WASHINGTON — Preservationists celebrating Benjamin Henry Latrobe, lauded as America's first architect, are finding that the imperious voice of Frank Lloyd Wright insists on joining the conversation.
Wright's name bobbed up repeatedly last week as representatives of nine institutions that guard Latrobe's heritage laid plans to elevate their hero to the heights Wright has long occupied.
To do that they have created a united front called "Latrobe's America," which plans a $50 million effort to restore Latrobe's surviving buildings and spread the word of his achievements. Exhibits, a book and a television documentary are planned.
But one participant noted mournfully that while Wright, who died in 1959, remains the 20th century's most celebrated American architect, Latrobe is hardly a household name.
That's true even though Latrobe left his mark on the White House, designed the great interior spaces of the U.S. Capitol and built America's first Roman Catholic cathedral, a Baltimore landmark now considered his masterpiece.
But there are parallels between Latrobe, who helped set the architectural style of the young republic, and Wright, who revolutionized American architecture in the first half of the 20th century and despised the classic style Latrobe had championed.
Both were skilled draftsmen and capable engineers who scorned their rivals. Both were musical, frequently short of ready cash, always ready to break the rules of traditional architecture and supremely confident of their own talent.
Wright said that when he needed ideas he simply shook them out of his sleeve. Latrobe said: "My designs come of themselves, unasked in multitudes."
Latrobe's partisans are launching a five-year effort to tell his story and preserve his remaining work.
Meeting at Decatur House in Washington, which Latrobe built in 1818 for naval hero Stephen Decatur, they lost no time getting started.
"He initiated the American architectural profession," said Patrick Snadon, a University of Cincinnati scholar and author of a forthcoming book on Latrobe's domestic architecture.
"Frank Lloyd Wright was a great designer; Benjamin Henry Latrobe was a great Capital A architect, period, said William Dupont, an architect representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
"More will know about him, his gifts, his fiery temperament, the delicacy of his drawings and watercolors, all against the backdrop of a forming nation," said William Seale, a chronicler of White House history.
America and the English-born Latrobe proved an easy match.
Sailing to the United States in 1795, Latrobe eventually caught the eye of America's most ardent amateur architect, President Thomas Jefferson. In 1803, Jefferson installed him as surveyor of public buildings and put him to work at the White House and Capitol.
Jefferson sought to connect the new republic to the democratic experiments of ancient Greece. Latrobe advocated the revival of Greek architecture in a new nation based on those ancient ideals.
Grumbling about shoddy work by those who had preceded him at the Capitol, Latrobe designed the old chambers of the Senate and Supreme Court and the old hall of the House of Representatives, now Statuary Hall. His most popular creations were his corn cob columns, whose tops were modeled from half-shucked ears of American corn.
Latrobe envisioned the North and South porticoes of the White House. Nearby, he built St. John's Episcopal Church. One architectural historian describes it as "a little jewel of clarity."
The Decatur House participants agreed that Latrobe's masterpiece is his Greek-revival cathedral in Baltimore where efforts are under way to raise $25 million to restore the dome's 24 skylights and flood the dim interior with light, just as the architect intended.
Decatur House itself is one of just three of 60 Latrobe houses surviving in America; all plan restorations.
Latrobe died of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1820 and was buried in an unmarked grave. But his influence survived him through his work and the young architects he trained.
Cincinnati's Snadon says that a chart of six generations of American architects, beginning with Latrobe and including his apprentices and the architects they trained, leads directly to the Chicago drafting rooms of architect Louis Sullivan.
It was Sullivan who hired Frank Lloyd Wright.