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Biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Name: Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Birth Date: 1764
Death Date: 1820
Place of Birth: England
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: architect
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), English-born American architect, was the first professionally trained architect to practice in the United States. He worked in a variety of styles.Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England of Moravian parents. He was educated in England, France, and Germany, and as head draftsman in the office of the London architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell he participated in such large projects as the Admiralty Buildings in London. His coming to American was something of an accident; his young wife died, architectural commissions were few because of the Napoleonic Wars, and he had an inheritance to claim in Pennsylvania.Latrobe arrived in Norfolk, Va., in 1796 and was soon recognized by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other prominent people as the ablest architect on the American scene. For the rest of his life he had many commissions in every part of the country.In his works Latrobe displayed an amazing …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…Gothic, as symbolic of a Church "the same yesterday, today, and forever," was more suitable than Roman. Roman won out simply because Gothic could not match its combination of "patriotic American" and "loyal Roman Catholic" symbolism.But Latrobe was too fundamentally versatile ever to accept the Greek revival symbolism unreservedly. Hence his disagreement with Jefferson over the dome of the House of Representatives, Jefferson wanting (and getting, in the original version) a grand symbolic shape, Latrobe advocating a more practical functional construction, and reverting to it when called back to rebuild the destroyed dome in 1815. Hence his failure in the Second Bank of the United States Competition in 1818, which William Strickland won with a "pure Grecian" design. This led to Latrobe's departure for New Orleans, where he died 2 years later. Further Reading The standard works on Latrobe are Talbot F. Hamlin's Greek Revival Architecture in America (1944) and Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1955).
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