Benjamin Henry Latrobe

American architect

• Born: May 1, 1764
• Birthplace: Fulneck, near Leeds, Yorkshire, England
• Died: September 3, 1820
• Place of death: New Orleans, Louisiana

The founder of the architectural profession in the United States, Latrobe had a genius that encompassed nearly every area of classical architecture but is noted most for his Greek revival influences.

Early Life

Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe was born in England into a family of exiled French Protestants. Originally named de La Trobe, the family of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (as he usually signed himself) had been distinguished in religious, cultural, and business circles in Ireland, England, and Holland. Latrobe’s father, Benjamin Latrobe, was educated at the University of Glasgow as well as in Europe. Converted from the Baptist faith to that of the Moravians (United Brethren), the senior Latrobe was an internationally recognized preacher and teacher, a Moravian leader whose headquarters at one time were in Fulneck. There, he married Anna Margaretta Antes. A Pennsylvanian with honored Revolutionary War ancestors and a wealthy, landowning father, she traveled to Fulneck at the age of fourteen to deepen her own Moravian learning. The sociability, cosmopolitanism, learned values, and interesting familial contacts surrounding young Benjamin were augmented by his parents’ Moravian belief in directing education toward the broadening of children’s individuality and tastes.

Thus, Latrobe’s father, who returned to London to direct church interests better for the remainder of his life, placed Benjamin in Fulneck’s Moravian school. Between the ages of four and fourteen, he acquired there a basic classical education: Latin, Greek, algebra, and geometry, as well as religious instruction. Then, following the example of an older brother and because of his father’s dismay with the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776, Benjamin was sent to Moravian schools in Niesky and Barby in German Silesia.

Little documentation exists of the seven years he spent in Europe. What is known is that, having established himself in London in 1783, Latrobe was fluent in French, German, and Italian and was proficient in Hebrew and Spanish as well. He also exhibited a knowledge and love of music. He had completed a translation of a popular German work on Frederick the Great, indicated an interest in military engineering, and manifested superior literary and artistic skills. Behind him, too, were invaluable friendships and acquaintances with European scholars and connoisseurs, which had led him deeply into philosophy, logic, ethics, a mastery of mathematics, sidereal navigation, and surveying.

At the age of twenty, Latrobe was a dark-haired, handsome, muscular young man, six feet, two inches in height. In addition to being privileged with an extraordinary background, he was ambitious, impetuous, childishly vivacious, and charming. He was also subject in young adulthood and throughout his life, however, to abnormal sensitivities, severe headaches, and sometimes debilitating depressions. Notwithstanding, he was remarkably accomplished and clearly gifted.

Life’s Work

Technically, Latrobe was employed in the London Stamp Office from 1784 to 1794. However, the commencement of his lifetime career proceeded unhindered by a civil service post, for within two years he began working with John Smeaton . Smeaton, though trained as a lawyer, was in fact a renowned instrument maker and the designer and builder of, among other engineering feats, the famed Eddystone Lighthouse.

Latrobe was the first Englishman to designate himself as a “civil engineer”; as an acknowledged master, he founded Great Britain’s first organization of civil engineers . Smeaton wrote extensively, was a friend of James Watt, and was a respected acquaintance of most upcoming architects and engineers; indeed, a whole generation of engineers sprang from association with him. Smeaton assigned Latrobe to work with his chief assistant, a master in his own right, William Jessop, chief inventor of the “edge rail,” as well as the designer-builder of numerous canals, docks, and other harbor facilities. From 1786 into 1789, Latrobe served under Jessop on Rye Harbor’s improvements and on construction of the Basingstoke Canal, both major engineering assignments.

Thanks to his achievements and his family and professional connections, Latrobe skipped the usual lengthy apprenticeships and joined the office of Samuel Pepys Cockerell, Cockerell being the founder of his own dynasty of great architects and officials. There, between 1789 and 1792, Latrobe variously helped design the Admiralty Building in Whitehall and took on private commissions, in the process making lifelong friends such as First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Charles Middleton.

Briefly, London was good to him. In 1792, he was able to establish his own architectural office. He became “surveyor” (designer) of London’s police offices and conducted surveys for the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation improvement. He also married Lydia Sellon and started his own family. Unhappily, Lydia died giving birth to their third child, and Latrobe suffered a nervous breakdown. That and a series of financial reverses shortly left him bankrupt and, in a sense, a professional failure. Only lands bequeathed to him by his mother in the United States allowed a way out of a sad situation. Further spurred on by a romantic, liberal attachment to American revolutionary principles and republican values, he abandoned England, landing in Norfolk, Virginia, in March, 1796.

Assisted by splendid references, Latrobe designed his first American house in Norfolk within months after landing and worked busily in Virginia until the end of 1798. He surveyed the upper Appomattox River for commercial navigational purposes, served as engineering consultant to the Dismal Swamp Land Company, and, receiving a gubernatorial appointment, designed and built the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, which drew acclaim for the liberal philosophy of penology that it embodied. Finally, he designed a novel Richmond theater complex. During his Virginia years, Latrobe became a friend of Thomas Jefferson and Bushrod Washington and struck close acquaintances with George Washington and his family at Mount Vernon, with the Madisons and Randolphs—indeed, with most important social and political figures in Virginia. Moreover, keen observer that he had always been, he kept an exceptional journal and sketches of his journeys through the state.

Residing in Philadelphia until 1807 despite serious struggles and misfortunes, Latrobe reached new heights in his career. In 1800, he started his second family with his marriage to Mary Elizabeth Hazlehurst. With this stability and a genius for combining architecture and engineering skills possessed by no one else in the country, he designed many of his masterworks. By tapping the Schuylkill River and ingeniously utilizing steam power for pumping and distribution of purified water, he sanitized a basic service while masking his work behind beautiful buildings. With private and public commissions, he designed splendid private homes and completed designs for a national military academy, a monument to Washington, and the Chestnut Street Theater.

Latrobe was chosen both engineer and contractor of the Susquehanna River Survey, and he restored Nassau Hall at Princeton University. He designed Transylvania College for Henry Clay (and Clay’s home) in Lexington, Kentucky, and the main buildings of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and he helped Jefferson with design of the University of Virginia. Three of his masterworks in Philadelphia were the Bank of Pennsylvania, the Bank of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, while two others in nearby Baltimore were the first Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States and the Baltimore Exchange. He also surveyed, then served as chief engineer of, the great Chesapeake and Delaware Canal enterprise. Meanwhile, he designed a covered naval dry dock in Washington for Jefferson and accepted his appointment as the surveyor of the public buildings.

Because Latrobe enjoyed federal commissions or appointments during all but four of his twenty-four years in the United States, he was drawn to Washington in 1807. There, in addition to building the Washington Navy Yard and the Washington Canal, he designed, helped construct, and—after its destruction by the British—helped reconstruct the national Capitol, which was the subsequent standard for hundreds of American public buildings. He continued scores of other architectural interests: close association with Nicholas Roosevelt and Robert Fulton, among others, on the uses of steam power, development of public works, and contributions to learned societies. In 1819, he moved his family to New Orleans, drawn by son Henry’s death (which occurred while he was working on a lighthouse of his father’s design) and by the prospect of new commissions such as the Louisiana Bank, the Customs House, the unfinished lighthouse, and other private projects. Like his son, he died in New Orleans, on September 3, 1820, of yellow fever.

Significance

Latrobe’s genius encompassed nearly every area of classical architecture, though he is most noted for his Greek revival influences. Indeed, his work was marked by considerable originality and restrained and novel interpretations in the use of columns, domes, and masonry vaults and penditives. He founded and, through family and pupils, perpetuated professional architecture in the United States.

Throughout his career, Latrobe was plagued by personal and political hostilities and by chronic financial difficulties, in addition to the philosophy of impermanence and cheap construction that seemed an American style, yet his living was made almost entirely from his architectural and engineering works. Few aspects of civil engineering escaped his touch. He worked on surveys, canals, tunnels, waterworks, beach conservation, public buildings, universities, bridges, lighthouses, arsenals, and naval and port facilities. Before the professionalization of mechanical engineering, he joined with other pioneers in the design and use of steam power in manufactories, utilities, and land and water locomotion. His legacy also included journals, papers, drawings, and designs of the highest merit. Of great importance, his breadth of learning helped bridge the technological and artistic gap between the best British and European work and their adaptation to young republican America.

Bibliography

Calhoun, Daniel H. The American Civil Engineer, 1792-1843. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960. Emphasizes the professionalization of civil engineering in the United States. Influences of West Point and state and federal sponsorship of public works are dealt with more extensively than the work of individuals such as Latrobe, who by mid-century would be eclipsed by task-oriented specialists. Excellent scholarly context for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Latrobe’s generation of architect-engineers with classical and continental educations.

Carter, Edward C., II, with Darwin H. Stapleton and Lee W. Formwalt. Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Public Works: Professionalism, Private Interest, and Public Policy in the Age of Jefferson. Washington, D.C.: Public Works Historical Society, 1976. Excellent, if brief, analysis of conflicting elements confronting early architect-engineers, by foremost experts on Latrobe’s journals and papers.

Condit, Carl W. American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Colonial Settlements to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Chapter 5 is particularly pertinent to masonry and to Latrobe’s and his contemporaries’ employment of it.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Chapter 1 puts Latrobe’s work in the context of previous American experience and later nineteenth century architectural and building directions.

Hamlin, Talbot. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. The most thorough, scholarly, and personalized appreciation of Latrobe in all of his dimensions. Well written and an expert critical analysis of the great architect-engineer’s trials, successes, and failures.

Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Edited by Jeffrey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Published for the Maryland Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society by Yale University Press, 1994. The final two volumes in Latrobe’s papers (see below), these drawings document his architectural career and the history of his buildings, including the U.S. Capitol, Bank of Pennsylvania, and Baltimore Cathedral.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Edited by John C. Van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt. 3 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. The editors and Latrobe himself have made this an intriguing and readable volume of keen observations and literary merit.

Maynard, W. Barksdale. Architecture in the United States, 1800-1850. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Documents the development of American architecture from the age of Thomas Jefferson to the antebellum era. Good for placing Latrobe’s work within the context of early nineteenth century American architecture.

Stapleton, Darwin H. “Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Transfer of Technology.” In Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, edited by Carroll W. Purcell, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981. Focuses upon an important aspect of Latrobe’s contribution to American architecture and engineering as a result of his British and Continental training.