In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
  • Jeffrey A. Cohen (bio)
Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 789 pages. Drawings, photographs, 22 color plates, catalog, index. ISBN 0801881048. $75.00.

The work of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820) has long marked a sea change in our telling of the architectural history of the United States. He modeled the professional practice of architecture as he knew it in England, with design separated from execution, and established this through the young Americans he trained, including William Strickland and Robert Mills. His designs, both for public, institutional buildings and private, mostly residential ones, embodied a modern Classical language that was governed by heroic geometries, by a largeness of scale, a spareness of surfaces, and often a demonstrative rationality in volumes visibly portraying specific iconic functions. He left a rich written legacy, which shows that he was conscious of bringing modern practice and rational taste to the young new republic, and he repeatedly cited bodies of contrary inclinations—the Anglo-Palladian tradition that reigned until 1760, the "old French books" that Jefferson consulted, and the entrenched habits of work and charging for it practiced by building craftsmen.

Latrobe's surviving architectural drawings, which number in the hundreds, still have the power to convey confidence in that reasoned monumentality, where the activity of the mind commanded that of the hand. His surviving letters, which number in the thousands, still capture the difficulty he encountered in bringing those design intentions to realization. (As an architect he was no friend to the vernacular, but as an observer he was a much better one, recording it in hundreds of sketches and commentaries on the American landscape.)

Latrobe was the subject of a 1955 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Talbot Hamlin, and of a large-scale documentary editing project, the Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (PBHL ), conceived by the late Edward C. Carter II to assemble and contextualize the widely dispersed documentary legacy of Latrobe, both as actor and observer, and make that more accessible for future scholarship; the result was a microform edition and ten volumes published by Yale University Press from the 1970s through the 1990s. The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a welcome addition to this literature. It is a product of many years of effort that presents new research, provides a comprehensive gathering of existing knowledge, and considers the whole range of the architect's residential work in terms of evolving types and themes.

The book is well organized and written in a clear and definitive style. It is richly illustrated, with full-page photographs of all the pertinent original drawings by Latrobe, along with many images of the surviving houses. A special boon lies in the scores of plans redrawn or newly devised by the authors to illustrate both built and proposed designs, rendering them to scale with a common set of conventions, including orientation; in many cases, these posit reconstructions re-imagined from only fragmentary evidence, sometimes mainly textual. Other plans, sections, and digital recreations are marked or sequenced to indicate circulatory routes, served versus service zones, or progressions of spatial experiences. These new graphics are among the most valuable parts of the book, very effectively supporting the detailed discussions of designs.

A short introductory essay sets out the book's direction: the authors, Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon, seek to "reinterpret Latrobe's career by means of his domestic work" (x), and they find a central theme in the notion that Latrobe "had responded quite consciously to the specifics of the American social and physical context and had, as a result, invented . . . a new house form for the nascent, democratic, American republic" (xiv).

The book then proceeds in seven chapters that track the origins and evolution of Latrobe's thinking about house design, moving chronologically from his English training and key examples of his own English house designs through to the best documented of his American houses, both proposed and carried out. These chapters are followed by a summary interpretive chapter, "Perspectives on an Architect's Career," and an "Epilogue" on...

pdf

Share