The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

definitive study of early major American architect

Nothing is spared in the way of breadth and depth of scholarship, nor in the way of production quality--for a definitive study of this important, but generally overlooked, American architect of the late 1700s into the early 1800s, the early period of the American Republic. A leading architect popular with the English royalty and gentry in their adaptations in a growing democratic society, Latrobe attracted the interest and commissions of the old and newly wealthy in the United States in the decades after the Revolutionary War for design of homes with many similarities to those he had done for the upper classes in his native England. And he attracted interest from government officials wishing to build impressive buildings representing the pride, the values, and the ambitions of the new Republic. Latrobe's architectural principles and designs went far in America as they had earlier in England because they characterized what he called his 'rational house' based on ideas of the Enlightenment partly originating in England and embraced by America's Founding Fathers in their creation of the basics of the American political system and its institutions. Fazio is a professor at Mississippi State U.'s School of Architecture Snadon is a professor of interior design at the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the U. of Cincinnati. The abundant biographical, critical, and analytical text with the hundreds of illustrations of all scales of architectural works are peerlessly informative standing alone. But also they work to render the authors' revisionist perspective that 'perhaps only Thomas Jefferson...held a panoramic view over the international architectural scene comparable to Latrobe.'