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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Benjamin Henry Latrobe by Talbot Faulkner Hamlin Benjamin Henry Latrobe by Talbot Faulkner Hamlin. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #7fc8aa90-cf51-11eb-a8fa-33e0b1df654c VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Thu, 17 Jun 2021 09:50:50 GMT. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in 1764 at Fulneck in Yorkshire. He was the Second son of the Reverend Benjamin Latrobe (1728 - 86), a minister of the Moravian church, and Anna Margaretta (Antes) Latrobe (1728 - 94), a third generation Pennsylvanian of Moravian Parentage. The original Latrobes had been French Huguenots who had settled in Ireland at the end of the 17th Century. Whilst he is most noted for his work on The White House and the Capitol in Washington, he introduced the Greek Revival as the style of American National architecture. He built Baltimore cathedral, not only the first Roman Catholic Cathedral in America but also the first vaulted church and is, perhaps, Latrobes finest monument. Hammerwood Park achieves importance as his first complete work, the first of only two in this country and one of only five remaining domestic buildings by Latrobe in existence. It was built as a temple to Apollo, dedicated as a hunting lodge to celebrate the arts and incorporating elements related to Demeter, mother Earth, in relation to the contemporary agricultural revolution. Latrobe was a master exponent of symbolism. Hammerwood's composition displays all of Latrobe's latent genius which he took to the States, designing both the house and the park as an essay in perspective as well as the picturesque. In this, Latrobe's work at Hammerwood achieves perfection. In 1997, the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the purchase by the Latrobe Heritage Trust of Latrobe's first perspective drawing of "Hammerwood Lodge". We hope to be inserting further details on this page. The drawing is extraordinary in that it relates both to Hammerwood Park and Ashdown House as built, Latrobe's conception of the South portico of teh White House and his 1808 drawing of The Capitol in Washington. Watch this space and bookmark this page! Come and visit or stay during the summer. Click here to see the White House web pages Click here to see the Capitol Latrobe web pages Latrobe's Doric Revival at Hammerwood Park, Thesis by Michael Trinder MA, Cambridge University - Click here for a tour. Click here to return to Hammerwood Park Home page. Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764 - 1820) - Background. Anne-Noelle Pinnegar, BA. Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in 1764 at Fulneck in Yorkshire. He was the second son of the Reverend Benjamin Latrobe (1728-86), a minister of the Moravian church, and Anna Margaretta (Antes) Latrobe (1728-94), a third- generation Pennsylvanian of Moravian parentage. The original Latrobes had been French Protestants who had settled in Ireland at the end of the 17th century. The young Latrobe was educated at the Moravian schools at Fulneck and later at Nieski in German Silesia. His education was impressive, comprising a broad curriculum including all the liberal arts, classical and modern languages. Having rejected the ministry as a possible career, Latrobe finally travelled back to England in 1783 on a Grand Tour of Germany and France (where he was much struck by the grand Classicist buildings of Paris). He also travelled to Rome and Naples, although this may have been on a later trip in 1786. By 1784 Latrobe had returned to London where he was employed for a time as a clerk at the Stamp Office. By around 1787, however, Latrobe had begun his professional training under England's most renowned engineer of the day - John Smeaton (1724-92), the designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse. Here Latrobe acquired a thorough grounding in both the technical and theoretical aspects of advanced English civil engineering, including the meticulous draughtsmanship in which he excelled throughout his life. Latrobe's interest in engineering soon led him to develop an interest in architecture (it was not uncommon during the 18th century for the two disciplines to be practised in parallel by one individual) and he became apprenticed to S.R. Cockerell (1754-1827) who was then engaged in designing public works, such as the house for the First Lord of the Admiralty in Whitehall. Latrobe gained further invaluable experience and rapid advancement, actually managing the office in 1791-2. By this association, Latrobe was immediately drawn into the orbit of England's three most advanced architects: Cockerell himself, George Dance the Younger (1741- 1825) and Sir John Soane (1753-1837), the latter's work being particularly influential on Latrobe. English architecture of the period can be divided into three distinct styles. The oldest school was the strict Palladianism of Sir William Chambers, inspired by Palladio himself, as well as other masters of the Italian Renaissance via the earlier English architects William Kent and Burlington, as Latrobe would have seen in Chamber's recently completed design of the grand governmental commission at Somerset House. The second school, that of the Adam brothers, was just passing its height but was still popular. The style was definitely Roman in origin, being characterised by its brilliant use of functional space as well as its decorative detail, which Latrobe found to be over-rich. Latrobe belonged, rather, to the third school (sometimes called the 'plain style') the work of which was characterized by simplicity, geometric power and rationalism. George Dance the Younger was its originator, but it was in the work of Sir John Soane (whose masterpiece is the Bank of England) that this movement achieved its great triumphs. This was regarded as the most radical in tone, both aesthetically and politically, and it appealed especially to those who were to follow Charles James Fox and show marked sympathy for the French Revolution. It was definitely a Francophile style and in many ways paralleled the revolutionary architecture parlante as expounded by Ledoux. Latrobe and Hammerwood Lodge (now called Hammerwood Park) Near the end of his service with Cockerell, Latrobe was made surveyor to the London Police (c. 1792), a minor official appointment involving the supervision of renovation and repair of a number of district police stations. Around this time, shortly after his marriage to Lydia Sellon (c.1761-1793), the daughter of a wealthy Anglican clergyman, Latrobe opened his own office, and was soon getting enough work, mainly alteration jobs, to enable him to employ at least one apprentice. Latrobe's reputation grew rapidly and he received commissions for some new residences, the first of which came through a Mr John Sperling, of Dynes Hall in Essex, who asked Latrobe to design him a hunting lodge at Hammerwood, Sussex. Latrobe's only other English house also survives - Ashdown House at Forest Row - which he designed the following year, 1793, for a Mr Fuller. Hammerwood Lodge and Ashdown House are the only two surviving English domestic houses by Latrobe. Evidence that Latrobe designed Hammerwood for John Sperling in 1792 may be seen in the ancient Greek inscription situated high up on the reverse of the Coade Stone capitals of the west portico: GREEK TEXT: THC. TOY I​ANNOY C​EP​IN​OY E​AY​E​C. ​PO​ TY​H ​P​TH. APXITEKT​N ​ATPOBE. E​OIE TON A​B ENEAYTON. IHCOY XPICTOY KAI. TON. ​E Y TEPON THC XMB. O​YMPIA​AC. ['This is the first portico of John Sperling's mansion (but word used = Cattlefold: see Trinder's Thesis). The architect is B.H. Latrobe. He made it in the 1792 year of Jesus Christ and the second year of the 642nd Olympiad'.] There is no better account of Latrobe's achievement at Hammerwood than that of his biographer, Talbot Hamlin: 'Hammerwood achieves importance as a monument in Latrobe's career when it is realized (if we can believe the architect's obituary in Ackermann's Repository) that it was his first independent work. According to Ackermann: "While pursuing his studies at home, he was visited by a friend, Mr Sperling, who, finding him disengaged [apparently he had already resigned from the Cockerell firm], and admiring his growing talents, commissioned him to design and build for him a mansion near East Grinstead, to be called Hammerwood Lodge. " '[Hammerwood's] exterior reveals a basic desire to tear open the usual conventions of 18th century country house design, to use new forms and old forms strangely, to create drama - almost wonder - for the observer. In places it harks back to the stark power of Vanbrugh; in others it looks forward to the Greek Revival.' 'It has a great main body five bays wide, with heavy Doric pilasters for the​ central pavilion; between these the three central windows under recessed arches are crowded in with only hairline jambs. The frieze - again a plain band (except over the pilasters) - is much heavier than ancient precedent would suggest, as though its designer were after the colossal in scale even in a country house, and above rises an attic as quietly powerful as the rest. A slightly projecting band course separates the two lower floors, and the recessed arches are without architraves or mouldings.' 'The two wings that flank the central block are even more unusual in design. Here the lower floor consists of arcades of narrow arches, with a window in each, and is terminated at the end by a primitive Greek Doric temple porch carrying a pediment.
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