Architecture: Classical Revival

Sources

Background. Americans achieved their first artistic successes in architecture, which appears in many ways to have been the form of art best suited to a republican nation. Because architecture served a practical purpose, it was exempted from traditional republican objections to art as a decadent product of aristocratic luxury. Their ideological concerns infused even the architectural styles that Americans favored, and the classical style was compatible with republican ideals. It was only fitting for Americans to imitate the architecture of the ancient Greek and Roman republics, whose political institutions had provided the models for the system of government in the United States.

Benjamin Latrobe. One of the most influential figures in the classical revival was Benjamin Latrobe, a British architect who immigrated to the United States in 1796. He designed the building for the Bank of Pennsylvania, the first public edifice built in the Greek Revival style. Believing that the grandeur and imperial connotations of Roman architecture made it incompatible with American ideals and culture, Latrobe expressed the democratic spirit of America through the simplicity of Greek architecture, itself the product of democracy. He stated firmly, “my principles of good taste are rigid in Grecian architecture.… Wherever therefore the Grecian style can be copied without impropriety I love to be a mere, I would say a slavish copyist.” Latrobe did not follow Greek models slavishly, however, for he recognized that “the forms and the distribution of the Roman and Greek buildings which remain, are in general inapplicable to the objects and uses of our public buildings.” Latrobe’s design for the Bank of Pennsylvania used Greek details, but it did not strictly conform to Greek models. By adapting their classical forms to American circumstances he created a unique American style.

Greek Revival. The completion of the Bank of Pennsylvania building in 1800 launched the Greek Revival movement that dominated American architecture from 1820 to 1860. Latrobe’s students Robert Mills and William Strickland carried on and extended his affinity for Greek forms in their designs. The distinguishing feature

of Greek Revival architecture, the white classical portico of the Greek temple, became a common sight on public buildings and private residences throughout the country.

Sources

Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955);

Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947);

J. Meredith Neil, Toward a National Taste: America’s Quest for Aesthetic Independence (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975);

Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).