, all without the use of sham windows (fig. 8.15). Collectively, Latrobe's plans show that he relied on certain form types to which he returned again and again, combining them, editing them, and adding nuance to them. That is, he did not necessarily begin each project as a tabula rasa, which helps to explain the rapidity with which he claimed to be able to summon up a new design. He put it this way: “My designs come of themselves unasked in multitudes, and I commonly welcome the first that iil

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comes and execute it with very little or any alteration.” His word for this creative phenomenon was ‘genius.’ In a contemporary sense, this word is probably an exaggeration. Perhaps the word “originality” would be more appropriate today. With his dense European education and his close study of American society and the American landscape and its environmental forces, Latrobe was able to make a unique contribution to American domestic design. Given that the Federal period witnessed the beginning of the nation, it seems clear that Benjamin Henry Latrobe was the first architect to con.

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Latrobe and the Arts of Interior Design In addition to his achievements as a professional architect, Latrobe made a revolutionary contribution to the design of American interiors by introducing the concept—previously unknown in the United States—of the architect as a designer of buildings, their interiors, and their furnishings as a unified composition. Latrobe also introduced to America coherent theories of interior spatial sequencing and ornamentation, sophisticated European drawing techniques that focused on the design of interiors, and advanced neoclassical forms, furniture, and color schemes. Latrobe’s American interiors and fur-

niture designs were at first derivative of English styles, but as time went by, he evolved interiors of increasing economy, boldness, and simplicity, which resulted in a uniquely “American” neoclassical style. This said, however, two qualifications must be stated. The first is that the design of domestic interiors is a collaborative endeavor that involves contributions from clients and other design professionals. Architectural historians—when they discuss interiors—have tended to emphasize the contributions of architects

544

at the expense

of clients and other designers

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

and

craftspeople. Latrobe's domestic interiors represented efforts by him, his clients, and numerous cabinetmakers, textile designers, upholsterers, wood-

workers, plasterers, metalworkers, and decorative painters. Latrobe depended on these allied professionals, instructed them, learned from them, and acknowledged their expertise. George Bridport, a decorative designer and interior painter, partly trained in England and partly with Latrobe, is a case in point. Bridport assisted with many of Latrobe’ interiors and worked periodically as his office assistant. Latrobe referred clients to Bridport for full interior-design services, calling him “a decorative architect,’ an “excellent

artist” and jokingly offering to appoint him “Viceroy” when he (Latrobe) should “ascend the throne of Mexico.’!° A second qualification is that, despite Latrobe's ideal of the wholly integrated interior, it was a goal he rarely achieved. His involvement in the design of interiors ran the gamut from having no control over how his clients and their designers and craftspeople finished his buildings, to making suggestions that the clients then modified to suit their own tastes, to occasional clients, like William and Mary Waln of Philadelphia, who commissioned him to design not only their house but all their major interiors, including furniture, schemes of decorative painting, and to design and select draperies and car-

pets. Latrobe also, as in his work for Dolley Madison at the President's House, designed and coordinated the comprehensive redecoration of existing interiors in buildings designed by others. Latrobe's English training and practice occurred in the wake of a revolution

English Background

in interior design, primarily brought about by the Adam firm. Until the Adams innovations of the 1760s and 1770s, English interiors had conformed to a Renaissance- and Baroque-derived system that involved the adaptation of exterior classical elements, such as pilasters, cornices, and pedimented window and door frames, as interior architecture. [hese individual architectural elements projected in high relief from the wall and floated “loose,” or isolated, on the interior elevations. Interiors were often executed by craftsmen or contractors with little input from the architect, and furniture, textiles, and other decorative objects tended to be the purview of individual craftsmen and were often unrelated to the interior architecture. As early as the 1720s, French designers and architects began to coordinate their interiors. Rococo paneling, or boiseries, overspread entire wall elevations, dissolving the previously isolated classical elements and synthesizing all interior architectural features, including doors, windows, mantelpieces, mirrors,

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

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and wall paintings, into coordinated decorative schemes. Furniture began to be custom-designed as an integral part of the wall elevations. English architect Robert Adam (1728-1792) passed through France on his grand tour of the mid-1750s and, although he professed to be unimpressed by modern French buildings, undoubtedly took note of the highly integrated quality of French Rococo interiors. Both Robert and his brother,

James Adam (1732-94), during their respective travels in Italy, observed ancient Roman interiors and Renaissance emulations of them, in which classical, geometric wall grids were filled in with fanciful grotesquery, either painted or in low-relief plaster. Back in England, the Adams gradually banished the older system of isolated, projecting interior architectural elements, substituting for them integrated wall, floor, and ceiling grids continuously articulated with shallow, Roman-derived and geometrically composed ornament, which, at its most complete, formed a delicate net or cage around the spatial volumes of the rooms. Influenced both by the French example of integrated furniture and by English cabinetmaker-decorator-designers such

as the Gillow Firm and Thomas Chippendale (whose book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, London, 1754, included French-style designs), the Adams began to include custom furniture and fittings in their designs for rooms and published large quantities of them in their own book, The

Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam (London, vol.1 published serially, 1773-1779; vol. 2, 1786; and vol. 3, 1822). To accomplish their revolutionary coordination of interiors down to the smallest decorative details, the Adams found it necessary to organize their office and contracting systems in a new way. They made use of an array of specific drawing types that focused on the design of interiors, such as highly

detailed interior wall elevations and sections (with furniture and draperies included as an integral part of the wall designs), interior perspectives, and individual room plans with “exploded” or “laid-back” elevations (i.e., a room plan with each wall laid flat around it, like a box cut at the corners), which sometimes included reflected ceiling plans on the floor plans. ‘This technique allowed for the visual control and coordination of all architectural

planes of a room in one orthographic drawing (plate 9).11 The Adams also introduced the extensive use of watercolor in these detailed drawings, which served to delineate complex systems of interior coloration and contributed to the unification of interior surfaces, ornament, and objects and served as detailed guides for their contractors. They employed numerous office draftsmen to execute these highly specific interior drawings and subordinated the

546

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

necessary crafts by collecting a stable of craftspeople, including artists, decorative painters, plasterers, wood, metal and textile workers, cabinetmakerts, and upholsterers, whom they trained in the new style and who either worked exclusively for them in the execution of interiors or to whom they consistently subcontracted such work. By the 1770s, the Adams had invented much of what we think of today as modern interior-design practice and could justifiably claim to have brought about “an almost total change” in the decoration of interiors.” By the 1780s and 1790s, when Latrobe began to practice, a reaction had set in against the complex delicacy of the Adams’ style. But their ideal of the architect as a purveyor of integrated interiors and the design and production systems they created remained influential. Latrobe knew the Adams interiors, as well as those of a slightly younger generation of architects, including

George Dance (1741-1825), Henry Holland (1743-1806), and James Wyatt (1746-1813). All were influenced by the Adams’ “revolution” but reduced and simplified their complex neoclassical style. Dance articulated his spaces volumetrically through the use of shallow arches, vaults, and domes, with low relief, or incised, ornament, developments that his pupil John Soane (17531837) perfected into a full interior system, especially in his rooms for the Bank

of England (from 1788). Holland fused a modern French neoclassical style with austere Roman and Grecian elements, notably in the interiors of Carlton House (ca. 1783-1796), the fashionable London palace of the Prince of

Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV). Wyatt showed how to make the Adams decorative system more crisp and economical by reducing it to limited amounts of low-relief plaster ornament within otherwise empty wall and ceiling planes. Latrobe's employer, S. P. Cockerell (1753-1827), was the most eclectic of his generation. He used the older, more robust Baroque and

neo-Palladian styles and rectilinear room shapes for conservative (often “masculine’) interiors, such as those of Admiralty House, London, and a simplified version of the Adam style, along with curvilinear room shapes, for more del-

icate (often “feminine”) spaces, such as the lady's boudoir, or dome room, at Daylesford. Latrobe often followed Cockerell'’s model of gendered space in his later, “rational” American houses, making service and gentlemen's spaces on the first story simple and rectilinear, while the more feminine spaces of the upper stories, such as drawing rooms, sitting rooms, and boudoirs, were more elaborately shaped and decorated. The interiors of Latrobe's English houses of the 1790s show influences from several of these practitioners. At Hammerwood,

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

the drawing room

547

walls are boldly divided by Doric pilasters in the style of Holland, but with the pilaster fronts covered in small, geometric mirror panels, recalling Robert

Adams glass drawing room at Northumberland House in London (completed in 1777) (figs. 2.22-2.24). Holland's Carlton House, which contained the most chic and fashionable interiors of late-eighteenth-century London, evidently made a great impression on Latrobe. The stair hall and dining room at Alderbury House has a Holland-like fusion of Greco-Roman clas-

sicism with French decorative detail (figs. 1.59-1.61), while Latrobe's upper stair hall at Ashdown, with its three, shallow-arched niches screened by columns carrying floating architraves, is a direct quote from Holland's Carl-

ton House entrance hall (figs. 2.82-2.85; plate 7). It is unlikely that any of Latrobe's English clients had him custom-

design furniture for their interiors (an expensive process limited to the wealthiest clients), but he may have assisted them with selecting furniture and interior finishes. The Fuller family bills from Ashdown show that they acquired furniture from the Seddon cabinetmaking firm of London, and Latrobe may have advised on these purchases. Some of the Ashdown rooms were covered in solid-blue wallpapers, perhaps creating color schemes like Wedgwood porcelains. Latrobe's first, documented, American, domestic designs, for the Pennock House in Norfolk, Virginia (ca. 1796-1799), led him to produce a dramatic

perspective of the entrance hall (plate 18). The staircase is an asymmetrical version of the architect's original “Imperial” staircase at Ashdown, the walls are a pale blue (perhaps like some of the Ashdown interiors), and the ceiling contains a shallow plaster centerpiece in Wyatt's emptied-out version of the Adam style. A wooden molding runs around the walls at the level of the second floor, echoing the belt courses on the front facade and creating a rational articulation of interior volumes. Latrobe rendered the floor in a black and white checkerboard grid emulating stone, but probably either painted on wood or on a canvas floor cloth, indicative both of the architect's early recognition that American houses rarely had masonry-vaulted floors and his reluctant acceptance of American wooden construction.

Latrobe quickly realized that drawings of custom-designed interiors

appealed to American clients and differentiated him from both gentlemanamateur architects and builders, neither of whom had the expertise to do such designs. In about 1798, he drew an elaborate perspective of the ballroom for his

proposed Richmond Theater, assembly rooms, and hotel complex (fg. 8.16). Almost contemporary were his designs for the Iayloe House in Washington,

548

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 8.16. Latrobe, perspective drawing of the

“ballroom” of the proposed Richmond, Virginia, theater, assembly rooms, and hotel complex, ca. 1797-1798 (unexecuted). Pen, ink, and watercolor. (Library of Congress, Prints and

Photographs Division)

D,C., which also contained elaborately detailed and colored section drawings

that exhibit the interiors (fig. 4.23). Neither project was executed, but taken together they record Latrobe's interiors style of the later 1790s. It is elegant but, in some ways, inconsistent and derivative. The Richmond Theater ballroom is a long, rectangular room with a segmental-arch vaulted ceiling and a semidomed, apsidal end that recalls English domestic interiors such as Robert Adam's library at Kenwood, Middlesex (1767-1769), but without a column screen across the apse. It also recalls Sir Robert Taylor's Exchange

assembly rooms in Belfast, Ireland (ca. 1776).13 The Richmond ballroom is simpler than Adams interiors, more like those of Holland or Wyatt, though Latrobe designed custom sofas for the niches and gilded pier and overman-

tel mirrors that recall Adam furniture (or popularized versions of it from the patternbooks of cabinetmakers such as George Hepplewhite and Thomas

Sheraton). Latrobe's Grecian exteriors and certain elements of his “interior architecture’ seem in advance of other parts of his interiors and his furniture designs at this point in his career; while the marble mantelpieces of the Richmond ballroom room are in the newer, bolder, Grecian classicism of his Hammerwood and Ashdown exteriors, the plasterwork and furniture are in the older, more delicate and decorative neoclassicism of Adam and Wyatt. The yellow walls, with tinted red trim, and the blue upholstery of the furniture create a typical “Grecian” color scheme although they are rendered in delicate, Adam-like tints. For the dining room of the Tayloe House, Latrobe used the Adams’ tech-

nique of a plan with “laid-back” elevations and integrated furniture (plate 19). Two segmental-arched niches contain custom-designed sideboards or serving tables (again, in the Adam-Hepplewhite-Sheraton style); above them are delicate, gilded, ornamental mirrors in the Adam style, containing brackets with Argand lamps—Latrobe'’s innovative updating of traditional candle girandoles. Pale, blue-green walls above a dado and chair rail form a background for paintings, which are organized along the regulating lines of architectural features such as the door frames. The mantelshelf falls on the line of the chair rail. Though Latrobe discarded much of the Adams’ ornament, the “bones” of their neoclassical regulating grids remain to organize his elevations. The blue walls could either have been painted or covered in a solid paper. Throughout his career Latrobe tended to prefer solid colors for walls, in paint or paper, the better to define the spatial volumes of his rooms, though in more elaborate rooms like drawing rooms or in private family rooms he may have sanctioned patterned papers.4

550

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

That Latrobe's interiors of the 1790s exhibited tensions between the more decorative, Roman-derived classicism of the Adams and their successors, and the simpler, more rational “Grecian” classicism of Holland and of Latrobe's own earlier English houses (with their bold, simple, Greek-derived

exteriors) may be partly attributable to Latrobe's American clients, who perhaps held him back with their rather conservative taste for a provincial, ornamental version of the Adam style. Within the next decade, however, Latrobe's interiors entered a new phase of boldness, simplicity, and consistency with his exteriors. Iwo projects of circa 1808-1810, the interiors of the Waln House in Philadelphia and his redecoration of the President’s House

for James and Dolley Madison, show that Latrobe had broken through to a new, more ‘American’ style. The Waln House was especially important as William and Mary Waln allowed Latrobe to design not only the house but also its interiors and much

of the furniture of its public rooms. Like Robert and James Adam, Latrobe had by this time assembled and trained a phalanx of craftsmen to work on his

interiors, including marble cutter James Traquair (1756-1811), carpenter Thomas Wetherill, plasterer William Thackara Jr. (1770-1823), and painterdecorator George Bridport (d. 1819), many of whom worked with him at the U.S. Capitol. Although the Waln House is gone, documentation suggests that its principal rooms were predominantly “Grecian” in their decor. Latrobe retained Bridport to paint at least the library and drawing room, the latter with a 2-foot-deep painted and stenciled frieze “in outline on a rich ground” depicting scenes from either the Iliad or the Odyssey by Homer, as illustrated

by English artist John Flaxman in the linear, two-dimensional style that he had derived from painted Greek vases.1° The bold colors of both rooms and their furnishings seem also to have been inspired by Greek vases: blacks, yellow ochers, golds, and reds. For the Walns, Latrobe designed full ensembles of furniture, including chairs with tablet backs and saber legs, based on Greek

klismos models (fig. 8.17), and scroll-ended sofas, and window benches based on Roman lekthos-couches (fig, 8.18; plate 22), as well as pier tables, card tables, and a sideboard. Much of the Waln furniture, executed under Latrobe's close supervision by carpenter Thomas Wetherill, survives and represents a stunning innovation: combining new, archaeologically based Greek and Roman furniture forms with an older, American, cabinetmaking tradition of painted furniture. The extraordinary decorative painting of the Waln furniture was probably done by Bridport and was perhaps as much his invention

as Latrobe's (plate 22). Latrobe was aware of the most recent discoveries and

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

551

adaptations of ancient, Greco-Roman furniture as published by French architects Percier and Fontaine, English connoisseur-designer Thomas Hope, and English cabinetmaker George Smith. But their furniture was usually produced in expensive woods like mahogany and rosewood and decorated with ormolu or with metal and wood inlays. Latrobe simplified, democratized, and Americanized their designs by using the less expensive woods, cane seats, and painted decoration of American “fancy” furniture. His fusion of Grecian forms with existing, economical American materials and production methods was consistent with his rational design theories and formed one of his most democratic and popular contributions to American culture. Cabinetmakers whom he initiated into this new Grecian mode, such

Fig. 8.17. Latrobe, Greek klismos-style side

chair (ca. 1808), designed for William and Mary Waln House, Philadelphia, ca. 1805-1808. Gessoed, painted, and gilded-yellow poplar, oak, maple, and white pine. Built by carpenter Thomas Wetherill; decorative painting and stenciling possibly by George Bridport.

(Philadelphia Museum of Art)

552

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

as the Finlays of Baltimore (already well-known for their painted furniture), popularized these designs, which were then widely emulated by less exclusive firms—even mass produced—and appeared in their more popular form in thousands of American interiors, both public and private, for the next halfcentury.’7 Ironically, the painted, “Grecian” furniture style that Latrobe introduced had far more influence on the lives and houses of everyday Americans than did all of his sophisticated domestic planning theories. In 1809, Latrobe designed another full, “Grecian” interior in the most American possible context: the oval drawing room at the President's House

for James and Dolley Madison. Although the British burned the President's House in 1814, Latrobe's drawings for some of the Oval Room furniture and fittings survive. The furniture included thirty-six Grecian, klismos-style

chairs made from maple (or painted to look like it) with cane seats, removable cushions in red velvet, and painted decoration; four window benches; and

a pair of scroll-ended “Grecian” sofas (actually more like Roman lekthos couches). The latter rested on legs like reverse-tapered Doric columns and had painted decoration of stars and stripes, within shieldlike crests, drawn from the American flag (figs. 8.19-8.20; plate 21). The red, white, and blue

Fig, 8.18. Latrobe, Roman lekthos-style sofa, ca. 1808, designed for William and Mary

scheme of the room and its furniture represents perhaps the first American

Waln House, Philadelphia, ca, 1805-1808.

interior to consciously display these patriotic colors. The

furniture was

painted (and probably built) by the Baltimore cabinetmakers John and Hugh Finlay. Latrobe also designed a mantelpiece and overmantel mirror, the cornice of which contained Greek anthemions topped by a carved lambrequin

Gessoed, painted, and gilded-yellow poplar,

oak, maple, and white pine. Built by carpenter

Thomas Wetherill; decorative painting

and stenciling possibly by George Bridport. (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

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Fig. 8.19. (Top) Latrobe, drawings for a Greek klismos-style side chair for the President's House, Washington, D.C. (for James and Dolley Madison), ca. 1809. Pencil, ink, and watercolor. (Maryland Historical Society)

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with a scalloped valence and gilded balls (fig. 8.21). The draperies of the windows and mirrored niches opposite them and the upholstery of the chairs, benches, and sofas were of red velvet. George Bridport did the decorative

painting (which may have included friezes similar to those at the Waln - House) and a skylike ceiling with a dark blue perimeter tinted to a lighter blue center, perhaps producing the illusion of a dome. The colors of the oval drawing room were apparently so close to those of the Waln House parlor that Latrobe suggested that Mrs, Madison use a carpet that he had ordered

for the Walns (which Mrs. Waln was unable to use that season).1° It would have been a patterned, fitted (“all-over” or “wall-to-wall”) carpet, perhaps in the blacks, reds, and golds of the Waln furniture. The oval room was ringed with Argand lamps and created an impression of “blazing splendor.’?° Though this drawing room was his most spectacular interior for the President's House, Latrobe, with assistance from his wife Mary Elizabeth, also selected furnishings for and fitted up Dolley Madison's sitting room and dining room, wryly noting that the newspapers referred to him as the First Lady's “upholsterer.’?! As Surveyor of the Public Buildings, Latrobe showed the same attention to the interior detailing of the U.S. Capitol (1803-1812 and 1815-1817). He designed not only the interior architecture but also elaborate draperies and ceremonial furniture such as speaker's rostrums, chairs, canopies, and tripod lamps, especially for the House and Senate chambers. While his later interiors for the Capitol survive and have been restored, most of his domestic interiors are gone. His later interior ornament was Grecian in its simplicity, composed with rational, easily created moldings and construction detailing, He often recessed ornament below the surface so that it was less liable to damage during cleaning by the domestics. While his décor was Grecian, however, his room shapes.continued to be derived from Roman arcuated construction and spatial types: domed rotundas, basilicas with half-domes, and groin-vaulted spaces. Although neoclassical, his rooms could be dramatically asymmetrical in three dimensions. In his preliminary designs for the drawing room of the

Markoe House (Philadelphia, 1808), for example, he conceived a space with four entirely different wall elevations: a segmental vault on one side, a segmental half-dome on another, a flat window wall on a third, and a flat fireplace wall on the fourth, all held in a dynamic, albeit unclassical, tension. Latrobe preferred to grade the decoration of rooms in an experiential sequence. In an 1811 critique of the designs of architect Alexander Parris for

the John Wickham House in Richmond, Latrobe not only condemned the

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

555

elaborate, American-Adamesque treatment of the entrance hall, but suggested a graduated and hierarchical sequence of décor, saying that “it is absurd to decorate the entrance, the rendezvous of servants the mere passage into rooms of utility or entertainment in a manner more expensive and laborious than that of any other apartments. . . . In the decoration of rooms, there should be a regular gradation from the plain hall to the ornamented Drawing room, & the Ladys boudoir.’?? In other words, he felt that rooms should become more elaborate in sequence and as their functions became more important. Latrobe also arranged his spaces for effects of novelty and surprise, often creating winding, nonaxial routes composed of different, often asymmetrical, room shapes, accented by marked changes of light, shadow, and color. He

called these interior effects “scenery” (derived from Robert and James Adam's similar use of the term) and drew their compositional principles from eighteenth-century picturesque landscape theories. His best-surviving scenic interiors in a domestic context are found in the Pope Villa in Lexington, Kentucky (1810-1813), where one progresses from low, darkened, rectilinear spaces on the first story, up a U-shaped stair, to an unexpected, toplit, domed rotunda in the second story, a dramatic visual event perhaps derived from G. B. Piranesi’s atmospheric perspective view of the interior of the Roman Pantheon (figs. 6.30-6.33). Evidence suggests that the walls of the Pope Villa rotunda were yellow, with a pale blue dome and white moldings, a color scheme similar to that in the rotunda of Latrobe's Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.? In both the villa and the bank, as well as in his interiors for the U.S. Capitol, smaller, darker spaces preceded the larger, lighter, major spaces. Latrobe used color and light to increase the contrast between minor and major spaces so as to illusionistically expand the size and dramatic effect of the principal rooms as well as the perceived size of his buildings as a whole. Latrobe's best-preserved, American, domestic interior is the vestibule or

entrance hall of Decatur House in Washington, D.C. (ca. 1818). It conforms, with only minor variations, to his surviving drawings for it, which show a plan, elevations, and reflected ceiling plan, all on one sheet (figs. 7.8-7.9; plates

16-17). The elegant economy of architectural detailing emphasizes the spatial sophistication of this vestibule. A basilican-form plan, it contains three distinct spatial zones that correspond to its circulation functions. First is a rectangular, segmental-arch vaulted entry unit, lit by the fan and side lights surrounding the front door; second is a square, central unit defined by four pendentives carrying a circular disk ceiling like a flattened dome, serving to emphasize the cross-axial circulation of a door on the left leading into Stephen Decatur’s

556

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

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library-office (or minister's room, if rented); last is a semidomed apse with diagonal niches and a central door, on-axis, leading to the main stair. A continuous, horizontal, friezelike molding runs around the space, uniting the tops of all the door frames and acting as a spring line for the bases of the pendentives and the half dome. Each of the spatial zones is further defined by subtle modulations in the wall planes. Unlike the similar but more formal space of the Senate vestibule in the U.S. Capitol, the Decatur House vestibule is articulated without the use of the orders, all of its elements being derived from a simple, structural vocabulary. As Latrobe recommended for entrance halls, its surfaces are austere, intended to be painted in pale stone colors, while the door panels are shown in a pale green, like patinated bronze. It is one of the most highly sculptural and fully integrated domestic spaces produced in Federal period America. Latrobe's domestic clients seldom gave him the opportunity to design and execute such fully developed interiors as those in the Waln House, the redecorated rooms of the President’s House, or the Decatur House vestibule. Often, because he was unable to supervise the completion of his far-flung domestic commissions and because his mature neoclassical style was so austere, his clients and their craftsmen—viewing interiors as vehicles for the display of wealth and status—would elaborate them with complex wooden

moldings and plaster ornamentation (often in regional variations of the Adam style) and would complete them with elaborate wallpapers, textiles, and color schemes that Latrobe would have found to be at odds with the geometric clarity and simplicity of his spaces. In tracing the evolution of his own interiors style, Latrobe stated in a letter to George Bridport that earlier in his life he had been guilty of some “overdone whims” but that “I am in my old age returning to primitive simplicity.’ Few of Latrobe's domestic interiors survive and currently none of those that do is completely restored to its original appearance. The President's House interiors were burned in 1814; the Waln House interiors were dismantled in the 1820s. But Latrobe's influence exceeded his few, completed interiors. With his increasingly chaste and Grecian classicism, Latrobe defined a new style for Federal period America, one which far outlasted his lifetime. What is today called the American Empire style of the 1830s—1850s, contemporary with American Greek Revival classicism, relied directly on his innovations. hus, Latrobe provided the essentials for a consciously American interiors style and showed the world how the citizens of a new, democratic republic might live,

558

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe as Architect-Engineer During the nineteenth century, the professions of architecture and engineering divided, one might say, against themselves. Both are now specialized disciplines that at best collaborate and at worst fail to communicate and even find themselves in open conflict. While the seeds of this schism were being sewn in Latrobe's time, he was unaware of them. He was unusual among his colleagues in the depth of his training in both fields, but he still imagined his knowledge and skill as an architect and as an engineer to be all of one piece, and he practiced accordingly. In 1812, when Latrobe applied for a position at the 10-year-old Military Academy of the United States, which we know today as West Point, he was prepared to teach at the only location in the country offering formal training to those who would become engineers.”® If labeled an engineer in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century, one would have been a builder of roads and bridges or of fortifications: a civil or a military engineer. In America, however, many practical men working as local millwrights or surveyors

addressed daily the problems now associated with engineering practice. Latrobe found it difficult to rise above or even outflank these local competitors, either because he, as an outside professional, was viewed with a certain

degree of distrust or because his professional training furnished him with a breadth of vision that defied the often-primitive circumstances in which his ideas had to become a reality. He saw the problem, writing that “the fault which the public have found with my professional character, is that my ideas and projects are too extended and magnificent to be practiced for some centuries to come.?7 He erred in comparing his practice, particularly regarding larger government commissions, with practice in England and even more so in France, where there existed a long tradition of architecture and engineering works planned as aggrandizements to the state and the crown; no parallel tradition existed in America, where the Congress operated between practicality

and parsimony and a president like Thomas Jefferson conscientiously avoided the trappings of monarchy. If Latrobe was frustrated by these problems of practice, he also found himself at a disadvantage in matters of theory. During the eighteenth century, considerable thought was given to an architecture based on “science” rather than only on the traditions of classicism. Often cited as evidence is the longstanding debate over the proper proportions for the orders and, more generally,y: the existence of immutable laws ggoverning 5 the beauty ty of architectural

Some Perspectives on an Architect’s Career

559

forms. The two positions in this debate can be represented by the writings

of Claude Perrault (1613-1688) and J. F Blondel (1705-1774), Theoreticians like Blondel saw these laws to be embedded in the architecture of antiquity and to have been passed down from generation to generation by discerning architects ever since the Renaissance. Perrault, while not truly scientific, had advocated observation, experiment, and individual judgment. However, architects, left without a set of traditional rules, were far from able to replace them with mathematical models capable of predicting success, whether success is equated with beauty, or economy, or efficiency of construction. Perrault's participation in the demolition of the traditional system of proportions for the orders ushered in not an era of “scientific” architecture but one of aesthetic relativity. Although such debates were certainly well beyond the concerns or even the consciousness of Latrobe's clients—particularly those in America, they did forecast a strategy that he adopted in advocating his designs. When he perceived pragmatic Americans to be dismissive of arguments based on beauty, which was anything but unusual, he would couch his arguments in the language of engineering rationalism. The most expansive example was the case he made for a “rational house.’ By framing his case for particular building forms in terms of such quantifiable matters as daylighting, cost, and convenience, he could justify the proportions, distinctive architectural elements, and unfamiliar plan distributions that his European training and evolving American sensibilities had convinced him were aesthetically correct. With these broad issues in mind, we can now examine the specific aspects of Latrobe’ architecture-engineering practice as it relates to his houses, beginning at the bottom, so to speak, with his shaping of earth. Latrobe's training as a canal builder provided him with a knowledge of the process of cut and fill, the management of related labor, and the implements required to carry out the work, While he never wrote of taking soil samples in preparation for the construction of any of his houses, he did send employee Louis DeMun

to

Louisiana to do just that for his Mississippi River lighthouse.

In England, landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), with whom Latrobe claimed an intimate acquaintance, was unusual in the late eighteenth century for introducing formal topographic manipulation in the form of retaining walls holding back artificial earth terraces immediately around country houses. Latrobe's willingness to manipulate topography may have owed something to Repton and also probably reflected his knowledge of modern French domestic design.

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In England, Latrobe placed both Hammerwood and Ashdown on manmade plateaus using soil taken from the rear of the sites where there are now service courts. Once in America, he almost immediately made a dramatic proposal for terrain manipulation at Mill hill, which was to be embedded in a hillside such that the ground story on the entrance front would be a full level above the ground story on the garden front. He employed the same device at the much later Van Ness House in Washington, D.C. (1813-1818) to take advantage of views out over the Potomac, and he situated Adena atop a small mountain and made it accessible by means of an artificially terraced forecourt defined both by wings and retaining walls. Latrobe also paid close attention to the connection between building and earth: foundations. In his drawings for the Harvie House in Richmond, Virginia, he indicated a brick foundation with a trapezoidal cross section, beginning at a width slightly greater than that of the bearing wall and corbeling outward down into the earth. At Decatur House toward the end of his career, he indicated a simple spread footing, its width considerably less than twice the width of the walls above, as would be typical today, with the only corbeling action occurring in the first course of the footing, this in an era before steel-reinforced concrete footings that act monolithically as beams. At the Louisiana

State Bank (1819-1820), he used wood to produce a beam effect, specifying g-inch-thick cypress planks laid longitudinally along the foundation trench, with a second “course” 2% inches thick laid transversely and beneath the brick bearing walls.?® Latrobe's more sophisticated solution for spreading the loads transferred to foundations was to turn an inverted vault under two bearing walls so that its full extrados would come into contact with the soil. Nearby to the bank, at his Mississippi River lighthouse (1817), he employed multiple inverted segmental-arch vaults in the foundations to distribute concentrated loads evenly onto timber piles. Above these vaults, he covered the keeper's house with embedded relieving arches and erected a tower hollowed out by a spiraling vaulted chamber carried up the shaft's full height to minimize its dead load. Latrobe left us with few indications of his preferences in domestic plumbing. He had, of course, considerable knowledge of hydrology, ranging from early experiences in scouring river channels and arranging canals to building watersupply systems, first in Philadelphia and last in New Orleans. His designs for the Philadelphia Waterworks, together with his chamber-story plan for the Markoe House, document his management of city water from the intake basin he had placed in the Schuylkill River to the fixtures he specified for an individual customer—with pressure for the system provided by steam-driven

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engines built to his designs. These Markoe House fixtures were a private water closet placed adjacent to the principal dressing room, a device that would not be widely used in the United States until the 1840s and 1850s, and a bath with its own cistern, one which was heated by a dedicated “furnace.” Latrobe provided water to Philadelphia in 1801, at a time when only New York City had undertaken comparable public works, and his future son-in-law, Nicholas Roosevelt, manufactured the steam engines for both systems. Fireplaces were not efficient heating devices, and if Latrobe made any improvements in them, they have not yet come to light. He certainly knew a great deal about combustion and heat transfer through his design and installation of steam engines. Yet in his drawings, he almost always indicated fireboxes with rectangular plans, which seemingly ignored then-current technical knowledge, such as that published by Benjamin Thompson, known in his scientific writings and after his removal from New Hampshire to England, then to Germany, as Count Rumford.#° Rumford proved through experimentation that the most efficient fireplaces had splayed sides that reflected heat out into the room,3! and Latrobe knew of Rumford and cited him often in his correspondence.” Latrobe did show two splayed masonry fireboxes in his “Plan of the Ground Floor” of the Philadelphia Waterworks pump house. More inform-

ative is his drawing for the “Chimney for the Hall of the Pennsyl[vani]a Bank,” where the splayed firebox is lined with a premanufactured, splayed, cast-iron insert.?3 Most telling, however, is a small sketch within the body of a letter to

Thomas Jefferson.3+ Here he showed such a splayed insert or “stove” that was “constructed on Rumford's plan” and discussed its possible use at Monticello. While it seems likely that most, if not all, of the rectangular fireboxes in his domestic buildings were planned to receive such devices, none now remains. Latrobe gave considerable thought to the efficacy of specific fireplace locations, disdaining placement on outside walls and between windows. He preferred to collect flues together inside interior walls so that once they passed through the roof they could be unified in flue walls or horizontally extended stacks. In some cases, this latter arrangement made the chimneys into very significant architectural features, and, in all cases, it reduced the bulk of required chimney construction and yielded a limited number of stacks.disposed in an orderly pattern. His most extreme manipulation of Hues was to direct them laterally so quickly that he could open up a window above the firebox, as in the garden room of his Tayloe House proposal—a questionable use of engineering to achieve aesthetic ends.

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Latrobe also regularly called for fireboxes that were not as tall for their

width as those recommended by Rumford. Judging from his interior elevations, Latrobe did so to allow the chair rail to define the head of the firebox; if he included a mantel, he matched its height to that of the chair rail. His motive was certainly to integrate fireplaces into the grid that he used to organize his interior elevations, making these technological decisions both a practical and aesthetic part of his rational-house conception. Latrobe made use of freestanding cast-iron stoves, typically set into niches in entry vestibules. Such devices were not unusual; William Thornton

included two (one false) in the circular entry of his Tayloe House, now called the Octagon in Washington, D.C. (1797-1801). Latrobe planned for such a stove inside one of the niches in the front hall-compartment at Decatur House and showed its flue in his chamber-story plan. Although he introduced central furnaces with hot-air distribution systems at the U.S. Capitol and discussed the possible use there of heat from steam carried through tin piping from a central boiler, he never tried such elaborate systems in his residences. There is no evidence that Latrobe proposed any unusual means for the ambient cooling of his houses, except to recommend that kitchen floors be sunken to obtain greater ceiling heights and, therefore, air stratification, and one could argue that the central-hall plan, which he so despised, represented a quite logical means for encouraging cross ventilation. Latrobe did, however, propose a well-considered ventilation system for the Van Ness House’ stable, consisting of air-intake grills set into an outside wall adjacent to the stalls and a very tall air-exhaust cupola set atop the apex of the building's pyramidal roof. Latrobe also had very specific opinions about lighting. In addition to conventional windows, he used skylighting, borrowed lighting transmitted from exterior openings to interior spaces through clerestory-like transoms and interior windows, and early in his career for the Tayloe House proposal, tribune lighting. He preferred to introduce daylighting from one direction so as “to throw the principal lights into one mass.’3° He compared such conditions to the morning and evening sun, when light was so directed as to give very distinct patterns of light and shade. At Decatur House, for example, he allowed light into a room from more than one direction only at the rear of the dining room, in front of the sideboard niche. Only a skylight and a minimum amount of borrowed light from adjacent spaces lighted his second-floor rotunda at the Pope Villa. His section drawing for this house shows borrowed light being introduced through interior windows into “landlocked” servants’ spaces, and at

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Decatur House, notes on his chamber-story plan indicate that the landlocked hall was to be lit by multiple, surrounding transoms.

The most complete evidence we have for his use of artificial lighting comes from his interior elevations of the dining room in his Tayloe House proposal (fig. 4.24; plate 19). On one short wall is a triple window, and opposite it a sideboard niche with what appears to be a wall-mounted, Argand-burner lamp, having a cylindrical metal base and glass chimney. Behind the lamp is a mirrored back plate contained within an elaborately ornamented framework of gilded wood, stucco, or metal. On one sidewall is a similar lamp and back plate in a niche and opposite it the fireplace with an overmantel mirror. Apparently his intention was to use these devices, in addition to candles placed on the dining table, to provide a modest level of illumination throughout the entire room at night. While such wall-mounted candleholders with mirrored backplates had been used in America for several decades, the Argand lamp was not patented until about 1783, making Latrobe's composition of illuminating elements an innovation. He adapted the eighteenth-century branched candleholder with reflector, called a girandole, to accept the brighter, longer-lasting, relatively clean, adjustable oil-burning Argand lamp. In his correspondence, Latrobe never addressed acoustical requirements for his houses. The presumption must be that residential spaces were too small to require acoustical treatments beyond those naturally occurring in the furnishing of rooms. He did, however, write an appendix on architectural acoustics for an entry in The Edinburgh Encyclopedia?’ and wrote to Congress concerning acoustics in the U.S. Capitol,#® While the idea of an architect manipulating walls may seem more than obvious, an examination of Latrobe's attitude toward this most basic of constructional elements, from the perspective of both architecture and engineering, provides insights into his creation of structural form. An interesting case involves his actions at Green Spring (1797), the Virginia home of William Ludwell Lee. Here, Latrobe inserted a new set of wooden bearing walls into an existing masonry shell, with multiple objectives: achieving structural stability, making for a general ease of renovation, and modeling the interior wall surfaces through the introduction of niches and the subtle relocation of window openings. In other words, he saw the structural character and aesthetic character of the wall as a single concern; he thought perceptually and conceptually simultaneously. It is not difficult to imagine the alternative, fragmented modes of thought: either that of carpenter-builders for whom the wall was a constructional element that happened to subdivide space or that

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of gentleman-amateurs for whom structural behavior fell somewhere between nuisance and mystery. Io appreciate more fully Latrobe's attitude and resulting explorations, we must examine his introduction of thin-wall poché. Poché was an almost inevitable by-product of masonry construction. Masonry walls, particularly bearing walls, have to be thick, especially the taller the building. Designers found themselves able to carve out some of the masonry, without sacrificing stability, in order to develop subordinate spaces in the form of niches, stairways, service corridors, and anterooms. The relatively thick mass of the walls also mediated between the contrasting irregularities of adjacent volumes so that square, circular, polygonal, and even basilican-form rooms might coexist without compromising any single room's geometric integrity. Latrobe employed traditional poché in such a solidmasonry structure as the U.S. Capitol. However, it is what he set out to do at his masonry and wood residences that concerns us here.

The undated principal-story plan (fig. 5.62) for the Markoe House illustrates Latrobe's accomplishments. Within a square perimeter, he combined five different room shapes plus Imperial and service stairs without the benefit of thick masonry poché. Using only wood and plaster and accumulating modest poché areas around the circular entry vestibule and the central stair hall, he was still able to snug one room against another while defining a distinctive perimeter for each, In addition, all the interior elevations of the two principal rooms are symmetrical. The gentleman-amateur would have ignored matters of structural design, leaving them to the builder, with his practical experience. The builder would likely have followed accepted practices and rules of thumb, such as an inch of depth in wood for a foot of span. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that Latrobe made meticulous calculations of the dead and live loads on individual walls, but some calculations must have been a part of his design process, as they were in his writing about acoustics. By making them, he could have defied the prejudices of both groups of men, yielding safe conditions and an economical level of overstructuring, what would today be called a factor of safety. As a combination of structural stability and architectural effect, thinwall poché represents another of Latrobe's notable contributions to American domestic design. In his section drawings for the two-and-one-half-story version of the Pope Villa, Latrobe indicated the configuration of floor-framing systems, in one case down to the level of individual members, and he included an orthographically related roof-framing plan / chamber-story plan showing individual roof rafters

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(fig. 6.20), A close examination of his section drawing with annotations for the front hall-compartment of Decatur House (fig. 7.9) reveals a similar level of specificity in sizing, orienting, and joining members; the solution he proposed contradicted conventional practice but was absolutely sound in theory—the solution of a trained engineer as opposed to that of a carpenter or builder. There must have been many other such Latrobe drawings put in the hands of mechanics on various construction sites and now lost. While European designers such

as Sir William Chambers and Sir John Soane have left us with many section drawings, they invariably chose to show floor framing as though it were monolithic, indicating individual members, if at all, only for roof superstructures. By changing interior wall locations from floor to floor, Latrobe created a structural problem: weight from load-bearing and non-load-bearing partitions above that could not be transferred directly to the ground. This condition occurs in the extant Adena, Pope Villa, and Decatur House, but in the Pope Villa no evidence remains of an accommodation, such as double joists, made for the vertically discontinuous walls, and, as a consequence, the wooden floor structures have fatigued. Does this mean that Latrobe ignored the problem, or did his absence during construction mean that carpenters were left to their own devices and did not adjust the floor framing? At Adena, second-story walls without firststory walls beneath them are suspended from the second-story ceiling joists. However, no evidence remains to attribute this construction practice to Latrobe rather than to a resourceful local builder. The same holds true for U-shaped iron hangers at Decatur House. Economy forced Latrobe to construct wooden rather than masonry “vaults” within most of his American houses. Working in wood, he often retained the structural logic of properly arranged stone vaulting, like back-toback semidomes that mutually resist the other's lateral thrust. He constructed vaults using both orthogonal and curving, crucklike wooden members to which he could attach thin, flexible wooden lath and then apply plaster. Latrobe plastered all of his walls and ceilings, and the plastering technology he advocated was radical enough in America for him to comment on it in his correspondence. He preferred the use of “grounds,” what would today be called screeds, that is, wood strips applied to the wall around doors and windows and at bases to serve as a guide against which the plaster could be finished flush when applied to the proper thickness. For Latrobe, the problem with wood was its impermanence. For him, permanence meant masonry-vaulted construction, in architecture or in engi-

neering. He wrote: “Of all Bridges . . .stone Bridges are assuredly the best and

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handsomest.’22 He did not even consider wooden bridges to be the domain of .

the professional engineer. He left behind many examples of masonry bridge designs such as segmental-arch spans over Rock Creek and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal feeder, a triple-arch aqueduct over Elk Creek, and a segmental-arch aqueduct over Rock Creek with circular cutouts in the spandrels to lighten the dead load. Preliminary to and as complex as the erection of masonry vaulting was the construction of wooden centering. Latrobe considered centering to be so important that he included a separate section on it in his specifications for the Louisiana State Bank. The quality of interior finishes, he observed, depended on the “accuracy” of the vaulting, which, in turn, depended on the “truth” of the centering, Regarding the erection of both vaulting and centering, Latrobe placed his faith in experience and supervision, not theory, saying that “vaulting requires a sort of knowledge which nothing but much experience can

give’ and that “a sort of knowledge is required [for complex vault construction] which cannot be easily communicated, but on the spot.’ While Latrobe was apparently able to build only one completely masonry-

vaulted house in America, the long-since-demolished Goodwin House (1806) in Philadelphia, he tried constantly to vault the floors of entry halls and the ceilings of kitchens. His only extant stone-vaulted entry, which once had a vaulted stair springing from it, is that at Ashdown in England. Even at the Sedgeley tenants house near Philadelphia, he constructed a basement arch to support a stone floor in the entry above, and he was still advocating a stone-floored entry hall at Decatur House in 1818. Latrobe preferred stone stairs to accompany stone-Hoored entry halls. Although no evidence of such stairs remains in any of Latrobe's American houses, his drawings show that he clearly intended to use them at Decatur House, where he would have cantilevered the stone slabs that formed the treads and risers out of adjacent masonry walls. Latrobe carried out his most mature architectural vaulting experiments in masonry at the Louisiana State Bank, where he fused a variety of vault and dome profiles in the service of fireproofing and spatial variety. The reflected

ceiling plan of the ground floor and a longitudinal section and photographs (fig, 8.22) illustrate these vaulting conditions. Above the front entry, the ceiling configuration is almost exotic, more reminiscent of late-Gothic vaults in central Europe than anything standing in America in the early nineteenth century; while the experience was forty years in the past, Latrobe may have seen

such vaults during his time as a Moravian student in Silesia. He employed a highly specific terminology, describing this entry vault as a“quadralateral segment

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Fig, 8.22. State Bank of Louisiana, New Orleans, 1819-1820. Vaults (left to right): saucer dome with lunettes over the banking room; view through arched opening in the “triangular vaults” adjacent to the rotunda; “spandrel dome” over the front entry; and “spherical groins” adjacent to the front

entry. (Michael Fazio)

of a sphere” or a “Spandrel dome.’ Beyond it lies the banking-room rotunda

covered by a shallow saucer dome enriched by a central rosette with radial “fluting.” This rotunda is lit by three lunettes that extend inward from the lateral tripartite windows and the front entry. Latrobe described their vaults as ‘cylindrical groins.” Astride the entry are groin-vaulted rooms that originally served as the insurance and cashier's offices; Latrobe called their vaults “spherical groins.’ He covered the four triangular spaces around the rotunda with “triangular Vaults” that form what he described as “quarter groins.’ He covered the cash vault with a conventional barrel vault and the corridor between it and the stair with a conventional groin vault. He specified that the “Director's room’ to the rear be arched in plank, a wooden vault mimicking the appearance of stone. When considered collectively, these vault types make it evident that no one in America was pursuing such a varied and innovative program of vaulting design. One is left to wonder what might have been had Latrobe not died in 1820 in the miasmatic lowlands of New Orleans attempting to construct the city’s water-supply system. Perhaps the most revealing way to conclude this brief discourse on Latrobe the architect-engineer is to compare his professional behavior with that of three notable European architects of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries:J. F. Blondel, Sir William Chambers (1723-96), and Sir John Soane (1753-1837). In fact, their behaviors regarding construction issues were remarkably similar. Between 1771 and his death in 1774, Blondel published four volumes of his Cours dArchitecture, along with two volumes of

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plates. In this didactic work by the most prominent teacher of the period in

France, one finds little about construction; Blondel was much more interested in matters of distribution, or planning, and decoration. Sir William Chambers issued the first edition of his Treatise on Civil Architecture in 1759. In it, he told his readers to anticipate a second volume dealing with construction and costs, but it never appeared. Because Chambers lived another 37 years, we can assume that construction did not occupy a position of priority with him. Sir

John Soane did address matters of construction in his twelve Royal Academy Lectures, which he began delivering in 1810, but he waited until the final lecture to do so, even though he was able to draw on long experience as a practitioner. In this lecture, he left no doubt about his preference, like Latrobe's, for fireproof, permanent construction, meaning masonry. Soanes attitude reflected his belief, based on the surviving monuments of antiquity, that the great ancient cultures had all built with solidity and that their work had stood the test of time. Latrobe's beliefs and preferences sprang from similar sources. However, whatever related problems Soane found in England paled beside those Latrobe found in democratic, capitalistic America. Here durability seemed to many potential clients almost frivolous and even a “permanent” building might all too soon disappear, as did Latrobe's completely masonry Bank of Pennsylvania, the first Greek Revival public building in America, which was razed only sixty years after its construction. If anything, however, this unfortunate, even tragic, pattern of demolition makes the preservation history of Latrobe's houses all the more interesting.

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A Preservation History of Latrobe's Houses and Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde

Tarsot Hamu in his 1955 biography of Latrobe interpreted the architect's American career in terms of persistent tragic themes, especially that of the gifted professional and Enlightenment thinker struggling against an intransigent society unprepared for his innovations. From the vantage point of halfa-century later, the “tragedy” of Latrobe’ career assumes a somewhat different form. Most of Latrobe's buildings are gone, and his houses are the rarest survivors. [his essay is thus both preservation history—an attempt to explain how the few houses that remain have survived—and postmortem, an attempt

to explain why so many of them have vanished. Latrobe worked on more than sixty domestic commissions in the United States, of which only three fully documented houses survive: Adena, the Pope Villa, and Decatur House.! By contrast, the three documented houses he designed in England all still stand: Alderbury House (ca. 1791-1796, in Wilt-

shire, designed by Latrobe as S. P. Cockerell’s chief assistant) and Hammerwood and Ashdown (both ca. 1792+, in Sussex). Latrobe's surviving American houses are all now owned by public entities or preservation organizations

(Adena by the state of Ohio, the Pope Villa by the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation, and Decatur House by the National Trust for Historic Preservation), while the surviving English houses are all privately owned, and two of them, Alderbury and Hammerwood,

still function as residences,

while Ashdown is now the center of a boys’ school and is partly used as public rooms and partly as a residence for staff and students.” These different patterns of private versus public ownership have resulted in significant differences in the physical treatment of the English and American houses. All Latrobe’ surviving houses have grown and changed organically over time. The English houses, reflecting traditional preservation procedures in the British Isles, retain most of their later additions and changes, illustrating their accumulated history and evolution. The American houses are variously interpreted for public audiences and have all undergone, and continue to undergo, radical restorations, the philosophical goals of which are to return them to an earlier point in time. This treatment is reflective of American preservation experiences and attitudes, formed in part by the Colonial Williamsburg restorations of the 1920s—1940s and is typified by intensive historic-structure investigations that precede often extensive physical restorations. Latrobe is more renowned as an American architect than as an English one, which perhaps explains why all of his surviving American houses are now in the public realm. His English country houses are rather remotely

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located and are not especially large by British country-house standards, which explains why they still survive and are still inhabited. By contrast, most of Latrobe’s American houses were built within or near American cities that have experienced constant expansion and rebuilding. It is significant that two of the surviving American houses are in relatively remote locations: Adena, near Chillicothe, Ohio, and the Pope Villa, in Lexington, Kentucky. Both these settlements boomed in the early nineteenth century

(Chillicothe was the first capital of Ohio and Lexington the largest city in the developing West), but both soon declined (the Ohio capital moved to Columbus in 1816, and Lexington lost its hegemony to nearby river cities

with the introduction of steam-powered riverboats around 1815). The survival of Decatur House in Washington, D.C., may also be partly explained by context; in a city with a tradition of height limitations, low-rise historic buildings may have suffered less from redevelopment pressures than in most American cities.? The loss of most of Latrobes American houses is both troubling and a challenge to the historian. The domestic buildings of Latrobe's contemporaries, such as Thomas Jefferson, William Thornton, and Charles Bulfinch, and of his pupil Robert Mills, survive in much higher percentages. How do we explain the low-survival rate of Latrobe's American houses? The lightness of American domestic construction, in which Latrobe reluctantly participated, may be one factor. In England, his houses were built of heavy masonry, with stone exteriors; brick internal walls; and some masonry-vaulted cellars, ground-story floors, and stairs. Though Latrobe greatly preferred this heavier construction, Americans, for reasons of expediency and cheapness, built their houses with rather thin, brick exterior walls, wooden floor plates and stairs, and many lath-and-plaster internal walls. Latrobe exploited the possibilities of this lighter construction by reconfiguring his floor plans and room shapes from story to story for both functional reasons and scenic effects; such buildings, however, which are quick, cheap, and easy to build, are usually more ephemeral. In a larger cultural sense, such expedient construction encouraged an attitude of impermanence in Americans, a trend that has continued to accelerate to the pres-

ent. One could argue, however, that Latrobe's houses were no lighter in construction than those of his contemporaries and that many of his masonry-vaulted public buildings, such as the Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1798+, demolished in 1867) and the Baltimore Exchange (1815-

1820, demolished in 1901), are also gone. Did Latrobe's houses have unique

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features that hastened their demise? Perhaps. Two factors especially, the character of Latrobe's clients and the designs of the houses themselves, may help to explain their disappearance. Throughout his career Latrobe pursued numerous speculative ventures with fortune making as their goal. Many of his clients resembled him in this regard and the fortunes on which they built their houses often proved unstable. As an avant-garde and high-status architect, Latrobe attracted clients with new money and progressive attitudes who were characterized by social climbing, the desire to make an impression, and a predisposition to engage in high-stake ventures. The magnetism between Latrobe and these clients began early, even before he moved to America. Hammerwood, one of the most adventurous country houses in late-eighteenth-century England, was intended by its owners, the Sperlings, as a hunting lodge and entertaining pavilion for cultivating London society, but they suffered financial reverses in such enterprises as Irish-distillery building and either left the house shortly after its completion, or perhaps even with portions unfinished. After his arrival in Virginia, Latrobe designed several houses, but few of them were built. The Virginia gentry who might have provided him with wealthy domestic clients were perhaps too conservative to be attracted to the adventurous qualities of Latrobe or his designs. Of the two Virginia houses

he built, the Pennock House (1796) in Norfolk did not survive the nineteenth century and the Harvie House (1798) in Richmond passed within a year to a new owner, Robert Gamble. It became a school in the 1870s and disappeared soon after. Latrobe's Philadelphia clients—mostly wealthy merchants—experienced considerable vicissitudes. None of his Philadelphia houses were long inhabited by their original owners. William Cramond, the Philadelphia merchant who built Sedgeley (1799-1800), the first Gothic Revival villa in

America (certainly an adventurous act of architectural patronage), bankrupted in 1806 and lost his house. Sedgeley went into the hands of speculators, then fell into ruin, and was gone by 1857, Only the tenant's cottage survives, considerably altered, in what is now Fairmount Park. Of all Latrobe's Philadelphia buildings, just this tiny house remains. William and

Mary Waln built Latrobe's first “rational” house in Philadelphia (1805-1807) and the first house for which he designed fully integrated interiors and furniture. Waln, a China merchant involved in the opium trade, bankrupted in 1821, and the house and furniture went on the auction block. Ironically, much of the furniture survives, while the house was demolished in ca. 1848.

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John and Mahitabel Markoe, for whom Latrobe built a Philadelphia town house (1807-1811), leased it as a tavern in 1813, and it disappeared in the later nineteenth century.

Of Washington businessman and eventual client John Peter Van Ness, Latrobe wrote: “No man has a worse character or is in worse credit. He is considered a mere adventurer.* But this neither prevented Van Ness from marrying well nor Latrobe from designing for him and his wife Marcia the

largest private house in Washington (1813-1817). The Van Ness Mansion survived until 1908 and its stable-carriage house, although relocated, still stands. Latrobe’ other major Washington client, Commodore Stephen Decatur, a naval hero, commissioner of the Navy, and aspiring presence on

the Washington political scene, precipitously allowed himself to be drawn into a duel and was killed only fourteen months after occupying his new house, leaving his widow Susan financially unable to maintain it. She rented

it and eventually lost it to creditors. Senator John Pope of Kentucky, for whom Latrobe designed a suburban villa in Lexington, made a political misstep by voting against the War of 1812 and became so unpopular with his Kentucky constituents that he surrendered his ambitions for reelection

before his house (designed for political entertaining!) was completed. He and his wife Eliza lived there briefly then rented the house to a succession of tenants. . While many of Latrobe's houses were built on the shifting ground of their clients’ erratic lives, some of the clients’ problems were endemic to the era. Although we now view the Federal period as a golden age of American democratic culture, it was, in fact, volatile, with dramatic changes of government,

interruptions of trade brought on by European wars, and frequent economic downturns and bank failures. Latrobe's houses perhaps suffered most of all from their own design and planning. They were so original and unconventional that they virtually begged for remodeling or demolition. Hammerwood is a case in point. A hunting lodge-entertaining pavilion with one showy facade and a shallow plan with multiple entrances and lateral circulation, rather than the more conventional double-pile plan of most country houses, Hammerwood defied standard English domestic planning of the late eighteenth century. The house survives, but later owners strove to eradicate its quirky planning and, as the decades passed, it became progressively larger and more conventional. In America, Latrobe's “rational house” ideas challenged every planning convention. His preferences for internalized and concealed services within

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an at-grade first story (rather than in a rear ell), his avoidance of the ubiquitous central stair hall, and his placement of principal rooms on the second

story (rather than the first), were all highly unorthodox. Latrobe's rational house may have been derived from his enlightened analysis of the environmental, social, and functional needs of the new Republic, but it overturned the conventions of American domestic life. In the final analysis, Latrobe attacked the traditional domestic planning to which Americans had grown accustomed and the vernacular houses that perpetuated its patterns, and he lost the fight. If Latrobe's rational house for America was the domestic architectural equivalent of the Enlightenment-based principles of the new Republic and its documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, it may be said that Americans were prepared to accept Enlightenment rationalism in their governing contracts, but not in their homes. Of the American houses that Latrobe did manage to construct, their conveniences and their capacity for entertaining often doomed them to what we now call adaptive use. A surprising number were converted to public functions—some within the architect's lifetime. Latrobe ironically noted this trend when the Markoe House in Philadelphia, with its splendid suite of public rooms and ingenious cross-axial circulation, became a tavern shortly after its completion, saying that it “was destined from the beginning to be a dutch tavern. That fate which decreed it was recorded in every part of the design, taste, and execution of the building, and it could not be resisted.’> Similarly, the Waln House in Philadelphia became a public bath and Clifton in Richmond, a hotel. The Pope Villa and Decatur House, though they never quite became taverns or hotels, survived mostly as rental properties appropriated for large-scale public entertaining. Vincent Nolte’s

house in New Orleans (1819) became a bank after its owner's business failure in 1826.

Several of Latrobe's innovative rational houses were extensively remodeled to conform to more conservative norms. Later owners of the Pope Villa eliminated Latrobe's concealed service dégagement on the first story to create a traditional, central hall; they removed the kitchen into a rear service wing; and they appended bay windows and verandas to increase the visual and spa-

tial importance of the first story (Latrobe's “basement”) while reducing in size the grand windows of the second story (Latrobe's public floor). Through these remodelings, the Pope Villa became what Latrobe had most resisted: a conservative, center-hall house with an attached service ell. Decatur House

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

experienced similar remodelings. The entrance vestibule became a symmetrical central hall with the opening of a new door into the previously concealed internal kitchen, while a new kitchen was added in a service ell to the rear. Victorian hoodmolds applied to the first-story windows and door were an attempt to increase its visual importance, despite the fact that the major public rooms were in the second story. Some of Latrobe's more conservative houses, for his more prudent clients,

were less compromised by later changes. The Fort family of Wiltshire resided at Alderbury House from its construction in the 1790s until the 1970s and changed it very little. Because Latrobe designed this house while working for S. P. Cockerell and for a provincial client, it exhibits a less adventurous style and planning, Anne and Trayton Fuller, who built Ashdown, were a solid part of the Sussex gentry and their descendants used the house until the 1880s, when it became the Ashdown School. Discounting the addition of surrounding school buildings, the house has changed in only subtle ways. It had a conservative plan from the beginning, as Latrobe organized it around central halls on both floors. Nonetheless, his more innovative and unusual features were modified, ‘The open, temple-like entrance portico was glazed-in and the original, masonry-arched, Imperial staircase was torn out and replaced with a more ordinary U-shaped stair rising around a central well and creating the traditional, axial circulation of a standard central hall. In America, the Stier and Calvert families, who were politically conservative and who

built Riversdale at Bladensburg, Maryland (1800-1807), began with a plan of their own and eventually rejected most of Latrobe's innovative suggestions, creating a handsome but more conventionally planned house that, though it can hardly be said to owe much to Latrobe, has survived relatively unchanged to the present. Adena, near Chillicothe, Ohio, is a particularly interesting case. Like Riversdale, it is a country house with symmetrical, Palladian wings. Its frontier context and unaffected clients, Thomas and Eleanor Worthington, caused Latrobe to design a seemingly straightforward plan. But the house contains numerous planning subtleties. It conforms to all of his theories of

environmental orientation and functional distribution (except that its principal rooms are on the first story), and though one enters into a central stair hall, it does not continue through the house but terminates in a handsome drawing room on the garden front. The primary public and service circulation routes are run through lateral enfilades and, though the rooms are simple and rectilinear, the first- and second-floor plans vary significantly from

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577

Fig. £.1. The “Ohio House,’ built for the 1907

each other. Perhaps because it seems a more traditional plan than it is, Adena

Jamestown Exposition. It is a replica of Latrobe's

has survived with relatively few changes. In fact, Adena survives in duplicate. A century after its completion it had

Adena, 1805-1807, at Chillicothe, Ohio, and is built of cast concrete blocks to emulate the cut stone of the original. The “Ohio House” now serves as a duplex for housing officers at the

Norfolk, Virginia, naval station. (Photograph courtesy of the Naval Station, Norfolk)

become a symbol of early Ohio history and was replicated as the “Ohio

House’ at the 1907 Jamestown, Virginia Exposition (fig. E.1).° The replica still stands, built of cast concrete blocks resembling the cut stone of the original, but it emulates Adena’s appearance in 1907 (rather than 1807), including porches that were added to the original Ohio house by early-twentieth-century owners. It is ironic that when so few of Latrobe's American houses remain, Adena should survive twice. It is doubly ironic that this Virginia Adena, imported from Ohio, should survive in a state where most of the architect's original buildings do not.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

In a class of its own for preservation history is Ashland, the country house of Henry and Lucretia Clay in Lexington. Latrobe designed Ashland’s wings

and possibly its entire plan (see the catalogue). Clay, Kentucky's most famous statesman, died in 1852, and his son, James B, Clay, purchased the estate, which had already become a Kentucky shrine. In the summer of 1854, the younger Clay demolished Ashland because its walls had supposedly begun to give way. [he old house was entirely removed to the bottom of its foundation

trenches by James B. Clay's Lexington architect, Thomas Lewinski, and Clay advertised the old building materials for sale in local newspapers. When few of the materials sold, Clay had the roof beams made into snuffboxes and walking sticks to sell as souvenirs. Shortly thereafter, George D. Prentice, edi-

tor of the Louisville Journal, attacked Clay in the press, excoriating him for “barbarism,” “desecration,’ and “vandalism” of his father’s famous house. Clay defended himself in a series of published letters and both sides deployed some of the earliest preservation rhetoric in America regarding architecture, public history, and private-property rights. The controversy became so heated that in the summer of 1855, Clay took steps to challenge Prentice to a duel; Lewinski delivered Clay's penultimate letter.” As the denouement of the affair, the editor refused to duel and, in 1856-1857, Clay and Lewinski rebuilt Ashland on virtually the same plan and with the same massing as the original house. The “new Ashland,” despite its homage to the original, involved new materials and mid-nineteenth-century details; the new frontispiece, for example, though identical in form to the original Federal one, is made of cast iron. Significantly, the Ashland controversy occurred simultaneous with the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association campaign (ca. 1853-1858) to acquire and preserve George Washington's home.

It would seem that James B. Clay and his architect saw the rebuilding of Ashland as an act of historic preservation. Although the main associations of the site were with Henry Clay, one sympathetic newspaper account of 1857 declared that in the reconstruction, “the form and character of the old building, planned by Latrobe, has been preserved.”® This is the first time that Latrobes name appeared within the context of a preservation controversy and it documents that his fame survived in Kentucky for almost four decades after his death and two decades before the formal beginnings of a national rehabilitation of his reputation in the public record.° The reconstruction of Latrobe's reputation began concurrent with the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the resulting popular revival of interest in Americas Colonial and Federal past. But despite an increasing stream of

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579

writing on Latrobe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his buildings continued to be demolished. The Baltimore Exchange disappeared in 1901, his largest private house, the Van Ness Mansion in Washington, D.C., followed in 1908; his Washington house for Ann Casanave disappeared in 1913; and another Washington house, Brentwood, for the Brent-Pearson

families (attributed to Latrobe; see catalogue), was in ruins by 1918. But while Latrobe's growing reputation as America’s first, great professional architect still could not save buildings associated with him, it caused some of them to be documented. Architect Ogden Codman (1863-1951), for example, drew plans and elevations of the Van Ness Mansion before its demolition and

architect J. A. Younger did the same for Brentwood. By the early twentieth century, Latrobe's increasing reputation may have begun to preserve some of his houses. A 1917 newspaper account of the Pope Villa, for example, accurately credited Latrobe with its design and compared it with his work at the White House and the Capitol.!° This publicity may have kept the house standing even though new owners converted it into apartments. Indeed, the increasing scholarly and popular interest in Latrobe's career may even have helped to preserve houses mistakenly attributed to him; the same 1917 newspaper account that identified the Pope Villa as by Latrobe misattributed three other Kentucky Federal-period houses to him, and all of them survive.!! A similar situation occurred in Cincinnati. In 1908, architec-

tural critic Montgomery Schuyler attributed the Baum-Taft House (ca. 1817; now the [aft Museum) to Latrobe, an opinion seconded in 1919 by Fiske Kimball—an attribution that perhaps contributed to the preservation of the house.’? It is ironic that Latrobe's name seemed to have more preservation cachet in western states like Kentucky and Ohio than in the eastern ones where he practiced more extensively. After Talbot Hamlin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Latrobe appeared in 1955, the destruction of his American buildings largely ceased, and the focus on him inspired the reconstruction and restoration of some of his major spaces within the U.S. Capitol Building in the 1960s—1970s. By this time, however, most of his houses were gone. Only Adena, the Pope Villa, and Decatur House have survived. By a happy accident, however, the three surviving American houses represent each of Latrobe's domestic building types: Adena, a country house; the Pope House, a suburban villa; and Decatur House, a town house. They and the outbuildings from Sedgeley and the Van Ness House, plus the three surviving English houses, are all that remains of Latrobe's domestic oeuvre.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Latrobe's Surviving English Houses Of Latrobe surviving English houses, Alderbury House has changed the least. It remained in the Fort family for almost two centuries after its completion, is still a single-family residence, and retains its surrounding landscape and views. Hammerwood, perhaps left unfinished by the Sperlings, was Latrobe's most unconventional English country house and has changed the most. Its second owners, the Dorrien Magens family, possibly added to it between circa 1800 and 1860 but probably used it as the Sperlings had intended, as a parttime residence, hunting lodge, and entertaining pavilion. The third owner, Oswald Augustus Smith, retained architect S.S. Teulon in the 1860s to transform Hammerwood from a moderate-sized pavilion house with a few large rooms into a substantial Victorian country house of more than fifty rooms. Teulon added new stories, greatly expanded the service wing, and gave the house a more conventional plan.13 Despite the magnitude of Teulon’s modifications, he designed the Hammerwood additions in a highly contextual manner, using the same stone and a classical vocabulary similar to Latrobes.

Teulon preserved the integrity of the important south facade, with its bold central block and Doric end pavilions, and though the main direction of approach has changed from the south to the north, Hammerwood’ lovely original landscape remains to the south, preserving essential views to and from the house. Hammerwood remained a private residence until World War II, when it became an army barracks. After the war, it was subdivided into eleven apartments, In 1973, the rock music group Led Zeppelin purchased the house, intending to use it as a recording studio and living quarters. Instead, Hammerwood sat empty for a decade, prey to vandals who both stripped its lead roofs and left it open to the weather. In 1982, the Pinnegar family, interested in the house and its associations with Latrobe, purchased the deteriorated Hammerwood and began a twenty-year restoration. They saved the house from extinction and have preserved its entire fabric, including the nineteenth-century additions. The nearby Ashdown remained in the Fuller family from its completion in 1795 until 1910, when the Ashdown School purchased it. The school expanded in stages throughout the twentieth century and Ashdown is now the formal centerpiece of a multibuilding complex. It received careful restoration and conservation work in the 1980s by London architect Edward Hill, including the rebuilding of its roof and the refurbishing of its interiors. The ground story now serves as public and reception rooms for the school and the upper stories as residence rooms for pupils and staff.

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581

Latrobe's Surviving American Houses Latrobe's surviving American houses have reflected, and sometimes led, preservation practice in the United States. All three, Adena, the Pope Villa, and Decatur House, are undergoing restorations; Adena and Decatur House had already experienced earlier restorations. The two surviving outbuildings from Latrobe's Sedgeley and Van Ness estates have not been restored per se, but both are stabilized and adaptively reused. The tenant's house of Sedgeley in Philadelphia is now the headquarters of the Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust, while the Van Ness stable and carriage house in Washington, D.C., relocated to the corner of C and 18th Streets, functions as part of the offices for the Pan-American Union. Adena remained in the possession of the Worthington family throughout the nineteenth century. In 1903, Chillicothe residents George Hunter and Clara Boggs Smith purchased the estate. The Smiths made several changes, mostly of a nonstructural nature, which included modernizing the domestic technology and rearranging some internal doors and partition walls. They added Doric-columned porches to the north, south, and east fronts, complex wooden balustrades to the north porch and the roof deck, and a large bay window on the north front of the east wing that required the removal of a portion of the exterior stone wall. Mrs. Smith, who died in 1946, left Adena, with approximately three hundred twenty acres, to the state of Ohio. Between 1948 and 1953, the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society conducted a restoration of the house to the Federal-period occupancy of

Thomas and Eleanor Worthington (1807-1827), interpreting Adena as a house museum-memorial to Worthington (one of Ohios first two U.S. senators, its sixth governor, and leader of the movement for Ohio statehood). Latrobe's connection with the house was an acknowledged, though secondary, consideration. The 1940s-1950s Adena restoration was one of the most careful of its time, equaling in documentation the restoration of specific buildings at Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s-1940s. Historian James H.

Rodabaugh and his staff led the Adena project (which included a landscape architect but no restoration architect). Rodabaugh compiled exhaustive documentary evidence on the house from the surviving Worthington family papers and combined a careful physical inspection of the building with archaeological investigations of the grounds.'* The restoration removed the Smiths’ early-twentieth-century additions and recreated the original floor plans and interiors, including colors selected through early “scratch and

582

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

match” paint analyses and some documented Worthington furniture. Nancy McClelland of New York City, one of the earliest interior designers to specialize in historic restoration, assisted with the interiors and the historic wallpapers reproduced for them. The formal gardens to the east of the house were recreated through archaeological investigations. Adena opened to the public in May 1953 (the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Ohio statehood), but restoration efforts continued through the 1960s and 1970s, including the restoration of some outbuildings and the reconstruction of others. In 19992003, the staff of the Ohio State Historical Society, under the direction of historians Stuart Hobbs and Cheryl Lugg and architect Neil Hitch and with assistance from historian William Seale, carried out a re-restoration and reinterpretation of Adena preparatory to the 2003 Bicentennial of Ohio statehood.'5 Although Chillicothe suburbs have gradually encroached on Adena, enough remains of its spectacular hilltop site to give some sense of the

original frontier context of Latrobe's westernmost surviving country house. After Stephen Decatur’s death in 1820, Susan Decatur rented her house to a parade of foreign ministers and American government officials until 1836,

when she lost it to creditors. Hotel owner John Gadsby purchased Decatur House and resided there until his death in 1844, after which his family rented it intermittently. During the Civil War, it served the Union Army as offices and barracks. At various times in the nineteenth century, the plan was made more conventional by the addition of a rear kitchen-service ell and by the cutting of the door through the right-hand wall of the entrance vestibule into the northeast corner room, originally Latrobe's concealed kitchen, which thereafter became part of the public realm of the first floor, while the vestibule became a standard central hall. In 1871, Edward and Mary Beale purchased Decatur House. They placed it again at the center of Washington social life and updated it with Victorian stone hoodmolds over the front door and first-story windows. They also Victorianized its interior décor. In 1902, Decatur House passed to the Beales’ son, Truxton Beale, and his second wife, Marie, who continued to use it as an exclusive center for Washington political entertaining. By the early 19408, Marie Beale, then widowed, had acquired Latrobe's surviving drawings for the house (which were incomplete, as neither a front elevation nor a plan of the principal, or second, story remain) and hired architect-historian Thomas Tileston Waterman to undertake a partial restoration of the house to the Latrobe-Decatur period.’® This was the earliest conscious restoration of a Latrobe building in America. Waterman removed the Victorian hoodmolds

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583

and restored the facade (though not entirely accurately) and recreated Federal Style woodwork and mantelpieces in several of the rooms. Marie Beale furnished the first story to evoke the Federal period, while she left the second story in a combined Victorian and early-twentieth-century taste. She bequeathed Decatur House to the National Trust for Historic Preservation,

which received it upon her death in 1957. The National Trust's presence in Decatur

House

came at a critical

moment. The federal government had acquired much of the property on the east and west sides of Lafayette Square and planned to demolish the existing buildings and erect new office buildings there. The plans called for the demo-

lition of the entire west side of the square (along Jackson Place), except for Decatur House at the north end. The National Trust criticized this plan and,

in the early 1960s, worked closely with the administration of President John F Kennedy and with Mrs. Kennedy (then engaged in her famous reinterpretation of the White House interiors) to make the Lafayette Square development plans more preservation sensitive. San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke created a plan for preserving the remaining historic town houses on the east and west sides of the square and infilling between them with new buildings that emulated nineteenth-century town houses. Some of the proportions, materials, and details of these new, infill structures were inspired by Decatur House. This created consistently scaled streetscapes on the east and west sides of the square, while the high-rise office buildings originally planned for the

street frontages were built behind, in the centers of the blocks (fg, 8.2). This was one of the pioneering efforts in the United States at “contextual” design, or the conscious integration of new and old buildings at an urban scale, and acted as a conceptual alternative to the insensitivity of Modern Movement architecture and many American urban renewal projects of the 1960s—1970s. Decatur House thus served as an inspiration for one of the nation’s earliest,

urban preservation-planning schemes. This innovative effort helped to inspire the passage of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act by Congress. Concurrently, in 1965-1966, the National Trust made Decatur House its headquarters, remodeling and occupying the third floor, the attic, and the rear service wing as offices, with restrooms and an elevator inserted in the original, northwest service quadrant of the house. Other than these intrusions, the first and second stories of the house remained more or less as Marie Beale had left them and were used by the Trust for receptions and as a house museum. Having outgrown these spaces, the Trust headquarters moved in 1981, leaving Decatur

House a house museum (though the third floor continued as offices and the

584

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

service ell contained a gift shop that connected with a new building, constructed

for special events, at the rear of the site). The trust continued to interpret the first story of the main house to the Latrobe-Decatur period and the second story to the Beale period of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1998, Paul Reber, then the new director of Decatur House, began a restoration and reinterpretation with a series of historic-structure investiga-

tions by preservation architects Charles Phillips and Joseph Oppermann of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The goals of this restoration were to document the house, stabilize it structurally, introduce new mechanical systems, create exhibit space in the second story of the rear ell wing, and restore the first two floors of the main house to the Federal period, with equal emphasis on Latrobe's innovative designs for the house and Stephen and Susan Decatur's short occupancy of it. During the investigation, Latrobe's original kitchen was rediscovered in the northeast corner room of the first story. This room had mistakenly been interpreted by the Trust both as a bedchamber and as Stephen Decatur's office, but after a reinterpretation of an 1820 inventory, subsurface investigations revealed not only the original opening of the large cooking fireplace, but the ghosts of shelves and countertops in the plaster of the walls and a residue of cooking grease and smoke on the earliest layer of paint. The current restoration recreates Latrobe's unconventional internal kitchen and other service spaces within the main house and interprets the day-to-day experiences of servants as well as the spatial and social experiences of the fam-

ily and visitors. The 1960s-era elevator and restrooms were removed from the

Fig. £.2. Decatur House and the east side of Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., showing

the combination of historic buildings, new, street-front /infill structures, and multistory office buildings within the block, which resulted from the 1960s—1970s planning scheme created by the Kennedy Administration, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, architect

John Carl Warnecke, and others. (Michael Freeman photograph)

main house and the original service rooms recreated there as well. When the current restoration is completed, Decatur House will be a house museum at least partially restored as Latrobe's only surviving rational town house. The Pope Villa is the most recently rediscovered of Latrobe's surviving houses. It lay dormant, used as an apartment building on a quiet residential street in Lexington, until a disastrous fire in 1987 damaged its interiors and burned offits roof. The house had long been connected with Latrobe's name, first in oral tradition and then through the scholarship of architectural historians Clay Lancaster and Talbot Hamlin in the 1940s~190s, but until the fire, it was assumed to be a distant and unfaithful adaptation of Latrobe's design. This incorrect interpretation resulted from the numerous remodelings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had nearly obliterated the original form of the house. The Pope Villa as it emerged from postfire investigations is now recognized as one of Latrobe's most creative and rational houses. Its low, basement-like first story contained a ground-level entry with family rooms in front and an internal, concealed kitchen and other service rooms behind. Its

principal public rooms (including a dramatic, domed rotunda) were located on the second story, and an asymmetrical, scenic route led up to them from the entry. The unorthodox front facade, with its “upside-down” arrangement of huge, triple windows in the second story and small, single windows in the first story, reflected Latrobe's distinctive distribution of public and service spaces. If the innovations of Latrobe’ rational house were alien to America in general, they were especially so to early-nineteenth-century Kentucky. After Popes sale of the house in 1836, later owners remodeled it nearly beyond recognition by creating a central hall downstairs, externalizing the kitchen in a rear wing, moving some of the public rooms from the second story into the reconfigured first story, and making the second-story windows smaller, while enlarging those of the first story to create a proper, ‘right-side-up” facade with a conventional emphasis on the first story. Early-twentieth-century owners subdivided the thirteen-acre site and converted the villa into a four-unit apartment house. Through the twentieth century, the villa was further subdivided until, when it burned in 1987, it contained ten apartments. Preliminary investigations proved that the Popes had built their house much closer to Latrobe's surviving designs than had been supposed. On the strength of these findings, the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation purchased the villa to save it from destruction. In the fifteen years since the fire, the Trust's Pope Villa Committee, under the primary leadership of historian Daniel B. Rowland, has raised funds, rebuilt the roof, stabilized the house,

586

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

retained Phillips and Oppermann (and later Charles Phillips individually) as preservation architects to conduct ongoing historic-structure investigations

and, under the direction of building conservator John Lee of Annapolis,

Maryland, have conserved much of its existing fabric (which had been extensively damaged by the fire and subsequent exposure to the weather).1” As the last of Latrobe’ surviving houses to be restored, the Pope Villa may receive the least traditional treatment. Its fragile condition presents great physical and philosophical challenges. Its preservation rationale rests primarily on Latrobe’ reputation and the merits of his innovative design; yet, its multiple remodelings are also important because they represent the social history of its later occupants and exhibit an ongoing “dialogue” between the house and its Kentucky context. It is also clear that the connection of the house with Latrobe and the innovative character of its original design, which might argue for its restoration as a house museum, are probably not compelling enough attractions to ensure its economic viability in a medium-sized city already saturated with house museums. In addition, a traditional restoration to any one period in its

history runs the risk of overwhelming the house with new materials (even though the investigations have revealed in considerable detail the appearance

of the house in each of its different incarnations). The Blue Grass Trust first stabilized the house in 1987-1988 by constructing the new roof and by removing the waterlogged partition walls of the twentieth-century apartment remodelings so that the house could be dried out. During the removal of these elements, Phillips and Oppermann discovered that earlier portions of the structure had been cut up and reused in the twentieth-century remodelings; the dismantling thus revealed more about the earlier phases of construction. Parts of the preservation process seemed inevitably to draw the building back to the Latrobe-Pope period. When the

roof was rebuilt (under considerable time pressure and financial duress) it seemed that Latrobe’ early roof configuration was the simplest and consequently the most economical to reconstruct (or, as Latrobe might have put it, the most “rational”). Between 1989 and 1999, the fire- and water-damaged fabric of the villa was conserved, with a premium placed on the surviving Federal-period fabric; then, between 1999 and 2004, the front facade was restored

to the Latrobe-Pope period, partly because of the undeniable appeal of Latrobe's reputation and the fact that, as a matter of design, this is his best surviving house; partly because the remains of all its surviving periods were so compromised and fragmentary that to recreate it to any later period would have resulted in equal expense and similar percentages of new materials. Yet

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587

the Trust's preservation philosophy strives to be flexible and eclectic. Although the reconstructed portico looks like a traditional restoration from the street

(and thus completes the restored facade), from the inside it shows itself to be constructed of new materials that both protect and reveal the remaining archaeological evidence of the original portico. Inside the villa, the woodwork and mantelpieces from the 1840s remodeling form a large percentage of the surviving fabric and will probably remain in place, while missing interior elements, such as the original staircase, may be rebuilt in a modern form that will reveal the surviving evidence of the original stair on the surrounding

walls and floor. The spatial configurations of later remodelings (such as the 1840s central hall) may be preserved as interpretive “options,” with hinged, moveable walls, to exhibit the changing spatial and social patterns of later occupants. Finally, some of the interiors may be stabilized but left in their unrestored state to exhibit original materials and construction methods and to retain some evidence of the crises through which the house has passed. The Pope Villa has served as a laboratory for training and educating craftspeople, students, and volunteers. In response to the challenges of the project, the architects and conservators have developed new preservation strategies and conservation techniques that are now being more widely disseminated. From this complex experience, a multifaceted end use has

emerged. The villa will continue to be part historic museum (open to the public but not restored as a house museum per se); part adaptive use (serving as learning and exhibition space for the graduate program in historic preservation at the nearby University of Kentucky); and part continuingpreservation laboratory (a setting for the study of building materials, con-

struction technology, and preservation practices). The virtue of Latrobe's surviving English houses is that they largely continue to function according to their original purposes and to exhibit the organic changes made to them over time. The virtue of Latrobe's surviving American houses is that their multiple restorations have engendered intensive studies that have been revelatory. The authors of this book have been involved in the preservation of the Pope Villa since it burned in 1987 and have participated in and learned from the recent restorations at Decatur House and Adena. Our involvement with Latrobe's surviving American houses has also informed our analysis of his English houses. And while it is indeed tragic that so few of Latrobe's houses remain, we hope that this book will help to preserve his larger achievement: that of having invented the first, consciously American domestic architecture.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

v

- Soe

Z 4

a

a

Documented Houses, Attributed Houses,

ouses Influenced by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Deattributed Houses

England ALDERBURY HousE Chapter 1

Location. Alderbury (southeast of Salisbury), Wiltshire; Tunnel Hill Road, across from St. Mary's Church (near 36) Clients. George Yalden Fort and Mary Fort Dates. Ca. 1790-1795 (designed by Latrobe while he worked in the office of

S. P. Cockerell) Status. Extant; privately owned

Although Alderbury was a commission from the Cockerell office, Latrobe's design drawings for the house survive in his “English notebook,’ found in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. An elegant stone villa, it abuts

an earlier house that became its service wing. The new house has three entirely different but symmetrical fronts and an ingenious floor plan with rooms asymmetrically disposed around a top-lit stair. Numerous artifices such as sham windows conceal the contradictions between the plan and elevations. It is in nearly original condition and neatly sums up the design principles Latrobe learned from Cockerell. Thirty-plus acres of landscaped grounds, with an early stable. HAMMERWOOD

PARK Chapter 2

Location. Off 4264, 3% miles east of East Grinstead, Sussex

Clients. John and Harriet Sperling Builders. Alexander Budgen, mortar maker (also stonemason?), who died in 1792, early in the building process; Mr. Russel, carpenter

Supplier. Eleanor Coade / Coade Manufactory, London (column capitals and plaques) Dates. Ca. 1792-1796 and later Status. Extant; privately owned; guided tours on Saturdays, Wednesdays, and bank holidays from June through September; other times by appoint-

ment (see www.mistral.co.uk/hammerwood/index.html) Latrobe's first independent architectural commission, a grand, five-part country house of stone, the end pavilions with “primitive” Doric temple fronts, making it one of the boldest and most progressive Greek Revival structures of its

date in Britain. The floor plan (probably including portions of an earlier house) contains a picturesque variety of rooms contradicting the symmetrical elevations. A neoclassical drawing room with elegant mirrored pilasters survives, overlooking a beautiful, original landscape. Later (1860s) enlargements of the main house in a sympathetic style by Victorian architect S. S. Teulon and surviving estate buildings of the 1870s by Richard Norman Shaw.

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The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Location. Near Forest Row, Sussex; east on B2110

ASHDOWN

Clients. Trayton and Anne Fuller Builders. C. Sandys, supervisor; John Stricker, construction foreman; Mr.

Chapter 2

Housg

Russel, carpenter; Stephen Hobbs, stonemason for portions of the portico;

John Waddilove, stonecutter or mason; James Messenger, London, ironsmith for the stair and balcony railings

Suppliers. Eleanor Coade / Coade Manufactory, London (column and pilaster capitals and bases; dome); A. & T. Spencer, H. T. Boorman (brick); Joshua Drummond Smith (lumber); J. Molineaux, London (hardware); Seddon, Sons and Shackleton, George Phileax, Willi Stephens, all London (cabinet-

makers); George Vornall (wallpaper); Esther Tonkins & Turner, London (carpets, drapery, upholstery) Dates. 1792-1795

Status. Extant; owned by the Ashdown School; open by appointment A finely finished stone villa built by Latrobe in front of a surviving Tudor house, which became its service wing. Entry portico an embedded, circular, Greek Ionic temple with graceful Coade Stone dome; an elaborated central hall with different functional zones, masonry-vaulted stone floor and stair-

case (altered) with basilica-like upper landing, all forming an early example of Latrobe's interior scenery. Overlooks an original landscape. The estate became a school in the late nineteenth century with buildings added to the sides and back of Latrobe's house, but portions of an original rear screen wall or stable survive.

English House Remodelings Attributed to Latrobe Location. Sussex, near East Grinstead Client. Crawfurd family Builder. Mr. Russel, carpenter

SAINT HI.

Dates. Ca. 1792-1795

Status. Extant; owned by the Church of Scientology; open by appointment English debts still dogged Latrobe a decade after his immigration to the United States. In 1805, he wrote to his brother Christian Ignatius Latrobe in England that, in addition to a tailor’s bill, “Russel the carpenter also has sent me over an acct. containing charges for work done for Sperling, Fuller, & Craufurd by my order to the amount of 525 Dollars £120. Both these bills I

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591

Fig, 1, Saint Hill House, Sussex. Park front, as it appeared before late-nineteenth and early-

twentieth-century modifications, (Lithograph from an 1872 sale prospectus; collection of Saint

Hill House-Church of Scientology)

have paid.” “Russel the carpenter” evidently worked for Latrobe on three

houses: “Sperling” was John Sperling of Hammerwood, “Fuller” was Trayton Fuller of Ashdown,

and “Craufurd” may have been Gibbs Crawfurd

(1732-1793), who began building (or remodeling) a house on his family estate of Saint Hill around 1792.” An earlier house (ca. 1730s?) apparently existed on the site. Crawfurd may have contemplated building operations earlier; drawings by Robert Adam dated 1785 survive for a house at Saint Hill in alternative neoclassical and Gothic styles.? The Saint Hill building history and Latrobe's involvement in it remain a mystery. The house survives, but with extensive late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modifications. Its appear ance previous to these alterations is suggested in an 1872 sale notice that includes room descriptions and a lithograph perspective of the park front

(see fig. 1).* This shows a neoclassical mansion with a three-story central block and symmetrical, two-story flanking wings, all capped by hipped roofs behind parapets. Four giant pilasters embrace the upper two stories of the central block and rest atop a basement with arched windows and a small, pedimented porch. The overall composition recalls Pierremont Hall, Broadstairs, Kent (ca. 1791-1792), designed in S. P. Cockerell’s office while Latrobe assisted him; the giant pilasters recall the central block of Latrobe's nearby

Hammerwood (except for the basement story). However, while the completed Saint Hill is unlike any of the surviving Adam drawings, the overall composition, particularly the central block with its giant pilasters atop a rus-

592

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

tic basement, resembles other work by Adam, such as the facade of Wynn House, London (ca. 1733). Saint Hill is faced with stone and has some

Yb

oH

masonry-vaulted cellars, as Latrobe preferred. Correspondence, 2, 153-55. Architectural Drawings, part 1, 55-56. After Gibbs Crawfurd’s death in 1793, trustees appointed in his

will apparently carried the house to completion for his son, Charles Payne Crawfurd. Will of Gibbs Crawfurd (proved 29 Jan. 1794) East Sussex record office, Lewes (SAS / H 455). Also, files at Saint

Ww

Hill House compiled by Ms. Barbara Bradley, historian for the Church of Scientology. The Adam Saint Hill drawings are in the Soane Museum, London; see David King, Unbuilt Adam (1991; Oxford: Architectural Press, 2001), 14-15, 133, 164. “Saint Hill Estate, Sussex, for sale by W. H. Sainsbury Gilbert,” lithographed by Martin & Hood, London (1872; and ed., 1876). British Library Map Room, London [MAPS

137. 6. 10 (11.) 7 (12.)];

copy also at Saint Hill House. Also in British Library Map Room is a “Field Book of Estates Belonging to Gibbs Crawfurd in Sussex,’ 1776 with additional notes from the 1790s (which shows outlines of

the house) [MAPS c. 7.18. (1.)] .

Location. Teston, Kent (426, 3% miles southwest of Maidstone)

TEsTON Hatt/ BARHAM

CourRT

Clients. Elizabeth Bouverie, Sir Charles Middleton (later Lord Barham), and Lady Margaret Middleton Dates. Ca. 1790-1792 (Coade Stone column bases dated 1790; Coade column capital dated 1792; stable bell-tower dated 1792) Status. Extant; privately owned by the Hesketh Corporation; portions open by appointment In Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Talbot Hamlin included Teston Hall among a list of English houses remodeled by Latrobe.! Despite Hamlin’ attribution, however, no primary source documentation has emerged to link Latrobe with the commission.” Certainly, strong connections existed between Latrobe

and the house. Sir Charles Middleton (1726-1813) and his wife, Lady Margaret, who made it their countryseat, were intimate friends of both Latrobe's father and his brother Christian Ignatius Latrobe; they all participated together in organizing antislavery efforts for the British colonies. Latrobe's father spent his last illness in the vicarage at Teston and died there in 1786.?

Teston Hall actually belonged to Elizabeth Bouverie (a cousin of the Earl of Radnor, an antislavery advocate, and a lifetime friend of Lady Middleton); she invited the Middletons to live there with her. Sir Charles managed the Teston estates and inherited the house upon her death in 1799. He eventually purchased much of the surrounding land from her descendants, calling

the estate Barham Court (which had earlier been its historical name).* Middleton spent much of his time in London pursuing his naval career and using Teston Hall, with its combined Middleton-Bouverie households, as his

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ee ee

Rie

meee

country estate. Between 1778 and 1790, he became controller for the Navy, in which post he surely worked with Latrobe's mentor-employer, S. P. Cockerell,

who served as Inspector of Repairs to the Admiralty (1785-) and built Admiralty House, London (1786-ca. 1791). Hamlin speculates that Middleton introduced Latrobe to Cockerell.> In 1795, Middleton became full Admiral, and in 1805-1806 he became first Lord of the Admiralty, simultaneously

(now Barham Court, Kent). Hypothetical

raised to the peerage as Baron Barham.

reconstruction to its appearance in the

Teston Hall / Barham Court evolved from a small Tudor house of the six-

Fig. 2. South elevation of Teston Hall

17908. (Patrick Snadon/ Thomas Williams)

teenth or early seventeenth century (Tudor stone door frames survive in the basement, which appears originally to have been the first story); it received early eighteenth-century additions (supposedly for Sir Philip Boteler, d. 1772) and further extensive additions in the early 1790s—the remodeling attributed to Latrobe. In this remodeling, the landscape on the south front appears to have been terraced up to conceal the first story and one, perhaps two, stories added to the central block. An entirely new wing was added on the west, built on a masonry-vaulted basement, adjacent to the submerged first story of the earlier house. A symmetrical south elevation resulted, with

a three-story central block flanked by two-story wings (figs. 2-3). By this time the exterior had probably been rendered in stucco (painted white; with stone quoins and trim) to unify the multiple periods of construction. The new west wing had a one-story portico or loggia on its west side, supported on paired Greek Ionic columns with Coade Stone bases and capitals; the north, or entrance, front received a similar Ionic portico. The north and south facades

are the long fronts (with the primary entrance on the north while the south enjoys handsome views down to the River Medway). The west Ionic portico

Fig, 3. Teston Hall (now Barham Court).

created a secondary garden front on the west, facing a freestanding Ionic con-

Photograph of its current appearance, from the

servatory in the landscape a few hundred yards farther west (now gone). [he

southwest. (Patrick Snadon)

eastern wing housed service offices and farther east an elaborate new stable block arose, with four wings around a central court.® Teston Hall/ Barham Court received further remodeling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the focus here is on the early 1790s work,’ It seems consistent with Barham's career (in 1790, he retired from his post as controller of the Navy and presumably spent more time at Teston until, in 1794-1795, he became one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admi-

ralty); it also corresponds with Hamlin’s attribution to Latrobe. Indeed, this remodeling recalls Latrobe's other work. The earth terrace on the south, which apparently concealed the first story of the older house, is conceptually similar to the treatment given by Latrobe's friend, landscape gardener Humphry

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595

Repton, to Welbeck Abbey (1789, Nottinghamshire), where he buried the ground story to “elevate” visually the entire house by setting it on an earthen podium; it is also similar to Latrobe's landscape treatments at both Hammerwood and Ashdown. The basement of the new west wing is of masonry construction with stone piers supporting modular brick groin vaults, similar to Latrobe's new basements at Hammerwood and Ashdown. Like them, the Teston Hall basement must have been built partially aboveground and then submerged with the earth “fll” of the new south terrace. On the first story, the west wing housed two, grand new rooms: a drawing room on the south

(remodeled in the 1930s but still containing an original marble mantelpiece) and a neoclassical library on the north, with surviving plaster and woodwork, including handsome built-in bookcases on three walls and an original marble mantel. It resembles S. P. Cockerell’s library at Wyndham House in Salisbury and Latrobe's library at Hammerwood. Both drawing room and library open through floor-length, glazed, window doors onto the new western portico. These large French doors have multihinged shutters that fold back into concealed recesses at the sides, similar to those of Latrobe's Venetian windows at Hammerwood and his entrance portico at Ashdown. Between the drawing room and library are back-to-back, curved-ended basilican spaces, the one on the east terminating a lateral circulation axis from the old north hall; the one to the west forming a vestibule opening on the new portico. The new library and drawing room became part of an expanded “circuit” of public rooms, while the long, lateral hallway may have been primarily for service and family

circulation (fig. 4). The back-to-back basilicas and the overall planning of the new west wing predict many of Latrobes later houses, including Sedgeley, the Markoe House, the Pope Villa, and the commandant’s quarters at the Allegheny Arsenal. The Ionic portico, with its paired columns, resembles

that at Pierremont Hall (designed in the Cockerell office while Latrobe was there) and Latrobes early perspective drawing for Hammerwood. Although the house shows slight asymmetries and is rather unrelieved in its rectilinear elevations and plan, these factors may be explained by the program of remodeling of the earlier house and by Sir Charles Middleton's rather austere character. he new ‘Teston Hall stable block displays symmetrical facades, seg-

mental-arched openings, and tripartite windows (some blind), all consistent with Latrobe's work of the 1790s. Cubic gate lodges of stone and stucco, flanking stone gate piers, survive, apparently also from the 1790s remodeling (see fig.

5). They have recessed, round-arched windows and are similar to Latrobe's later gate lodges at the Van Ness House in Washington.

590

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Although the physical evidence at Teston Hall argues for Latrobe's involvement, two pieces of documentary evidence suggest otherwise. Writing in 1806, Latrobe recalled a painful episode in his relationship with the Middletons. At a dinner party with Sir Charles, Latrobe (then 21, ca. 1785) sought to amuse the guests with a story he perhaps heard at the London Stamp Office, concerning the Edinburgh, Scotland, stamp warehouse where rats had eaten so many stamps that a Scottish ofhcial included in his budget a small sum for the maintenance of a cat to protect them. Unaware of Sir Charles's Scottish origins, Latrobe mimicked a Scottish accent in telling the story and later, when apprised of his faux pas, became so embarrassed that despite Sir Charles's efforts to put him at ease, Latrobe stated that he “neglected the house, where I was formerly on the footing of an intimate, and on my marriage [27 Feb. 1790], gave thus up one of my best connexions.”® This recollection does not square well with the hypothesis that in the early 1790s Latrobe remodeled Teston Hall for the Middletons.!° The second complicating fact is that surviving Coade Stone column bases of the west portico are stamped “Coade London 1790.’ At this date, Latrobe was still in Cockerell’s office; to have taken on an independent commission

0

50 ft.

Fig. 4. Teston Hall (now Barham Court), Hypothetical reconstruction of its principal-story

plan to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (Patrick Snadon/ Thomas Williams)

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597

Fig. 5. Teston Hall (now Barham Court). Surviving gate lodges. (Patrick Snadon)

would perhaps have been in violation of his agreement with his employer. Sources also insist that Hammerwood, begun in 1792, was Latrobe's first independent commission. It is possible that the Coade column bases on the west portico were stock items manufactured earlier than the dates of the commission for Teston Hall, but at both Hammerwood

and Ashdown,

Latrobe used custom Coade elements that he had cast during the design and

construction process (those at Hammerwood dated 1792). At Teston, a Coade column capital on the north, or entrance, front is dated 1792; that date also appears on the clock tower of the stable. One theory might reconcile the conflicting evidence: if the Teston Hall remodeling were a commission from the Cockerell office, circa 1790-1792,

while Latrobe was Cockerell’s chief assistant (Middleton knew Cockerell’s work for the Admiralty). If this were so, Latrobe might have designed the remodeling (or assisted in it) with little direct contact with the Middletons.

598

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

This would explain the similarities of Teston Hall to the work of both Latrobe and Cockerell. Failing the emergence of new proofs, however, it may be impossible to document Latrobe's involvement in the remodeling of Teston Hall/ Barham Court. But the surviving architecture there of the 1790s suggests it. I Hamlin, Latrobe, 42. 2 Architectural Drawings, part 1, 56. 3 BHL to Isaac Hazlehurst, 15 Sept. 1805 (C2), 149 and 150 n. 4. 4 Joan F, Severn, The Teston Story: Kent Village Life Through the Ages. Teston: Rufus Fay Publications, 1976, I5-I7. AN

Hamlin, Latrobe, 28. Sources pertinent to the reconstruction of Teston Hall / Barham Court to its 1790s appearance are

(1) Engraved views of Barham Court (all in Kent County Record Office, Maidstone): “Barham Court” drawn by J. P. Neale, engraved by W.A. le Petit (n.d., but early 1800s); “Barham Court, Kent” 1812, engraved by Hay, for “Beauties of England and Wales,’ London, published by John Harris; “Teston

Bridge &c.” (with house; n.d.);“Teston House, the Seat of Lady Barham, Kent” (n.d., but after death of Lord Barham in 1813); “Teston Bridge, Kent (including house), London, published by Tombleson &c. (n.d. but post-1790s). (2) Barham Court Estate Book” (ca. 1825; contains map with outlines of the house and outbuildings), Kent County Archives Office, Maidstone, doc. no. V 1883 Ex. (3) “Notice of the Freehold Estate of Barham Court, 31 May 1842 (sale catalogue),” published by Farebrother and Co., Land Surveyors and Auctioneers (London), Kent Archives Office, Maidstone, doc. no. U 1821 Es. (4) An 1842 drawing of Barham Court by J. B. Papworth prepared for arbitration between Lord Gainsboro [sic] and South Eastern Railway Co.; The British Architectural Library, Drawings Collection, Royal Institute of British Architects, London (reproduced in Architectural Review 74 (1936) 279 [incorrectly captioned]); also see George McHardy, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the RIBA: Office of J. B. Papworth. London: Gregg International, 1977, 107 (no. 258). (5) Photographs and description, Royal Commission on Historic Monuments / National Monuments Record; Department of the Environment, List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historical Interest, District of Maid-

Ni

stone, Kent, book 69, 131-32. Before 1841, the house received three Doric-pilastered, porchlike bays on its south front; the central one is of two stories, those on the wings of one story. Later, the west wing received a third story. The house burned in 1932; the 1790s west wing remained more or less intact but the third story burned

off. Architects Sir Herbert Baker and Alex. T. Scott restored the house as a two-story composition but retained many of its earlier features. Baker’s and Scott's drawings, dated 1932-1933 (some drawings showing “existing conditions” before the remodeling), in the British Architectural Library,

co

Drawings Collection, RIBA, London.

Our reconstructed floor plan is based on on-site observations and on a written description of the rooms in 1842: “Notice of the Freehold Estate of Barham Court, 31 May 1842 [sale catalogue],” published by Farebrother and Co., Land Surveyors and Auctioneers (London), Kent Archives Office,

‘oO

Maidstone, doc. no. U 1821 Es.

BHL, 7 Aug. 1806 (Journals, 3:50-51). Another potentially embarrassing circumstance between Latrobe and Middleton was that Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, with whom Latrobe experienced difficulties in his position as inspector of the police offices in London, was a close relative of Charles Middleton (BHL to Christian Ignatius Latrobe, 5 Jan. 1807, C2, 351 and 355 n. 6). But, despite Latrobe's 1806 recollection of withdrawing from Middleton in England, he did correspond with him from the

United States. BHL to Charles Middleton, Lord Barham, 20 Dec. 1806 (Cz). In another letter of 1806, Latrobe mentioned Middleton as “rather my patron than my friend. I have since written him sevIO

eral letters.” BHL to Lewis Mark, 1 June 1806 (C2). Elizabeth Bouverie was still owner (or perhaps co-owner with the Middletons) of Teston Hall in the early 1790s; she may have acted as the client, or a co-client, for the remodeling.

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599

FRIMLEY PARK

Location. Frimley, Surrey (Frimley Road at Portsmouth Road, near Frimley town center) Client. Probably James Laurell Date. Ca. 1792-

Status. extant; owned by the British government and operated as a military school, the Frimley Park Cadet Training Centre; open by appointment In 1834, Latrobe’ son, John H. B. Latrobe (1803-1891), requested that his English cousin, Peter Latrobe, son of the architect's older brother, Christian Ignatius Latrobe (1758-1836), question his father regarding BHLs early life and career in England. Peter Latrobe responded in a letter of 24 September 1834 with information he extracted from his elderly father with considerable effort and cross-questioning. About Latrobe's English practice Peter Latrobe wrote that the architect “built Hammerwood Lodge, Ashdown house;-building at Frimley Surrey,-superintended works of a canal in Surrey.’ Although the original of this 1834 letter is now lost, architectural historian Fiske Kimball transcribed portions of it for his essay on Latrobe in the 1933 Dictionary of American Biography in which he duly noted Latrobe's unspecified “buildings at Frimley, Surrey.”! When Talbot Hamlin began research for his 1955 book, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, he sent Kimball’s 1933 essay to English architectural historian Dorothy Stroud, whom he retained to research Latrobe's English career. In an undated (but 1951) memorandum, Stroud reported: “I... went to Frimley where ... Latrobe worked, but there is nothing in the village suggestive of his hand. I went on to Frimley Place which is a Georgian house much altered ... The only unusual feature of the house, which has been greatly enlarged, is the South front.’ In a subsequent letter, Stroud speculated that this south front reflected Latrobe's style, and in her next letter wrote, “In the absence of documentary evidence, it is of course impossible to prove the con-

nection between Benjamin Henry and the alterations at either house (she meant both Frimley and Teston Hall / Barham Court) but at least the dates are right, and in view of what I said about them in my last letter you may consider it likely.’ On the strength of this, Hamlin included Frimley among a list of English houses that Latrobe altered or remodeled.? Despite Stroud and Hamlin’s speculation that Latrobe remodeled Frimley, no direct documentary evidence linking him with the house has emerged. But the style and timing of the remodeling seem right. The Tichborne family owned the Frimley estate throughout the seventeenth century and built

600

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

a house on it between circa 1670 and 1699. In 1789, James Laurell (also spelled

“Laurel” and “Lawrell”) purchased Frimley from the Tichbornes.* He also maintained a house in London and appears to have made a fortune in India

where he served with Warren Hastings (for whom Latrobe's employer S. P. Cockerell built Daylesford).* Laurell’s purchase of Frimley in 1789 suggests the motivation for a remodeling by him in the early 1790s, more especially as

he is reputed to have counted the Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and George IV) among his friends and to have entertained him there.® Latrobe worked in Surrey for engineer John Smeaton’s chief assistant William Jessop on the construction of the Basingstoke Canal, which in circa 1788-1789 passed near the Frimley estate.” Latrobe could have met Laurell through his work on the canal, or through the Cockerell office, or through his

friend Charlotte Ann (Burney) Francis, whose husband, Dr. Clement Francis, served with Hastings in India. The late-seventeenth-century house of the Tichbornes seems to have controlled the remodeling. It must have been an approximately square block of four rooms bisected by a central hall. A wooden staircase containing the Tich-

borne family crest survives in the rear (north) compartment of the hall. The ceilings are all low (between 9 and 10 feet in height), presumably governed by the old house. The south front apparently contained the main entry, with a service wing on the north. The early 1790s remodeling attributed to Latrobe transformed the exterior of the house without seriously modifying its plan. The earlier house was probably a two-story, seven-bay block; the remodeling

seems to have added a low third story (with extra bedchambers) and new roof. On the west front a new, two-story canted bay enlarged the drawing room. The south, or entrance, front apparently received a complete, though shallow,

refacing (fig. 6). The center three bays break forward slightly, and a frontispiece of paired Doric pilasters articulates the entrance door. Above that was

a tripartite window within a giant blind arch (now altered) that rose into the third story. Above the main cornice, evidence suggests the existence of a low, raised attic.® The entire building was stuccoed to conceal the multiple additions. With a few bold yet economical moves, the 1790s remodeling dramatically transformed the house, creating a striking statement of the neoclassical plain style of the 1790s. It recalls designs from the Cockerell office, such as Pierremont Hall, during Latrobe's time there, and the low attic is reminiscent of Gore Court and of Latrobes own Hammerwood and Ashdown. The giant, blind arch above a Doric porch recalls the facade of Perdiswell Hall, a villa of circa 1787-1788 near Worcester by architect George Byfield, a fellow pupil with

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601

S. P. Cockerell in the office of Sir Robert Taylor. If Byfield remained a part of Cockerell’s milieu, Latrobe may have known him. Most suggestive of Latrobe's hand at Frimley are certain clever discontinuities between the new facade and the spaces behind it. Both major rooms

on the south deny the three-bay central outset of the south elevation (fg. 7). The library (on the east) has three southern windows, all of which are genuine; the drawing room, by contrast (on the west), has only one genuine central window—the two side windows are blind but with full sash and glazing. The complexity of this south wall and the artifices used to reconcile the surprising contradictions between plan and facade are reminiscent of Cockerell's office practices, of Latrobe's work within it (see, e.g., the conceptually simi-

lar south facade of Alderbury House), and of Latrobe’ own houses, such as Hammerwood, where he raised such dichotomies between the plan and elevations to an extraordinary level of cleverness and artifice. This type of planning, more than anything else at Frimley, argues for Latrobe's involvement. Several handsome, late-eighteenth-century details remain on Frimley’s interiors, including built-in library bookcases with astragal-panes and two elegant neoclassical mantelpieces in the northern rooms behind the library and

drawing room. In the northeast room (perhaps a combined hall-breakfast parlor), the floor is of stone (now covered by later marble tiles), and beneath it is a masonry-vaulted wine cellar—a feature that agrees with Latrobe's structural preferences. In two or more remodelings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Fig. 6. South facade of Frimley, Surrey, England. Hypothetical reconstruction of its appearance in the 1790s; form of attic story conjectural. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

602

{ | i fd | [ | Ty | Lt JL 1

centuries, Frimley gained extensions to its service wing, an added wing to the

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Kitchen

N

Dining Room? gg

|

|

Fig. 7. Plan of Frimley. Hypothetical reconstruction of its appearance in the 1790s.

(Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

rN

r

|

Office or

Cross Hall

Gentlemen’s Room?

Breakfast Room?

Drawing Room?

0

Hall

30 ft.

Library

Fig. 8. Frimley. Photograph of its current appearance. (Patrick Snadon)

right of the south front, and a second canted bay on the west front that made

a more symmetrical facade with a new entrance door and porch between the canted bays; the whole was then topped with a new balustrade. On the south front, the roof was raised between 3 and 4 feet and the giant blind arch raised into the attic. Within the arch were added a Palladian window in the second story and a bull’s-eye window and decorative swags in the third story.

A shallow pediment at the level of the new roof (where the earlier attic had been) completed the remodeling, giving the resulting south facade a neoGeorgian character difficult to distinguish from the 1790s work (fig. 8). The Frimley of the 1790s was a country house of moderate size where

James Laurell probably entertained a fast set of London friends. With a few bold strokes, his clever architect transformed the existing seventeenth-century house into an arresting neoclassical composition. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, it seems likely that Laurell’s architect was Latrobe.

604

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

1 Fiske Kimball, “Latrobe, Benjamin Henry,’ Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 11. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 20. Kimball's transcription of the now lost Peter Latrobe letter of 24 Sept. 1834 is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fiske Kimball Papers, Series 4, No. 3, Latrobe Research

Materials. 2 Dorothy Stroud to Talbot Hamlin, 14 Feb. and 14 March 1952. Talbot Hamlin Papers, Avery Library, Columbia University, New York. 3 Hamlin, Latrobe, 42-43. 4 “Schedule of title deeds and writings relating to the Frimley Park Estate, 3rd—4th August 1789...

Release between Sir H[enry] Tichborne & Dame Eliz.th Tichborne. ..and James Lawrell...Deed of assignment.” Surrey County Record Office, Kingston-upon-Thames. _ § Architectural Drawings, part 1, 56. 6 Letter, Gordon Wellard, Camberley, Surrey, to Patrick Snadon, 15 July 1995. Laurell died in 1799, and

the estate passed to his son James LaurellJr. 7 Correspondence, 1:84 n. 4; 2:71 n. 6; 3:759 n. 24. Gordon Wellard, The Story of Camberley, 1798-1987 (privately published, Surrey England, 1989), 6-23.

8 Although this facade was remodeled around the early twentieth century, the “ghost” of the lower original blind arch still shows in the stucco. In the attic, the rafters of the earlier roof survive 3 feet,

6 inches beneath the later (early twentieth century) roof. On the interior of the south wall in the attic three areas of brick infill suggest the existence of windows in what we speculate was originally the low attic. 9 The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century additions are evident in the plan outlines of the house shown on Ordnance Survey Maps of Surrey for 1871, 1897, 1915, and 1934; all in the British

Library Map Room, London.

Location. Sussex, east side of A275 midway between East Grinstead and Lewes,

SHEFFIELD PARK

near Sheffield Green (and 5 miles northeast of Uckfield) Clients. John Baker Holroyd, Lord Shefheld, and Maria Josepha Holroyd, his daughter

Miscellaneous Remodelings by Latrobe of an Existing House by James Wyatt

Date. Ca. 1794

Status. Extant; privately owned; divided as condominiums; gardens owned by The National Trust and open to the public While assisting Talbot Hamlin with research for his 1955 book Benjamin Henry Latrobe, English architectural historian Dorothy Stroud discovered a

reference to Latrobe's working at Shefheld Place (now Sheffield Park), Sussex. Lord Shefheld’s daughter, Maria Josepha Holroyd (b. 1771) wrote 10 September 1794 to her friend Ann Firth: What do you think of this house being once more in brick and mortar [i.e., under construction]? The Job now about, however, is I believe a necessary evil, but I hope I have helped to stop another that was certainly not so. They are now pulling down the partition between Papa's bedchamber and the dressing room, which, being built of brick and without support, promised to descend speedily into the inferior regions. The superfluous dilapidation is a Project of a Mr. Latrobe’, an architect employed by Mr. Fuller in the house he is building upon the Forest, and brought

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here by him. It is to open a great window into the dressing room, and the Lord knows what vagaries besides.

John Baker Holroyd, Lord Sheffield (1735-1821), a statesman and notable writer on commerce and agriculture, purchased Shefheld Place (an existing, sixteenth-century courtyard house) in 1769 and commissioned architect James Wyatt (1747-1813) to remodel it. Wyatt, in a first building campaign of about 1775-1777, completed the north and east fronts in an early, rather weak Gothic style. He returned circa 1780-1790 to complete the south front in a stronger and more consistent castellated style.? Wyatt's interiors are only partly Gothic; he inserted a handsome, top-lit staircase within a courtyard of the earlier house and created public rooms on the east front with delicate, Adam-style neoclassical plasterwork. From about 1789 Lord Sheffield had Humphry Repton improve the park; this could be where Repton and Latrobe met.? Miss Holroyd’s letter shows that Latrobe was working at Sheffield Place by 1794 and that Trayton Fuller, for whom Latrobe built the nearby Ashdown, introduced the architect to his client. Latrobe began work for the Fullers in 1792, so his introduction to Shefheld Place occurred sometime between 1792 and 1794. Miss Holroyd’s letter shows impatience at again having the house under construction. Wyatt, sometimes an inspired designer, often exhausted his clients by unreliability and slipshod supervision; Lord Shefheld perhaps retained Latrobe in part to rectify problems left over from Wyatt's campaigns. Lord Sheffield’s bedchamber was the easternmost room save one in the second story on the south front; the adjacent room at the southeast corner was his dressing room. Both rooms are above the drawing room in the first story and the brick “partition” between them was perhaps a wall left over from Wyatt's remodeling hanging unsupported above the drawing room. Although Miss Holroyd’s letter does not specifically connect Latrobe with this project, he may have removed the brick wall and rebuilt it in plaster and lath; it remained until the conversion of the house into condominiums in the early 1990s.4 Lord Sheffield’s dressing room had two smaller windows facing south but was immediately behind a huge, pointed-arched and traceried window on the east front. Although this window is the main feature of the east facade, Wyatt improbably designed it as a sham, blocked from behind. It is probably the window Latrobe proposed opening up, which project Miss

606

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Holroyd seems to have squelched. Indeed, this great window remained blocked until the mid-1970s when the Radfords, who owned the house at that time, opened it. Latrobe probably did more. In 1817, when he submitted designs for the

Baltimore Library Company, he wrote: “Some years ago (about 25) in designing a library for Lord Sheffield, I counted his books, and find by a memorandum attached to the plan, that the average was 12 books to a square foot, from folios to miniature Editions.’ This suggests that Latrobe designed a library at Sheffield Place. The main library is on the first story, the third room from the east on the south front. Its current bookshelves and mantelpiece may date from an approximately 1912 remodeling.” However, Latrobe's “library” may have been the room immediately east of the main library. Miss Holroyd wrote in a letter of 17 June 1794 that “Papa is making great alterations in his room, putting up Bookcases to contain the Law Books and Tracts which will make room for the New Books in the Library. The French Memoires are a Library in themselves, between 60 and 70 volumes.”

It seems that Latrobe ‘tidied up” after James Wyatt at Sheffield Place and made his own modifications to some of its interiors. The fact that Wyatt's neoclassical style resembles Latrobe's early interiors style and several subsequent remodelings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries make Latrobe's work difficult to isolate. What is more sure, however, is that this intimate contact with Shefheld Place influenced Latrobe's later Gothic essays. Latrobe's Gothic buildings generally resembled Wyatt's somewhat thin and symmetrical Gothic, and his Gothic tenant's cottage at Sedgeley in Philadelphia

H

specifically emulated Wyatt’s Sheffield Place gate house. Jane H. Adeane, ed., The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd (Lady Stanley of Alderly) Recorded in Letters of a Hundred Years Ago: From 1776 to 1796 (1896; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897, 2nd ed.), 304-5. Hamlin, Latrobe, 43. Lady Shefheld had died in 1793 leaving Maria Josepha to manage the house for her father in 1793-1794. 2 On Lord Sheffield see Dictionary of National Biography vol. 9 (1917; London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1094-96. On Wyatt at Sheffield Place see Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British

Ww

Architects (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1114. Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 268, 293 n. 237. Edward

Hyams,

Capability Brown and

Humphry Repton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 140. Repton blended his own work at Shefheld Place with an earlier (ca. 1775) landscape by Capability Brown. 4 On the interiors before the 1990s remodeling see Sheffield Park, Sussex (Derby: English Life Publi-

cations, Ltd., 1978), 6-8 (a booklet written during the ownership of Mr. and Mrs. P.J. Radford). Lord Shefheld’s dressing room was called the Willow Room and his adjacent bedroom the Cypress WN

Room in the later twentieth century. Sheffield Park, 6-8, Wyatt may originally have meant the east front to be longer and more symmet-

rical. He perhaps intended the large window as a central element fronting a major room. If the south

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607

front was completed circa 1780-1790 on a truncated plan, it might explain the extreme asymmetry of the east front and the fact that the great window was blind and fronted a mere dressing room.

Some drawings of the house survive (some unsigned, some signed by Wyatt) East Sussex Record Office, Lewes, SAS Drawer E/7: A4504/2; A4504/3. 6 BHL to Robert Goodloe Harper, 4 June 1817 (C3). The “plan” that Latrobe mentions in this letter does not survive. 7 The A. G. Soames family purchased Sheffield Place in 1909 and remodeled several interiors circa 1912. Sheffield Park, 15. 8 Adeane, The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd, 289. Sheffield Park, 8. This room, east of the main library, was in the later twentieth century called the Garden Room. Although remodeled around 1912, the Radfords claimed in the 1970s to have found its original shelves and woodwork in other parts of the house and to have restored them to the room. It is also possible that Latrobe's work may have included the main library or the adjacent room to the west, called the “Study.” The Sheffield Papers at the East Sussex Record Office include a pencil and watercolor perspective drawing of a library, undated and unsigned (F1/23); it does not, however, seem to be in Latrobe's hand nor has it been identified with a specific room at Sheffield Place.

TANTON-HILL (OR-HALL?)

Location. Essex; site unknown

Clients. Charlotte and Mathilda Hoissard Date. 1795 Status. Unknown

Sisters Charlotte and Mathilda Hoissard were stepdaughters of John Silvester, the Latrobe family friend and lawyer. Charlotte eloped and married her family's former groom. The marriage became disastrous and Latrobe and his family helped to extricate her from it; he gave a detailed account of the affair in his journal.! The sisters then decided to live a retired life in the country and consulted Latrobe. He wrote: “About six Months before I left England, I was sent for by the Miss Hoissards to breakfast ... they begged me to go into the country with them for the day. I did so. It was to give my professional opinion upon a house and Estate they meant to buy in Essex... gave them with great pleasure my assistance and altered the house for them into a very snug and rather elegant retreat.’ No one has been able to locate “Tanton-hill.’3 Possibly it was demolished

without record (portions of Essex have disappeared into the expansion of London); or possibly the Hoissards or Mr. Silvester took the estate by lease rather than purchase, leaving no record; or perhaps Latrobe misremembered

or misspelled the name (as he occasionally did with other English place names, writing later from America). 1 Journals, 1:251-71 (6 Aug. 1797). 2 Journals, 1:270. 3 We thank Rita Springsort, archivist at the Essex Country Record Office (ESRO), for assisting us

in a search for Tanton-hill. The ESRO contains no record of Tanton-hill or of the Hoissards. John

608

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Silvester’s name is on the tax lists for Essex, but none of the properties seems to answer the description of Tanton-hill. Through the ESRO and the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments / National Buildings Record (in the Survey of Essex and An Inventory of the Historical Monuments of Essex, 1923), we located some smaller, vernacular houses with similar-sounding place names to Tanton-hill, including two houses at Sandon Hill in Great Waltham Parish; Sandon Hall in Sandon parish (extant); Fanton Hall, North Benfleet Parish (destroyed); and Santon Hall, North Benfleet Parish, Wickford. In no case, however, could we make any connections between these houses and Latrobe, the Hoissards, or John Silvester.

That Latrobe devoted much of his time in Cockerell’s office to houses is proven by designs recorded in his “English notebook.” Some of these houses

Domestic DESIGNS FROM LATROBES

ENG.iisH NoteBook (CA. 1789-1792)

Latrobe designed himself and some he copied from other architects associated with Cockerell. They indicate the character of Latrobe's own designs, the domestic designs emerging from Cockerell’s office, and what caught Latrobe's attention in the work of other architects.

On page five of the notebook is a design that Latrobe copied from another architect in the Cockerell office. The page contains two side-by-side floor

PLAN OF A COTTAGE FOR AMERICA DESIGNED BY Mr. NosBie

plans for the “Ground Story” and “Chamber floor” along with a tiny elevation in a landscape vignette, of a house that Latrobe captioned as the “Plan of a

Cottage designed by Mr. Noble” (fig. 9). On the table of contents page at the front of the notebook Latrobe further identified this design as the “Plan of a

cottage for America:—Mr. Noble for —— [name unclear: appears to the “Linman,’ but could possibly be Lirman(s), Limman(s), or even Simmons].”! The “Mr. Noble” to which Latrobe refers was probably either James Noble (1753-1818) or Charles Noble (ca. 1755-1827), brothers and longtime clerks and assistants in Cockerell’s office.? This design immediately follows a memorandum by Latrobe in the notebook about “Bricks made at Bath by Mr. Upsdell for Mr. Pulteney,’ suggesting that the cottage may have been related

to Cockerell’s wealthy client Sir William Johnstone Pulteney, possibly for a planned development of his extensive American landholdings in western New York state.3 The cottage is a square block, 30 feet to a side, of two stories with a hipped roof from which rises a central chimney. Each elevation is regular, with two double windows below and above, except the entrance facade, where the door balances one of the lower windows. The external appearance of the cottage suggests a bilateral plan of four equal rooms of approximately 15 feet square. Despite its apparent simplicity and symmetry, however, the plan is full of complexity and artifice. The room distribution is, in fact, highly irregular and asymmetrical, with walls bisecting windows and rooms arranged in wholly

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609

0€ o~ Fig. 9.“Plan of a Cottage designed by

unexpected ways. The kitchen, surprisingly, is on the entrance front of the

Mr. Noble.’ Drawing by Latrobe in his English

house, with the parlor behind.* Except for the chimney core at the center of

notebook. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

the plan, there is little relationship between the wall placements of the lower and upper floors. Small as it is, this cottage is in the Cockerell tradition, with a plan and interior volumes like a complicated puzzle within a plain, symmetrical box. So much complexity and artifice on so small a scale indicates both the significance of plan development in the Cockerell office, and the existence of a kind of “culture of cleverness” among Cockerell’s assistants. Although Cockerell'’s own asymmetries and artifices usually served pragmatic goals, such as the accommodation of earlier buildings, the convenient disposition of functions and circulation, and the orientation of principal rooms toward picturesque views, one senses in the “Noble cottage” that cleverness and complexity have become their own ends. Latrobe's copying of this cottage plan into his notebook seems to indicate his admiration of it. It is ironic that he recorded a cottage probably designed for working-class tenants, as his own, later, American clients tended to be at the higher end of the social and economic spectrum.

610

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

On page 6 of Latrobe's notebook is a freehand ink sketch labeled “Plan of a

PLAN OF A CountTRY Housg Mr.B

Country House Mr. B” (fg. 10), The drawing is a plan for the principal story of an unidentified house. It is possible that “Mr. B” was the client.* However, “Mr. B” may refer instead to the designer of the plan. In this case, as with the cottage by Mr. Noble, this plan would be a record sketch by Latrobe of another architect's design. The internal evidence of the notebook seems to

support this hypothesis. On his drawings of Alderbury House (also in the notebook; see Chapter 1), Latrobe listed the client's name first (“Mr. Fort's

House”) and again on the contents page (“Plan of Mr. Fort’s House”). On the sketch of Mr. Noble's American cottage, however, Latrobe listed the architect

last on the drawing (“Plan of a Cottage designed by Mr. Noble”) and also on the contents page (“Plan of a cottage for America—Mr. Noble ...”), The order of listings thus suggests the possibility that “Mr. B” was the designer rather than the client for the house. Further supporting this hypothesis is the presentation of the drawing on the page. While two of the walls of the plan are aligned on two of the longi-

tudinal watermark (‘chain’) lines of the paper, there are no underlying ruled or freehand pencil grid lines on the sheet (as there are in the Alderbury House drawings), which indicate Latrobe's design process, suggesting that Latrobe recorded this sketch from an existing drawing. That Latrobe would list the unknown “Mr. B” by his initial also implies a degree of intimacy greater than might appropriately be felt by an eighteenth-

century architect for his client (“Mr. Fort,’ “Mr. Pulteney,” are other clients named by Latrobe in the notebook), or even for some of his colleagues in Cockerell’s office (“Mr. Noble,” for example). If “Mr. B” was a fellow architect, he and Latrobe were on friendly terms. Possibilities for the identity of “Mr. B”

are architects George Byfield (ca. 1756-1813) and Charles Beazley (ca. 17601829), both pupils of Sir Robert Taylor and thus presumably acquaintances of Cockerell. One or both perhaps frequented Cockerell’s office and may have assisted him on occasion. Byfield designed several country houses in the 1780s and early 1790s with exteriors in the neoclassical “plain style.’® Beazley was near Latrobe's age and had been Taylor's deputy for the work at the Bank of

England until the latter's death in 1788.” Other candidates are James Burton, with whom Cockerell worked on the development of Brunswick Square,

London, part of the Foundling Hospital Estate (see note 9), and Thomas Baldwin (ca. 1750-1820), city architect of Bath and designer of the Bathwick New Town for the Pulteney family for whom S. P. Cockerell acted as surveyor of their London estate. Other pages in Latrobe's notebook show designs for

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61

baths and mention bricks manufactured at Bath for “Mr. Pulteney” (William

Johnstone-Pulteney for whom Baldwin worked). The “Mr. B” plan resembles in size, orientation, and room functions and distribution Latrobe's designs in the notebook for Alderbury House, the Fort family home in Wiltshire. The lateral entry and longitudinal circulation of the “Mr. B” plan also recalls Cockerell’s Daylesford, as do the perpendicular “focal” facades. The “Mr. B” plan suggests a gender division of rooms on either side of the longitudinal circulation core. To the top of the plan are “gen-

tlemen’s rooms’: the library (centrally located and the largest room in the plan) with a waiting room preceding it and what appears to be a “gentleman's Fig. 10. “Plan of a country house—Mr.

B.”

Drawing by Latrobe in his English notebook.

(Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

612

suite” of dressing room, vaulted safe room, and toilet.§ The drawing room anchors the range of rooms below the hall, preceded by the breakfast room, both spaces where the ladies spent significant amounts of time. The dining

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

room, a room of mixed gender except after supper when the gentlemen sometimes remained to drink and smoke while the ladies withdrew, is conveniently close to the kitchen offices. The top-lit, central stair is a device from Taylor's villas, as is the partial circuit of rooms surrounding it. This plan, however, has an orthogonal grid of bearing walls that defines its rooms, and there are none of the complex asymmetries and pinwheeling of rooms in plan, or the artifices in the relationships of plans and elevations, found in the Cockerell office work of this period and in Latrobe's own early plans. The elevations clearly indicate the spatial volumes of the rooms behind, and thus accurately reflect the plan. This is a less subtle piece of planning than typically emerged from Cockerell’s office. But, if Latrobe himself did not design it, this plan caught his eye. Among the most interesting drawings in Latrobe's notebook and, like Alderbury House, probably his own designs, are two pages of drawings that he

HouseEs PROPOSED TO BE BUILT AT LUNBRIDGE WELLS

labeled in his table of contents as the “Plan of Houses proposed to be built at Tunbridge Wells.” On the first page of the notebook is a floor plan, on the second is a garden-front elevation, the latter a surprisingly formal ink and

watercolor wash rendering of near-presentation quality (figs. 11-12). The formality of the elevation drawing in the odd context of the little sketchbook— too formal for a conceptual sketch yet not an appropriate context and at a size too small to present to a client—suggests that this and other of the notebook drawings may have been Latrobe's method for communicating his design ideas to Cockerell for his employer's approval and critique, preliminary to developing them into more finished drawings. The client for the Tunbridge Wells project is not known, but Latrobe had several possible connections to the town, both through Cockerell’s office and on his own.? That the design is by Latrobe is suggested by several of the same factors

discussed in attributing the Alderbury House design to him (see Chapter 1). First, Latrobe did not, in his notebook entry on the project, credit it to

another designer (which he seemed scrupulous in doing in other cases). Second, the major walls of the floor plan correspond with longitudinal water-

mark (‘chain’) lines in the notebook page (again, like the drawings for Alderbury House), which gave Latrobe both guidelines for drawing and a rough scale of approximately 1 inch = 30 feet. Third, he added three ruled pencil lines to the longitudinal watermark lines to center the plan and to define the interior, or courtyard, walls of the service wings. Finally, the plans were inked

(partly freehand and partly with ruled ink lines) over the watermark-and-

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613

Fig. 11. Elevation of “Houses Proposed to be

pencil-line grid, with some pencil tick marks (using the pencil point to posi-

Built at Tunbridge Wells.’ Drawing by Latrobe

tion the rule) and pencil underdrawing. All this suggests, as in the Alderbury

in his English notebook. (Library of Congress,

House drawings, that this page is the record of Latrobe's design process, and

Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

that this plan is his preliminary or conceptual drawing for the project. The elevation drawing is of ruled pencil lines with ruled ink lines over and watercolor wash for color, shading, and landscape. The elevation, with its planar surfaces, canted central bay, and overhanging, bracketed eaves is a simplified version of the austere, astylar, Tuscan style pioneered by Sir Robert Taylor for his villas and a style that Latrobe frequently used on his later, American houses. Latrobe's “Tunbridge Wells” plan suggests either an urban or, more likely, a suburban or “near urban’ site. It can hardly be a plan for a country house. Entrance to the house is made through a courtyard defined by symmetrical service wings and what appears to bea street wall at its lower edge. With the

614

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

‘

“

JSC Gh.

l,

A

2

"6 (0-4 3

ric

SG.6~

0

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Fig, 12. Plan of “Houses Proposed to be Built at Tunbridge Wells.” Drawing by Latrobe

in his

English notebook. (Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Osmun Latrobe Papers)

opposite facade and its canted bay facing a garden or a landscape, the plan is reminiscent of French hétels or of larger London town houses that faced over open lands at the edge of the city. The blank “street wall” at the entrance to the courtyard and the loggia spanning the facade between the service wings, with what appears to be three, central blind arches, would have presented a blank and closed front both to the courtyard and to the street or road; not the character of the court entrance of a country house, or even of most suburban villas. Several elements of the design suggest that these Tunbridge Wells drawings were for a speculative building project. First is the wording in Latrobe's

caption: “Plan of Houses [italics added] proposed to be built at Tunbridge Wells.’ This suggests multiple units, either within a single villa or multiple villas.1° Both possibilities are suggested by the drawings. Typical of compositions from the Cockerell office, this design is symmetrical externally but has unusual internal asymmetries. The plan drawing is a preliminary effort and not fully resolved, but the essentials are shown. The central block of the villa appears to be divisible into two unequal residences: a larger and grander one to the right and a smaller one to the left, with the possibility of interconnection at the door between the stair halls. The wings embracing the entrance courtyard reinforce the suggestion of two establishments, for they contain identical kitchens, stables, and service facilities. Each “residence” in the main block is entered through the arcaded ends

of the transverse loggia along the front facade (the central openings appear to be blind). A nearly central, spine wall bisects the loggia between the entries, visually separating them, and continues inside to divide the stair halls. Both “residences” are entered under reversed staircases that rise to landings above the entrance doors. The unit to the right has three large downstairs rooms, including that in the canted bay—perhaps the drawing room—which is entered asymmetrically, on the axis of the entry door. The unit to the left has a smaller stair and two rooms downstairs; it is possible that the units were meant to be equalized if, on the second story, the large bay room was attached to the left-hand unit. In this case, the drawing or sitting room of the left-hand unit would be in the second story. In the late eighteenth century, Tunbridge Wells became a fashionable spa town, second only to Bath. Given the transient character of the population and society in such a place, it is possible that the design was intended to be flexible so that it could be sold or leased as either one or two units or rented seasonally either as a whole or as separate units.

616

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

HU

TL

In addition to the possibilities for internal division of the villa, it also appears to be planned as one unit in a residential terrace of multiple, identical houses. Suggesting this possibility are first, the thinness of the outer walls of the kitchen-service wings in the plan and their lack of windows, as if this is a shared, or party wall with the next unit; second, the fact that in the plan drawing, both the upper and lower walls of the right-hand service wing

Fig, 13. Reconstructed elevation of Latrobe's “Houses ... at Tunbridge Wells”

hypothetical multiple units. (Patrick Snadon / Thomas Williams)

extend beyond the side (or party) wall, suggesting a continuation of these walls; and third, the fact that, in the elevation drawing, the horizontal lines of the parapet of the right-hand service wing extend into the foliage and beyond the point where they should stop if the villa were a single, freestand-

ing entity. Finally, why would the service wings need parapets at all (in contrast to the pitched and overhanging roof of the villa), if not to serve as a horizontal connector between villa units and to conceal a low-pitched roof that spans doubled service wings rather than a single one? Latrobe seems to have added the foliage to the elevation drawing not only to enframe the villa but to suggest a landscaping scheme that would screen and partially conceal the multiple villa units and their gardens from each other. Latrobe's scheme thus seems to suggest a row of two-story, semidetached

villas (each villa designed for flexible single or double occupancy), linked by one-story, symmetrical, service wings (fig. 13). The effect of this ensemble would be quite different than the usual English residential terrace of the period in which party-wall town houses were concealed either behind uniform facades, as in the Royal Crescent at Bath (1767-1775), by John Wood

Jr,,

or palace-like elevations, as in Portland Place, London (1768-1780), by the Adams. The probable appearance of Latrobe's row, with its higher “villas” and lower, linking wings, was more suburban and villa-like in character, while its “street” facade, with its frontal wall and entrance court, is more urban. The architectural ensemble suggested in Latrobe's drawings was essentially a new interpretation of English terraced housing and an early example of the semidetached villas that proliferated in nineteenth-century

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617

Britain. [he only comparable schemes of the period (recall that Latrobe's notebook designs date between circa 1789 and 1792) are the nearly contemporary crescents of houses in south London by architect Michael Searles (1751-1813), including the Paragon Crescent, Blackheath (ca. 1793-

1807).1? Searles took the formula of the English residential crescent, with its uniform cornice line and repetitious fronts, and recomposed it using semidetached villas of two or three stories, linked by one-story colonnades that served as entrances or minor rooms. The picturesque, rising and falling compositions of Searles’ crescents and of Latrobe's proposed Tunbridge Wells scheme would have shared similar silhouettes, but there the relationship ends. The crescent is an essentially urban form that focuses attention on an entrance into its concave front while concealing its services behind. Latrobe's project, by contrast, would have created an orthogonal row of linked villas with blank-walled entrances to the road, and with their service wings defining courtyards on the entrance front, while each over-

looked a common, but essentially private, landscape to the rear through large windows and canted bays, like suburban villas or country houses. While the typical terrace was “suburban” to the front and “urban’ to the rear, Latrobes Tunbridge Wells scheme would have been “urban” to the front and “suburban” to the rear. Latrobe's proposal, had it been built, would have been unprecedented in English domestic architecture. His scheme was predictive but isolated. Even in the nineteenth century, when similar terraces of semidetached villas proliferated in suburban London and elsewhere, no other architect ever recreated Latrobe's unique solution.!? That the young Latrobe could “toss off” an idea so new, so innovative, and so predictive of the general direction of suburban

residential development in nineteenth-century England seems amazing, The combination of forms and the unique planning shows what he had inherited from Taylor and Cockerell and how, early in his career, he could synthesize and invent entirely new domestic planning ideas. Latrobe never again received a commission that would allow him to design multiple-unit housing of this innovative type. Nonetheless, echoes of this “Tunbridge Wells” plan appear in his later, freestanding houses. The central spine wall reappeared at Alderbury House and Hammerwood. The Pennock house in Richmond, with its reversed stair in the entryway and its bow-fronted drawing room beyond, resembled the larger, right-hand unit of the “Tunbridge Wells” villa. And Adena, in Ohio, replicated the entire plan parti of the Tunbridge Wells design, with a frontal courtyard defined by

618

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

service wings, a transverse entrance loggia across the front facade of the cen-

H

tral block, and the tripartite plan with its combined central-entrance stair hall. Cohen and Brownell interpret this name as “Linman’ and suggest a possible connection with the Lan-

IS)

man family of Connecticut (Architectural Drawings, part 2, 69). Colvin (A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 3rd ed., 708) discusses Charles Noble under the entry on James Noble (ca. 1795-1875). James was the son of George Noble and the nephew of Charles Noble; George and Charles Noble must therefore have been brothers. See also David Watkin, The

Ww

Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell, 41-42. William Johnstone-Pulteney, circa 1788-1790, purchased a vast tract of land in the United States, between one and a half and two million acres, part of the “Pulteney Purchase,’ then in western Massachusetts, now western New York state. The London proprietors entrusted the development of the Pulteney lands to Captain Charles Williamson, who established a town named Bath, just south of Jeuka Lake, New York, laid out with two squares connected by a short, wide street—a small piece of Georgian town planning in frontier America. Bath was for a time in the 1790s a hotbed of land

speculation and building development. See John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City

aN

Planning In the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 350-51; (Architectural

Drawings, Part 1, 69). It is possible that the Cockerell office was involved in some of this development. Frontal kitchens were unusual in any domestic planning of the period, but one appeared in Cockerell’s Admiralty House, London, where the kitchen was in a front courtyard separated from the street by a wall. Latrobe planned the kitchen of Decatur House, Washington, D.C., in a front, ground-

story room. nn

Cohen and Brownell suggest this (Architectural Drawings, part 1, 75-77): On George Byfield, see Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary, 202-3, Binney, Sir Robert Taylor, 27. One of Byfield’s neoclassical houses of this period was Craycombe House, Worcestershire, circa 1791, for George Perrott of the East India Company. See Francis Brett Young, “Craycombe House, Worcestershire,’

N) oo

Similar “gentleman’s suites” are found in Cockerell’s Middleton Hall, Wales, and in Latrobe / Cock-

\O

Country Life 138 (6 July 1940): 10-14. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary, 114-15. Binney, Sir Robert Taylor, 20, 27, 79, 81, 87, 93, 97:

There are at least two possible Tunbridge Wells connections through the Cockerell office. First, mem-

erell’s Alderbury House, Wiltshire (see Chapter 1). bers of the Pulteney family spent much time in Tunbridge Wells and may have had properties and development interests there as they did in Bath. Second, James Burton, a London builder (and father of architect Decimus Burton), who worked with Cockerell in the 1780s—1790s on the development of houses in Brunswick Square, part of the Foundling Hospital Estate in London for which Cockerell was surveyor, eventually built a large housing development at Tunbridge Wells (ca. 1802~1807).

It is possible that Burton contemplated earlier developments there (Summerson, Georgian London, 154). Latrobe perhaps had Tunbridge Wells connections outside the Cockerell office. His clients in Sussex, such as the Sperlings, the Fullers, and the Holroyds, were close by the fashionable spa town

and may have had property dealings there or have introduced Latrobe to other clients there. Finally, J. T. Groves, a surveyor-architect with whom Latrobe worked on the London police offices, eventually built baths at Tunbridge Wells, about 1804 (Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary, 434; and Correspondence, 1:33). IO

Cohen and Brownell interpret “Houses” as an error on Latrobe's part for “House” (Architectural Drawings, part 1, 70-73).

II

Searles evidently invented this type of “semi-detached villa crescent.’ He designed similar crescents earlier than the Paragon at Blackheath, such as Prince’s Place, Kennington Park Road, London, 17871878; the Paragon, New Kent Road, London, 1789-1790; and Gloucester Circus, Greenwich, 17901793. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary, 856-57.

I2

On the nineteenth-century development of the terraced house and the semidetached villa, see Stefan Muthasius,

The English Terraced House (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); John

Summerson, “The London Suburban Villa, 1850-1880,’ in The Unromantic Castle, 217-34.

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619

Virginia (Arrived March 1796) PENNOcK

HousE

Chapter 4

Location. Formerly located on the north side of Main Street between the Customs House and Market Square in Norfolk, Virginia Client. Captain William Pennock Builders. Mr. Gracie and Mr. Hill, joiners; cornices by Mr. Furgeson Date. 1796

Status. Demolished, possibly destroyed by fire in the early nineteenth century Based on English and French models. A commission obtained through a “wager, where Latrobe explored “scenery” and proposed an interior “system” of ornamentation. MILL HILL Chapter 4

Location. Unknown, possibly intended for a site in or near Richmond, Virginia Date. 1796

Status. Unbuilt With this very large, probably hypothetical house project based on English Palladian models, Latrobe began to examine the social and physical context in Virginia. RoTUNDA-PLAN Housg Chapter 4

Location. Unknown, probably did not progress beyond the project stage, perhaps a hypothetical project Dates. Ca. 1796-1797

Status. Unbuilt Latrobe's first consideration of the domed rotunda for an American house; it was to be completely vaulted, in masonry. TayLog Houses Chapter 4

Location. Possibly intended for a specific site, perhaps in Washington, D.C.

Clients. John and Ann Tayloe Dates. Ca. 1796-1797 Status. Unbuilt A tribune house with corner pavilions anda picturesque rear garden and with rooms distributed according to Latrobe's theories of “rational house’ design. His detailed section drawings illustrate his systematic design of interiors.

620

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Location. Unknown, probably a hypothetical project

‘TEMPLE-Form Housg

Dates. Ca. 1796-1799

Chapter 4

Status. Unbuilt A wooden garden folly with multiple room shapes defined by thin-wall poché that creates both orthogonal and diagonal views and, therefore, interior scenety.

Location. Unknown, probably a hypothetical project

ASYMMETRICAL HousE

Date. Ca. 1797

Chapter 4

Status. Unbuilt A modest picturesque building with two projecting bays as part of a pinwheel plan. Location. James City County, Virginia on Route 5 west of Jamestown

GREEN SPRING

Client. William Ludwell Lee

Chapter 4

Date. 1797

Status. Unbuilt A renovation project that called on Latrobe's architectural and engineering ingenuity.

Location. Remains now on the property of the Ethyl Corporation, south of

KEEPERS House,

the Downtown Expressway (1-95), at the foot of South Foushee Street in

VIRGINIA STATE PENITENTIARY

Richmond, Virginia

Chapter 4

Client. James Wood, Governor of Virginia Dates. 1797; constructed in 1797-1800 Status. Demolished in 1928; only the foundation walls remain and archaeological work has been carried out on the site

A first Latrobe critique of the American central-hall plan. Location. Unknown

Mayo

House!

Clients. John and Abigail Mayo Dates. Ca. 1797-1798

H

Status. Probably never built; possibly intended for a site in Richmond, Virginia An inscription on the back of Latrobe's plan for the Shockoe Church reads “Put 10 Blank Leaves after this For John Mayos house[,] Volney’s philosophieré [,] My own house [,] and sketches.”

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621

VOoLNEY HousE Chapter 4

Location. Possibly intended for a site in or near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Client. Constantin Francois de Chasse-boeuf, comte de Volney Date. 1798

Status. Unbuilt

It seems likely that Latrobe met Constantin-Francgois de Chasse-boeuf, comte de Volney, through his friend Giambattista Scandella.! Volney had apparently sent Latrobe an “elegant note” containing a “neat and well turned explanation of all his wants in his Castle in the air.’ From Richmond, Latrobe wrote to Scandella in Philadelphia that he was sending him a roll of drawings, none of which have been found, that apparently included a proposal for a house for Volney.? Latrobe observed that Mr. Volney is too much a Philosopher, I fear, for the workmen of Philadelphia. I see exactly what he wants; but he would find a thousand prejudices to encounter before he could persuade them to deviate so far from all established sizes, proportions and forms, as to put together the parts of his little hermitage so as to make it habitable. His chimney, for instance, would occupy a space of at least 4 feet by 8 in order to contain, upon the usual mode of construction, the two fireplaces in the Chambers. I have therefore taken the liberty to give him an entirely new plan,

in which the [torn] he dislikes is avoided and much expence in general is saved. There is nothing indeed, I so much desire as to make one of the gargons philosophes, who live so harmoniously together under your roof et qui samusent a batir des chateaux en Espagne.

The house Volney requested was to have two parlors, each 12 feet wide and 14 feet long, on the first floor, and several bedchambers, each with a small adjoining room and some closets, on the second floor.* Latrobe wrote to Scandella “that the convenience of his arrangements exceeds their practicality” and that such a two-story distribution was “not easy to contrive.’> Such a plan called for French dégagement as exhibited in the many cleverly planned, lateeighteenth-century Parisian hétel designs. Atop the two parlors, the several smaller chambers would have required partitions without bearing walls directly below them (as in the chamber story of the Liston House; see Chap-

ter 4), and the introduction of closets would have required an intricacy of poché so that they did not protrude into the chambers. Though appearing selfeffacing in his comments, Latrobe was quite aware of the sophisticated compositional techniques involved and quite capable of producing such a design.° He corresponded with Volney as late as 30 April 1798.7 However, amid heightening tensions between the United States and France, the Federalists

622

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

passed alien and sedition laws aimed at, among others, French immigrants.® These actions led Volney to comment that “an epidemic of animosity was raised against the French.’® Perhaps because of this hostile climate, he returned to France in the spring of 1798, and nothing more seems to have come of the project. 1 Journals, 2:329 n. 6. 2 BHL to Scandella, 22 Feb. 1798. 3 BHL to Scandella, 22 Feb. 1798. Constantin-Frangois de Chasse-boeuf, comte de Volney, historian

and professor of history at the Ecole Normale in Paris, had written Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur le révolutions des empires (1791) and, on his return to France, would write Tableau du climat du sol des Etats-

Unis dAmérique (1803). Volney was a confidant of Benjamin Franklin in Paris but a critic of John Adams's A Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States and an antagonist of Joseph Priestly (Biographie Universelle Ancienne et Moderne, vol. xt1v [Paris: Chez Madame C. Desplaces, 1854], 64-72).

Latrobe commented on Volney’s criticism of Priestly in his journal (Journals, 2:381-82). 4 Latrobe wrote in French: “plusieurs chambres, avec un pitit cabinet a chaque chambre, et des armoires dans les murs.” 5 22 Feb. 1798.

6 Cohen and Brownell argue that the temple-form house may have been intended for Volney (Architectural Drawings, part 1, 81,170), but the connection seems tenuous. 7 Journals, 2:381. 8 Latrobe commented in his journal about the so-called XYZ affair, involving, among other things, an

attempt by French officials to solicit a bribe from American diplomatic envoys (Journals, 2:369, 432). 9 Biographie Universelle Ancienne et Moderne, 68.

Location. Formerly stood on Gamble’s Hill, south of Byrd Street and east of

Harvig Housg

3rd Street in Richmond, Virginia

Chapter 4

Clients. John and Margaret Harvie Date. 1798

Status. Demolished in 1889 A Palladian five-part plan with a rational-house distribution of rooms in the

main block. Location. Unknown

CENTRAL-DINING-Room

Client. Unknown; possibly associated with Mill hill Date. 1799 (?)

Chapter 4

Housg

Status. Unbuilt The plan of the principal story of this unidentified house remains, dated April 1799 (fig. 14), as does a related but undated and unfinished floor plan for a chamber story. The widths of its walls suggest that they were all to be of masonry. Although many of its elements are unresolved, it does share several features with Latrobe's other Virginia houses of the period. Like Mill

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623

Fig. 14. Central Dining Room House, 1799.

Latrobe's principal-story plan. (Courtesy of the Historical and Interpretive Collection of the Franklin Institute)

2

Ee

head aig 4 Minrt

TYG r

hill, it includes two projecting bays on the entry front; a vestibule composed of three, groin-vaulted squares; and a dining room encircled by other rooms and a loggia and lit by a huge tripartite window.! Like the rotunda-plan house, it includes a denied central-entry axis. Its most distinctive feature, the circular stair in a projecting bay, is a unique one in Latrobe's work. More

common is his use of arches to subdivide major spaces, in this case the dining room and drawing room. In the basilican-form drawing room, with its four radically different elevations, he used this device twice, once to screen the projecting rectilinear bay and once to define the apse of the basilica. It is also notable that he proposed a series of sham windows in the right-side elevation in order to produce a symmetrical composition but chose to make

H

all four of the elevations dissimilar, a practice familiar in S. P. Cockerell’s remodeling projects. In the Architectural Drawings (part 1, 94-98), Cohen and Brownell argue that this drawing and the related, unfinished chamber-story plan, both now in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, were part

of Latrobe's design process for Mill hill. They also discuss its many erasures and overdrawings. In addition, they discuss, in the context of Mill hill, the small sketches from Latrobe's sketchbook v1 treated below in the section on Clifton. Their argument depends, however, on largely discounting

Latrobe's annotated dates for his drawings and sketches.

624

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

—

Philadelphia (arrived December 1798) Location. Formerly stood in Fairmount Park south of West Girard Avenue,

SEDGELEY

between Poplar Drive and Sedgeley Drive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Client. William Cramond

Chapter 5

Date. Ca.1799

Builder. Mr. Shaw, carpenter Status. House demolished in 1857; only the tenant's house remains A very early Gothic Revival villa in a picturesque context, possibly the first instance where Latrobe used a compact circular entry hall leading diagonally via “scenery” to the principal rooms,

Location. Formerly stood on the north side of Walnut Street from Seventh to Eighth streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SANSOMS Row!

Client. William Sansom Dates. Ca. 1799-1800

HK

Status. Demolished See Correspondence, 3:519.

Location. Unknown, possibly intended for a site near Edinburgh, Scotland

LisTON

Clients. Robert and Henrietta Liston Date. 1800

Chapter 5

HousgE

Status. Unbuilt A multistory vaulted residence inside a masonry cylinder.

Location. Bladensburg, Maryland, just off of route 1, the old BaltimoreWashington Turnpike

RIVERSDALE Chapter 5

Clients. Henri Joseph Stier and Marie Louise Stier and George Calvert and Rosalie (Stier) Calvert Dates. 1300-1801 (for Latrobe's principal involvement) Status. Extant; restored; owned by the Prince George's County Parks and Recreation Foundation and open to the public Latrobe provided a plan with rotunda and wings for a European client who owned an extraordinary collection of paintings. It is unclear how much his

proposal influenced the house's final form.

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625

Location. Near present-day Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Morris House!

Clients. Benjamin Wistar Wells and Mary Wells Morris Date. Before ca. 1803, possibly as early as 1799

H

Status. Unknown See Architectural Drawings, part 1, 181.

Location. Near present-day Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Client. Gideon Hill Wells

WELLS House!

H

Date. Before ca. 1803, possibly as early as 1799 Status. Unknown See Architectural Drawings, part 1, 181.

Location. Formerly stood at the corner of East Grace and 6th streets (600 East Grace Street) in Richmond, Virginia Clients. Dr. James McClurg and Elizabeth McClurg Dates. Ca. 1804 (constructed in ca. 1807?)

McCriure Houses

Status. Demolished in 1894 The only reference to a house for Dr. James McClurg, father-in-law of John

Wickham (see the Wickham House entry), is a letter from Latrobe dated 16 April 1804 asking for site dimensions and topographic data and promising a design within days. In Old Richmond Neighborhoods (1941), Mary Wingfield Scott included a photograph of the house that she identified as Dr. McClurg’s and that she says was built in 1807 at the corner of Grace and 6th streets and demolished in 1894. Working only from this photograph, Talbot Hamlin rationalized that the “beauty of the proportions suggests the possibility... {that it was designed by Latrobe].”! The detailing, while elegant, lacks Latrobe's preferred simplicity, but this could be the result of localbuilder practices. The old-fashioned five-bay front would also seem to rule out Latrobe's involvement, although Adena does have one facade with five bays on the ground story. I

626

Hamlin, Latrobe, 110-11.

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Location. West end of Allen Avenue, off Route 104 in Chillicothe, Ohio Clients. Senator Thomas Worthington and Eleanor Worthington Builders. George McCormick and Conrad Christman, carpenters; Mr. Eng-

ADENA

Chapter 5

lish, plasterer Dates. Designed in 1805; constructed in 1806 Status. Extant; restored in 1946-1953 and in 1999-2003; owned by the state of Ohio and open to the public A countryseat for an important political leader subtly planned according to Latrobe's rational-house principles.

Location. Formerly stood at the southeast corner of 7th and Chestnut streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Clients. William and Mary Waln Builders. Mr. Gray, contractor; George Bridport, decorative painter

WALN

Housk

Chapter 5

Dates. designed in 1805-1806; constructed in 1807-1808 Status. Demolished in ca. 1848 A further development of Latrobe's rational house with scenery. In one unbuilt proposal, a ground-story service floor with an interior stair allowed for movement through scenery to a principal story above. In the design as built, a central stair hall likely led on the diagonal to two south-facing principal rooms.

Location. Formerly stood at the southeast corner of 9th and Market streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Client. Thomas Goodwin Builders. Mr. Robinson; Mr. Mitchell, carpenter; and Mr. Walters, mason

GoopwINn HousE

Date. 1806 Status. Substantially modified or demolished by 1873 Latrobe designed a house for Thomas Goodwin quite rapidly during the summer of 1806. It is the only known occasion where he constructed a residence that was entirely vaulted. It was also one of the few instances where he did all of the construction supervision and measured virtually all of the work himself.1 He identified the mason as Mr. Walters and the carpenter

who erected the centering as Jacob Mitchell and later remembered the cost as $6,000, a remarkably low-figure in a city where Latrobe reckoned a comfortable house to cost six dollars per square foot.” Only one none-too-

Catalogue

627

Fig. 15. Goodwin House, Philadelphia, 1806. Photograph looking down Ninth Street from Market Street, with a portion of the Goodwin House visible on the left.

(Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

enlightening 1859 photograph remains to show the building's form, and it reveals only a part of the front facade that has no particularly distinctive fea-

tures except for a second-story, flat-headed tripartite window (fig. 15). The building was substantially modified or replaced by 1873.4 1 BHL to Samuel Ewing, 30 May 1811 (C3). 2 BHL to Goodwin, 13 Aug. 1806, and BHL to Goodwin, 23 Aug, 1806, and BHL to Ewing, 30 May

r8ur (G3). 3 This photograph is found in the Perkins Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Vol. 25 (oth S&), 41, 4 Correspondence, 3: 100 n. 3.

Craic House CALLED ANDALUSIA Chapter 5

Location. West side of the Delaware River, 13 miles east of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Clients. John and Margaret Craig Dates. Designed in 1807; constructed in 1807-1808 Status. Extant; remodeled for Nicholas Biddle by T. U. Walter in 1835-1836; privately owned A remodeling carried out according to Latrobe's rational-house principles. However, his work has been subsumed by T. U. Walter's aggressive Greek Revival second remodeling.

628

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Location. Formerly stood at the southwest corner of Walnut and 7th streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Meany Houses

Client. Captain John Meany Date. 1807

Status. Demolished No drawings remain for this house, and Latrobe considered the commission so unsuccessful that he wished to remove himself and Robert Mills, who supervised construction, from any responsibility for it. In 1807, ship captain

and merchant John Meany hired Latrobe to design his residence at the southwest corner of Walnut and 7th streets in Philadelphia. Work was

underway by July of that year and was well along by the following December. Exasperated in August, Latrobe wrote to Mills that “I am a little sick of Captn Meany. I shall never get the least credit for his house, for the plan adopted by him forbid that; and therefore I am wholly indifferent about the detail.”! Being “indifferent,” Latrobe seems to have given Mills considerable discretion in prescribing detailing but often found fault with his decisions.” By 23 December 1807, Latrobe, experiencing his all-too-common cash-flow problems, sought payment of $100 for services rendered. Acknowledging that Meany had the right to make unilateral changes, Latrobe still expressed regret for those “very frequent alterations” that Meany had taken upon himself to make. Latrobe, in addition to having a wounded ego, felt his profes-

sional reputation to be at risk and wrote to Meany that “I whom [sic] am the only person likely to suffer by your alterations, at best to be humiliated and mortified by them, and not to pretend to dispute the point. But you will have no idea of the expense you are incurring and will not find it out ‘til your work is measured and valued.”3 Latrobe concluded in frustration that “I am as certain that a house built entirely by my design and contrary to your wishes would please you when finished better than your own plan.” The form of the Meany House as constructed was recorded in an 1868

watercolor by E. H. Klemroth (fig. 16). Seen from the southeast, the building depicted here certainly has its ambiguities, particularly the huge gable facing the street, with circular and semicircular windows, so unlike any of Latrobe's other residences. A close consideration of the building's form in light of Latrobe's communications with Mills does allow for some tentative conclusions to be reached. A faceted, projecting bay at the south facade was reflected

on the north by a “bow.’> These-extensions would seem to suggest principal rooms facing both north and south, not Latrobe's desired distribution. What

Catalogue

629

then of the wide east facade, with its many openings, including a major entry? The Venetian windows with concentric, semicircular heads are comparable to the main-block and dependency windows on the ground story of the Waln House's front facade. In fact, for the Meany House windows, Latrobe wrote to Mills that “Mr. Waln’s window will be your best guide.’¢ Latrobe mentioned niches for statues, which, if they were incorporated, would likely have appeared on the north facade.” He sketched stone window lintels like those seen in the watercolor: square corner blocks with rosettes extending laterally beyond plain heads.* However, he scorned stone carving like wooden “cabinetwork,” which he dismissed as “incongruous with good taste’; presumably this carving was also intended for the north facade, as were

Fig. 16. Meany House, Philadelphia, 1807. 1868 watercolor view. (Free Library of Philadelphia)

630

“paterns ... over the pilasters.’? He also discouraged the use of recessed “pannels,’ which Meany wanted placed in the “frieze,” and he railed against

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Meany’s decision to have black marble used for the water table.1° These changes make it clear why Latrobe wished to remove himself from out the project." Still, if one assumes that the watercolorist placed board bays in the east facade too close to the corners, it seems not that Latrobe was working here with a plan similar to the Markoe

carrying the outunlikely House,

HY DY

BHL to Meany, 23 Dec. 1807. BHL to Mills, 23 July 1807 (C2).

H H

oR Oo

Oo

WON

DA

BP

BHL to Meany, 23 Dec. 1807.

HN

BHL to Mills, 3 Aug 1807. BHL to Mills, 6 July, 23 July (C2), 28 July, 11 Aug., 3 Sept., and 20 Sept. 1807 (C2).

W

which had a transverse-gable roof in its first iteration.

BHL to Mills, 28 July 1807. BHL to Mills, 28 July 1807. BHL to Mills, 11 Aug. 1807. BHL to Mills, 5 Aug. 1807. BHL to Mills, 6 July and 5 Aug. and 23 Dec. 1807. BHL to Meany, 23 Dec. 1807.

Location. Formerly stood at the center of the block bounded by Chestnut,

HARRISON STABLE

Walnut, 6th, and 7th streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Client. George Harrison Date. 1807

Status. Demolished

©

Nothing remains of the Sansom Street stable that Latrobe designed for Navy agent George Harrison and built behind his home on Chestnut Street. The stable was probably destroyed with the house in the 1850s. It can be compared to other stables that Latrobe designed in both England and America, those at Ashdown, the John Tayloe House, and the Van Ness House. While no drawings remain, Latrobe prescribed the length but not the depth dimensions as follows: 9-inch wall, 4-foot harness room, 19-foot coach house; 9-inch wall,.14-foot stable; and 9-inch wall. His characterization of the scheme as an “abbey glimmering through the foliage” and his

description of its construction as “plain brick walling and all its finery. . . [in] plaister and paint” suggests Gothic fenestration and ornamentation.? This conclusion is reinforced by Latrobe's instructions to Robert Mills, who was supervising construction, regarding the proper form for a three-part Tudorarched opening.? I

Correspondence, 2:457 n. 4.

2

BHL to Harrison, 25 July 1807.

3 BHL to Mills, 5 Aug. 1807.

Catalogue

631

Markog

Housg

Location. Formerly stood on Chestnut Street, between oth and oth streets in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Clients. John and Mehitabel Markoe Builders. John Haydock, James Traquair, and Robert Vickers, stonemasons and Joseph Worrell and Isaac Forsythe, carpenters Dates. Designed in 1807-1808; constructed in 1809-1811

Status. Demolished in the 1880s A rational-house distribution through which Latrobe threaded an undulating entry sequence between complex room shapes on the ground / principal story.

Washington, D.C. (Arrived June 1807) PRESIDENTS Housg Chapter 6

Location. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

Clients. President Thomas Jefferson and President James Madison and Dolley Madison Builders. Many, including decorative painter George Bridport, furniture mak-

ers Hugh and John Findlay, and seamstress Mary Sweeny Dates. 1803-1808 for Jefferson, with interiors work and furnishings in 1809 for the Madisons Status. Extant; interior renovated in 1902; virtually all interior fabric removed and interior rebuilt in 1940s—early 1950s; portions open to the public Repairs and renovations and a proposed radical remodeling for Thomas

Jefferson that would have made James Hoban’s borrowed Palladian design into a rational house with interior scenery. The interiors and furnishings

Latrobe designed for the Madisons were burned by the British in 1814. GOLDSBOROUGH

HousE

CALLED MyrtriLe BANK

Location. Near the Wye River in Talbot County, Maryland Clients. Charles and Sarah Goldsborough Date. 1807 Status. Unknown

In 1807, Latrobe assisted chief clerk to the Secretary of the Navy Charles Goldsborough in the “re edification” of his house, meaning additions and modifications to an existing structure. Talbot Hamlin believed this house to be “Myrtle Bank, near the Wye River in Talbot County, Maryland.”! Latrobe sought to have Mr. Grimes, a carpenter whose work on the Chesapeake and

632

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Delaware Canal he admired, undertake the work. He wrote to Goldsborough

asking for an “exact plan of your walls (ground plan and elevation)” and promised him “clear and useful advice” even though he apparently never vis-

La

ited the site. No drawings are known to remain for this project. Correspondence, 2:748 n. 5; Hamlin, Latrobe, 340; and BHL to Goldsborough, 18 March 1807.

Location. Navy Yard located between M Street and the Anacostia River and east of 6th Street

COoOMMANDANTS House, WASHINGTON, D.C., Navy Yarp

Client. Captain Thomas Tingey, Superintendent of the Navy Yard Date. 1807

Status. Probably never built The extent of Benjamin Latrobes work on a commandant’s house for the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard is not clear. Talbot Hamlin wrote: “The old commandant’s house was close to the north boundary and east of the entrance; a second good house, also built before Latrobe's appointment, existed not far away on the eastern lot line. To these the architect planned to add another and better for the commandant west of the entrance, but this was not built until 1807.”! He was correct about the location of the “old commandant’s house” and about Latrobe's intention to build a new one but incorrect in saying that Latrobe actually “built” a new commandant’s house “west” of the entrance.

In January 1800, Navy Captain Thomas Tingey was ordered to proceed to the Federal City to oversee planning and construction of the Navy Yard.? A year and a half later, Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith instructed Tingey, by then designated the Superintendent of the Navy Yard, to contract with builders William Lovering and William Dyer to build a house for him-

self.3 Apparently this structure was not built, because in April 1803, Joseph Cassin replaced Tingey as superintendent,‘ and in March of the following year Secretary Smith instructed Cassin to have plans prepared for a brick house for himself, which he did.* Seven months later Tingey returned to become commandant but Cassin remained at the yard as his second-incommand and continued to live in the house he had built.® Latrobe began work at the Navy Yard in 1802.” His sketch of the yard

in a letter of 1 July 1805 (fig. 17) shows the brick house built by Cassin, labeled as the house of “Capt Cassin,” and the main gate to the northwest.® Latrobe proposed that a new commandant’s house be placed “In the Center of the Upper part of the Yard,” presumably directly south of the gate and

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633

suggested that if a third house were needed it could be located“ West of the principal Gate.’® However, while Secretary Smith decided to postpone building a new commandant's house, Latrobe continued at least to think about the project; he wrote to Tingey: “In the meantime I have orders to prepare a design which will be similar to that I sketched in Washington.”!° In the following September, Latrobe amplified this intention, writing to Tingey that “I shall bestow special pains on the plan of your house.”!! While Tingey continued to ask that a new commandant’s house be built, nothing seems to have come of his efforts, however, and by 1812, all attempts to erect a new structure seem to have been abandoned; Cassin was transferred; and Tingey moved into the house Cassin had built, where he remained until his death in 1829.!2 In February 1813, Latrobe reported to the Secretary of the Navy, now

William Jones, that “All the buildings in the Navy Yard, excepting the house of the Commandant, and the stores on the East side of the Yard have been

to the Yard was built, and a considerable portion of it remains.

eS

b

HH

gue

ate

a! Qerert

built from my designs and under my direction.’13 While no drawings by Latrobe of a commandant’s house have been found, his design for a gateway Hamlin, Latrobe, 297. Benjamin Stoddert to Tingey, 22 Jan. 1800, Letters to Officers, Ships of War (vol. 3, Oct. 23,1799 to May 21,1800), Record Group 45, National Archives; and Taylor Peck, Round-Shot to Rockets: A History of

the Washington Navy Yard and U.S. Naval Gun Factory (Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1949), 11. Also see Correspondence, 1:243 n. 6. 3 Robert Smith to Tingey, 10 Oct. 1801; and Smith to Tingey, 23 Oct. 1801, both in General Letter Book

Fig. 17. Washington, D.C. Navy Yard.

Latrobe's sketch site plan. (Latrobe's Letterbooks, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

(vol. 5, Sept. 21, 1801 to Aug, 31, 1802), Record Group 45, National Archives. 4 Robert Smith to Tingey, 7 April 1803, General Letter Book (vol. 6, Sep. 1, 1802 to Nov. 28, 1803) and Smith to Cassin, 7 April 1803, Letters to Officers, Ships of War (vol. 6, 1802-1805), both in Record Group 45, National Archives.

5 Robert Smith to Cassin, 28 March 1804, Letters to Officers, Ships of War (vol. 6, 1802-1805), Record Group 45, National Archives. 6 “History of the Washington Navy-Yard,’ U.S. Congress, Senate, Executive Document No, 22, sist Cong,, 1st Sess., 1889-1890, 28-30. 7 Correspondence, 3:426 n. 2.

8 1 July 1805, BHL to Shadrach Davis. 9 BHL to Tingey, 18 May 1805 (C2). 10 BHL to Tingey, 1 July 1805, 11 BHL to Tingey, 15 Sept. 1805. 12 Tingey to Robert Smith, 7 Feb. 1807, Captain’s Letters, 1805-1814, vol. 1 (1807), Record Group 45, Na-

tional Archives; and Secretary of the Navy to Cassin, 17 July 1812, Letters to Comandants (vol. 1, Jan. 1808 to March 1814), Record Group 45, National Archives and “History of the Washington NavyYard,’ 65, 67. 13 BHL to William Jones,

634

2 Feb. 1813 (C3).

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Location. New York City Clients. Dr. David Hosack and Catharine Hosack

Hosackx Housz!

Date. 1807

HW

Status. Probably never built See BHL to Mts. Stuart, 7 Dec. 1807; and Correspondence, 2:652, 655 n.14; and Architectural Drawings, pakt 2, 333:

Location. Formerly stood at the southeast corner of 14th Street and Apricot Alley in Richmond, Virginia

CLIETON

Client. Benjamin James Harris Dates. 1807-1808

Status. Demolished in 1903 To some extent, the fate of Clifton paralleled that of the Markoe House in its eventual transformation from private to public use. It appears that client

Benjamin James Harris chose to build only the southerly rooms of the central block of the complex that Latrobe designed for him in ca. 1807-1808.1 Within these limits Harris erected three stories and a cellar instead of two stories, as Latrobe had prescribed, and, in doing so, fashioned an anachro-

nistic James River plantation house detailed with the kind of locally inspired

Fig. 18. Clifton after its conversion to a hotel.

(Richmond Scenes in ’62, 1887-1888)

frippery that Latrobe deplored. If he knew of it, Latrobe never chose to comment in his remaining correspondence on the fate that befell his creation. By the late 1800s, this parody suffered the indignities of conversion into a hotel, the Clifton House, and the lowering of the streets around it such that

its original entry doors opened into midair (fig. 18). Scholars have noted the similarity of Latrobe's perspective drawing for

Clifton (fig. 19) to the chamber-story plan signed by draftsman Adam Traquair, which made its way to the Stier family, builders of Riversdale. They have speculated that, having made contact with Harris in Richmond, when Harris had been subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Aaron Burr during the summer of 1807, Latrobe may have adapted the Riversdale scheme or another like it to a new site.? One wonders whether it is coincidental that only a perspective and a site

plan (fig. 20) remain for Clifton, the two drawing types that most satisfactorily describe a building's context. The perspective is dramatic and highly evocative, with trees in the foreground and southeast Richmond and the

James River in the background. The site plan is Latrobe's most extensive drawing of its type and documents his vision for a picturesque landscape ona large scale. If we assume the

Catalogue

635

Fig. 19, Clifton, Richmond, Virginia,

width of the house with its wings to be 140 feet, based on the dimensions of

1807-1808. Latrobe's perspective drawing,

the central block as built, then the surrounding walled precinct measures

ca, 1807-1808(?). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

some 1,000 feet from east to west and better than 750 feet from north to south, It includes an entry road, elaborate bridle paths, and an enormous Ushaped stable some 200 feet wide. A comparison of the house's position in the drawing, on a prominence about one-tenth mile northwest of Shockoe

Creek, with the structure's position on an 1876 Atlas of Richmond (fig. 21),3 confirms that Latrobe's site plan depicted a real landscape, a large, undevel-

oped parcel designated as “Wilson's Tenement” on Thomas Jefferson's 1780 plan for the extension of the city. On Richard Young's 1809 map (fig. 22), (north to the upper-left-hand corner), the area is obvious, the unplatted land below (southwest of ) H Street (the broad street at the top of the map) and northwest of Shockoe Creek, with Jefferson's Capitol just off the map to the left.* Harris, Latrobe, or both had a grand vision for a suburban estate amid a developing capital city of five thousand people and adjacent to the

major public buildings and with views out across the James River.

636

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Fig. 20, Clifton. Latrobe's site plan (north to the right), ca. 1807-1808(?). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

52

REFERENCES

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