Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

by Jean H. Baker

An English émigré who became America's first professional architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe put his stamp on the built landscape of the new republic. Latrobe contributed to such iconic structures as the south wing of the US Capitol building, the White House, and the Navy Yard. He created some of the early republic's greatest neoclassical interiors, including the Statuary Hall and the Senate, House, and Supreme Court Chambers.

As a young man, Latrobe was apprenticed to both a leading architect and civil engineer in London, studied the European continent's architectural and engineering monuments, worked on canals, and designed private houses. After the death of his first wife, he was bankrupt and emigrated to the United States in 1796 to restart his career. For the new nation with grand political expectations, he intended buildings and engineering projects to match those aspirations. Like his patron Thomas Jefferson, Latrobe saw his neoclassical designs as a way to convey American democracy. He envisioned his engineering projects, such as the canals and municipal water systems for Philadelphia and New Orleans, as a way to unite the nation and improve public health.

Jean Baker conveys the personality of this charming, driven, and often frustrated genius and the era in which he lived. Latrobe tried to establish architecture as a profession with high standards, established fees, and recognized procedures, though he was unable to collect fees and earn the living his work was worth. Like many of his peers, he speculated and found himself in bankruptcy several times.

Building America masterfully narrates the life and legacy of a key figure in creating an American aesthetic in the new United States.

Genres: Architecture

304 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 2019

About the author

Jean H. Baker is a professor of history at Goucher College. A graduate of Goucher College, she earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Laurabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite the interesting man. Like many of the founding figures of America, Benjamin rejected orthodox Christianity, borrowed too much money (leaving his family destitute upon his death), and was brilliant in his field.

Known as the preliminary architect of the United States, few of his buildings survive today. Wikipedia a list of his structures and see where they stand...or stood.

I like that this book went into various details of Benjamin's life and influences rather than just sticking to what he built. He was very temperamental and falsely thought of himself as descended from French Aristocrats.

Worth reading if you like early American history.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a near-perfect biography. It encapsulates the personality of a man and his time, explains the peculiar nature of his work and his genius, and explores his effect on history. Even somebody mildly familiar with Benjamin Henry Latrobe might be shocked to read in this book at how broad his impacts were.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born to be a minister in the strict confines of the Moravian Church in England, where communal child-rearing and intense education, including a spell in the seminary in church's homeland in Germany, were supposed to turn Latrobe into an ideal preacher. He, however, rebelled against the church, and in 1796, after the death of his first wife and his looming insolvency (the first of three), he took his budding talents from a spell at an architectural firm, and a time working with pioneering engineer Sir John Smeaton, to America, and, to be precise, to Norfolk and then Richmond, Virginia. His intelligence and education, and his Freemasonry, meant he was meeting with President George Washington within weeks of arriving and he soon began designing buildings.

As Latrobe constantly complained, his insulated upbringing made him incapable of financial stability. Yet he constantly insisted on his status as a gentleman supervising architect and his 5% commission (he also consistently disdained the American practice of soliciting architectural competitions, with unpaid submissions, judged by lay juries, but he kept participating in them). Yet he designed several new buildings, including the first Virginia State Penitentiary, which incorporated the new reform ideas of John Howard about solitary confinement. He moved to Philadelphia and completed the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1798, which single-handedly ignited the Greek Revival style in America (the more famous Second Bank of the US, from his student William Strickland, in the 1820s, explicitly stole not just from this, but from Latrobe's own submission for the contest.) He also created the design of the first municipal waterworks, with steam-powered pressure, and surrounding Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. His friend Thomas Jefferson called Latrobe to the new city Washington D.C. when Jefferson became president and appointed him surveyor of building, from which he fixed and rearranged amateur architect William Thornton's Capitol building. He redesigned it again after the British burned it in the War of 1812. Later he designed the first neoclassical Catholic cathedral in the country in Baltimore. In the meantime he supervised a launch of Robert Fulton's steamship in Pittsburgh, and with his son helped construct the New Orleans waterworks, although both he and his son succumbed to yellow fever there.

So from one of the first US prisons, to the first Greek Revival building, the first municipal waterworks, the US Capitol, innovative residential design (he moved the kitchen to the first floor and combined tub and toilet in one room to centralize plumbing), many famous descriptions and sketches (some of which still populate US history textbooks), and relations with everyone who mattered, Latrobe had an eventful life. This book shows him warts and all. He was haughty, with a a false and imagined aristocratic lineage he touted, and constantly struggling with friends and supposed allies, but it also shows why he still matters today. It's a great read.