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By James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell
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Smooth stucco walls with arches over the upper windows, quoins, string course, and balustrade with a plain pediment are hallmarks of the Neoclassical 1819 Owens-Thomas House in Savannah, Georgia, designed by architect
William Jay.
Photo Courtesy of the Historical American Buildings Survey
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The Federal style, with its clean lines and easy symmetry, looks simple enough as American architectural forms go. Its origins, though, are complex.
In the first half of the 18th century, the British built, and Americans emulated, many beautiful and imposing houses in what we now call the Georgian style. The Georgian style evolved from Renaissance architecture, which in turn grew out of a classical building tradition that could be traced back to the Greeks and Romans.
It seemed as if that wriggly line might stretch on forever, but then, in the mid-18th century, archeological discoveries in places like Pompeii and Herculaneum opened a direct path to the past. With real, newly excavated ancient buildings to guide them (or at least with drawings and descriptions prepared by archeologists who had actually seen such buildings), people were able to look at classical architecture in a new way. They could see it as the Greeks and Romans had built it, not as the intervening centuries had changed it.
Which brings us to Neoclassicism, the great architectural passion of the
late 18th and early 19th centuries. Neoclassicism used elements from Greek and Roman temples and rotundas, with both a new freedom and a new precision. The Federal style ran parallel to it with classical roots in American buildings constructed between about 1790 and 1820.
Proponents of the Federal style had something more than architecture in mind. The Federal style was meant to signal a break from the British past and a passionate embrace of the American future. What could be more fitting for the architecture of a new republic, after all, than designs inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, the birthplaces of democracy and republicanism? American architects rallied to the cause.
Of course, the terms "American" and "architect" have to be generously interpreted here. Many of the most talented and best-trained architects in America during the Federal period learned their trade in England or France. Among the greatest of these was Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who has been called America's first professional architect. Latrobe immigrated to America from England and worked in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Stephen Hallet, a Frenchman, won the design competition for the U. S. Capitol but was displaced after the contest ended by a late entry from a Washington physician and amateur architect, William Thornton (born in the West Indies). James Hoban, an Irishman who worked in South Carolina and elsewhere, designed the President's House (now known as the White House).
Many of the nation's finest Federal buildings were the work of talented amateurs with a genius for dreaming up beautiful buildings but little or no practical training in how to construct them. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the most famous of their generation who designed their own homes; there were many others. Those who showed a special aptitude for building were often pressed into service by friends and acquaintances who wanted architectural help. Some who started as amateurs deserved eventually to be called professionals. Charles Bulfinch of Boston traveled and studied abroad and also worked with James Hoban. Samuel McIntire, "the Architect of Salem," was noted for his elegant three-storey Federal houses in Salem and elsewhere in New England. Together, Bulfinch and McIntire defined the Federal style in New England. Alexander Parris, of Portland, Maine, carried Bulfinch's influence with him as he built a practice that extended from New England to Richmond, Virginia, where he designed two Federal-style gems, the Wickham House (now the Valentine Museum) and Virginia's Executive Mansion.
Architects on this side of the Atlantic were assisted by books that showed classically inspired architectural details as well as faŽades and layouts of buildings. At first, they had to rely on earlier British publications, such as those by James Gibbs and William and James Pain. Finally, however, a New England builder, Asher Benjamin, published The Country Builder's Assistant (1796) and The American Builder's Companion (1806), which inspired many Federal-style buildings.
The Federal style was much more delicate and far more reserved in its decoration than the Georgian. Symmetry, balance, and order were its overriding principles. High-style Federal houses were most often constructed of brick or stuccoed brick, although wood and, occasionally, stone were also used. FaŽades were flat and smooth, though often punctuated by curving bays, "bow rooms," and semicircular porches. Federal ornament was restrained and often influenced by the most prominent English Neoclassicist, Robert Adam. Graceful "Adamesque" urns, garlands, and swags in bas-relief and recessed plaques decorated not only the fronts of Federal-style buildings, but their interior woodwork and plaster as well. Slim, exquisitely detailed columns marked delicate one-storey entrance porches; elliptical fanlights and narrow sidelights held intricate tracery, and elaborate ironwork led up curving stairways and fronted small balconies. Windows were large and often particularly prominent at the second-floor level, marking that as the major floor of the building, where the parlors and other grand rooms were located. Window muntins were noticeably slimmer than those in Georgian houses, and the windows themselves were set closer to the outer face of the wall, with their frames hidden behind the brickwork.
Americans in the South were particularly drawn to a form of Neoclassicism based on Roman forms—arches and domes, as well as elliptical, circular, semicircular or polygonal spaces, and, of course, large porticos. Thomas Jefferson was the best known advocate of this movement—in fact, the style is most often called Jeffersonian Classicism (less commonly, Roman Revival). Jefferson popularized the one-storey, temple-form house with a raised basement for service functions, a common feature of Roman villas.
The choice of Roman architectural elements reinterpreted in an American mode was deliberate, even patriotic. Jefferson was determined to forge a truly American brand of building design, separate from that of Europe and especially of England, but solidly grounded in classical principles. To Jefferson—and to those who thought as Jefferson thought—there was no architecture as artistically and intellectually satisfying as that of Rome.
During the Revolution, Jefferson had spent five years as an American diplomat in France, England, and Italy, where he avidly studied Roman buildings. His favorite was the Maison Carr˙, a Roman temple in Vienne, France. He was so impressed by the building that he had a plaster model made of it (the model is extant) and later used it as the design for Virginia's state capitol building (1792).
After his return to the United States, Jefferson set about turning Monticello, his home near Charlottesville, Virginia, into an architectural workshop. When the house was finished (or at least when the building and rebuilding finally ended), its Roman features included an impressive dome above the main block. Because it is cannily situated on a hilltop, Monticello appears, when viewed from the front, to be a one-storey building in the Roman style. Actually, however, its dependencies stretch behind it, underground and out of sight, their roofs forming a terrace at the rear of the main block.
Poplar Forest, the little octagonal house that Jefferson built near Lexington, Virginia, in 1806-1809 as a retreat from the constant onslaught of visitors to Monticello, expresses his admiration for the geometry of Roman architecture even more strongly. Recently restored to Jefferson's design, Poplar Forest has a handsome, square, glass-topped dining room at its center, with four elongated octagonal rooms surrounding it.
Circular and polygonal-shaped rooms and features were popular among Federal architects, not just for their aesthetic appeal but for their inventiveness. William Thornton designed John Tayloe's elegant Washington, D.C., home, the Octagon (1799-1800). (It is now a museum owned by the American Institute of Architects.) The name of the house is technically wrong, since the main block of the building is actually an irregular hexagon, but that doesn't detract from the impact of its lovely semicircular pavilion on the entrance faŽade, which is echoed on the interior by a semicircular entrance hall.
Thornton's scheme for Tudor Place (1794-1816), the Thomas Peter Mansion in Georgetown, D.C., featured a towering semicircular portico whose curving lines continue through the walls of the building to form a matching semicircular entrance hall on the first floor. Like many high-style Federal buildings—and many Georgian ones as well—Tudor Place was designed on a Palladian five-part plan, with a large center block flanked by matching dependencies that were linked to the house by one-storey hyphens.
For most of the first third of the 19th century, the Federal style ruled. Inevitably, though, the time came when those refined Federal features began to look old-fashioned and way too delicate. Even the more robust Roman Revival wasn't quite in tune with the super-charged aura that accompanied westward expansion under the Jackson administration.
By the 1820s, it was clear that the country was in for a hearty dose of unvarnished Greek Revivalism, signaling the eclipse of the Federal style. . . at least, that is, until the Colonial Revival breathed life back into it 40 or 50 years later. Ah, well, as Jefferson must often have thought, Plus
Ža change.
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