NOVEMBER 2006 »  book review

The Luck of Latrobe

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
by Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD; 2006
769 pp.; hardcover; 590 b&w and 34 color illus.; $75
ISBN 0-8018-8104-8

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

The architect/engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe left his native England for America in 1795, penniless and heartbroken. A widower at age 31 with two small children to support, he was fleeing from creditors of his fledgling architecture firm in London – his late wife’s family had cheated him out of her estate. During the cross-Atlantic move, he lost most of his office archive, including a library of some 1,500 books.

Yet within four years of his bedraggled disembarking in Virginia, he’d befriended well-connected patrons and was proposing avant-garde Greek and Gothic Revival estates of up to 10,000 sq.ft. "He exhibited a facility for meeting influential people, gravitating toward landowners, politicians, merchants, and traders," write the architectural historians Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon in this exhaustive study. Latrobe charmed American presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison) and senators, but he also sometimes got in his own way. He tended, the authors point out, "to take on more projects than he could carefully manage, to work without adequate contracts or retainers, and to bill his clients apologetically, belatedly, or not at all."

During Latrobe’s 25-year career in the U.S., he moved often: Richmond, VA, Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, PA, back to Washington, DC. In a dozen states, he designed infrastructure (bridges, canals) and mansions as well as religious, commercial and institutional buildings. Still, he was usually on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1820, he died of yellow fever in New Orleans, LA, where he was laying out a water-supply system in one more attempt to earn a fortune.

Previous biographers, especially Talbot Hamlin (his 1955 monograph on Latrobe won a Pulitzer Prize), portrayed the architect as an Ayn Rand-style proto-Modernist hero, tragically stymied by philistines. Fazio and Snadon instead depict an aloof, impetuous, stubborn designer whose residential buildings proved too impractical to last very long.

Latrobe wanted Americans to abandon their stodgy center halls and awkward rear-kitchen ells. He preferred to lay out rooms asymmetrically, with oblique views, and to incorporate the service zones into the main-house mass. He was structurally adventurous, too: he moved earth mounds to create pedestals for his houses, and he supported daringly thin masonry or plaster walls on segmental-arch vaulted foundations. To conceal all the interior surprises and engineering feats, he austerely ornamented symmetrical façades. At times, Snadon and Fazio write, "he crowded, overlapped, and interpenetrated spatial units and architectural events in a dynamic, compacted, and even disturbing way."

The text is rich in similarly vivid passages. The authors compare a 1795 villa’s Ionic portico to "a freestanding antique garden temple plucked from a picturesque park and embedded within the façade." For an 1815 mansion near the White House, Latrobe specified a "boldly prismatic" roughcast skin: "The taut wall latrobe appeared to thinly wrap the internal volumes and acknowledged their distribution by means of shallow but dramatic changes in wall planes."

Fazio is a professor at the College of Architecture, Art + Design at Mississippi State University, and Snadon teaches at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Architecture and Interior Design. They have been researching Latrobe for 15 years: taking road trips, poring through voluminous family correspondence, scrutinizing spectacular renderings and barely legible sketches. The prose can bog down in the sheer depth of all that uncovered detail, and the chapters apparently grew so long and dense that editors stopped checking for repetition. Some facts reappear in neighboring sentences: an English baron left his daughter "a considerable sum of money," so she "inherited a fortune."

We’re also told numerous times why only half a dozen of Latrobe’s 40-odd residential commissions survive intact. The basic reason: "They were so original and unconventional that they virtually begged for remodeling or demolition."

The authors are so passionate about documenting Latrobe’s ephemeral architecture that they supply floor plans, elevations and sections for almost every project that progressed past the concept stage. Whenever archival drawings don’t exist, Snadon and Fazio rendered their own and commissioned a few eerily lifelike digital reconstructions complete with furniture and wallpaper. On the endpapers, maps indicate the sites of 70 Latrobe works, whether built or unbuilt, extant or razed. And the authors are posting ever more data and illustrations at www.bhlatrobe.info. The transplanted Englishman’s architecture has suffered a high mortality rate, and his professional life was a roller coaster. In having Fazio and Snadon as devoted fans, Latrobe’s oeuvre is finally enjoying its first lucky break.  

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