Hugh Howard - Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture

Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture

HUGH HOWARD

For Betsy
and, of course,
our two tall daughters,
Sarah and Elizabeth

Writing about the past, of necessity, is a process of searching for new evidence, restudying original sources, and reassessing the thoughts of other writers on the subject. This may be why the second part of the word history is story.

ALLAN GREENBERG, George Washington, Architect, 1999

To travel backward: That is the immodest goal of this book.

Thomas Jefferson inspired this attempt at time travel. Some years ago while researching Jeffersons architecture, I encountered Fiske Kimball (18881955), the man who had put Jefferson back on the architectural map. As a student, architect, historian, professor, university administrator, and museum director, Kimball became my tour guide in researching this book and, in the coming pages, he will be your cicerone, too.

Working in opposite directionsthe former advancing from the days of the American Revolution, the latter looking backward from the first quarter of the twentieth centuryJefferson and Kimball are the Johnson and the Boswell of early American architecture. They provide a unique entre to the world of Federal America, when Englishman Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Bostonian Charles Bulfinch, Samuel McIntire of Salem, a Frenchman named Charles-Louis Clrisseau, Tortola-born William Thornton, and Jefferson himself were in the vanguard of American architectural innovation.

Before Jefferson, there were builders in the Colonies, but no American architects. Thanks in no small measure to him, by the time of his death in 1826 a coterie of professionals had emerged, men who imagined buildings, rendered them onto paper as sophisticated architectural drawings, and then supervised construction not as craftsmen, not carpenter-joiners or masons, but as Architects. Because of Dr. Sidney Fiske Kimball, the story of that evolution, which is the matter of this book, can be told.

HUGH HOWARD,
Hayes Hill, New York

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Fiske Kimball (18881955), graduate student

George Henry Chase (18741952), chairman of Harvards Department of Fine Arts

Marie Christina Goebel (18891955), daughter of a Kimball colleague

Worthington C. Ford (18581941), editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society

R. T. H. Halsey (18651942), New York stockbroker and curator

Ferdinand C. Latrobe II (18891944), great-grandson of B. H. Latrobe

John D. McIlhenny (18661925), president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

William C. Endicott Jr. (18601936), president of the Essex Institute

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (18821945), president of the United States

John Russell Pope (18741937), New York society architect specializing in the classical style

Thomas J. McCormick (1925), graduate student

THE EARLY ARCHITECTS AND BUILDERS

William Buckland (17341774), English immigrant joiner and carver

Thomas Jefferson (17431826), newly appointed minister to France

Charles-Louis Clrisseau (17211820), Parisian artist and antiquarian

Major Pierre Charles LEnfant (17541825), French-trained artist and engineer

Charles Bulfinch (17631844), a newlywed Boston gentleman

James Hoban (17621831), Irish-born winner of the competition for the Presidents House

Dr. William Thornton (17591828), Edinburgh-educated physician

tienne Sulpice Hallet (17601825), French-trained architect residing in Philadelphia

George Hadfield (17641826), London-born, European-trained architect

Benjamin Henry Latrobe (17641820), English-born, European-educated professional architect and engineer

Samuel McIntire (17561811), Salem, Massachusetts, carver, builder, and designer

Robert Mills (17811855), Charleston-born architecture student

THE PATRONS

George Mason (17251792), wealthy patriot and Virginia landowner

Mathias Hammond (17481786), Maryland planter and patriot

George Washington (17321799), former general and president-elect

Samuel Mickle Fox (17631808), president of the Bank of Pennsylvania

Joseph Barrell (17391804), Boston merchant

Elias Hasket Derby (17391799), Salems wealthiest merchant

James Monroe (17581831), newly elected president of the United States

Harrison Gray Otis (17651848), Boston merchant, real estate developer, and politician

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Charles Willson Peale (17411821), Annapolis portraitist

John Trumbull (17561843), Connecticut-born portraitist and aspiring history painter

Maria Hadfield Cosway (17601838), Anglo-Italian wife of artist Richard Cosway

Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (1775?1865), wife of Dr. William Thornton

George Ticknor (17911871), a well-to-do young Bostonian planning a Grand Tour

Ellen Randolph (17961876), granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Randolph (17921875), grandson of Thomas Jefferson

Joseph Coolidge Jr. (17981879), husband of Ellen Randolph

T. Jefferson Coolidge Jr. (18631912), Ellen and Joseph Coolidges grandson

Jefferson Monroe Levy (18521924), owner of Monticello

The job wasnt much, but he knew he had no grounds for complaint. At the beck and call of Professor George Henry Chase, the twenty-three-year-old graduate student appreciated the work, he really did. But who could blame him for daydreaming about his first visit to Europe the previous summer and fall? The stops on his journey had included London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna. He had walked the Amalfi coast, bicycled through the French countryside, and seen Chartres and Avignon by moonlight.

Yes, Sidney Fiske Kimball had to admit, Harvard had been good to him, bestowing upon him an A.B. in architecture summa cum laude in 1909. He had been awarded a Sheldon Fellowship, too (a loafing fellowship, as it was known about campus, its sole requirement being to travel abroad). Next came an assistantship, but here he was, in the winter of 1912, looking out his window not at the neoclassical beauty of Paris or the classical ruins of Rome. All he could see was a snow-covered Cambridge streetscape. He noted in his diary, I want specially to write about the French eighteenth century, which I had fallen in love with in Paris. Instead, he was working toward an immediate goal, to earn his M. Arch. degree by completing a design for a grandiose governors palace for Panama. He was teaching a course in art history, too, but wondered all the while just where it would get him.