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Who they were

Benjamin Henry Latrobe was a British-born architect and engineer widely regarded as the first professionally trained architect to practise in the United States. Born in a Moravian settlement in Yorkshire and sent as a teenager to a Moravian school in Germany, he later trained under prominent London architects and engineers before emigrating to America in 1795, partly for financial reasons after his first architectural practice in England had failed. He introduced a refined neoclassical, Greek Revival style to American public building, beginning with the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1801, the country's first fully Greek Revival building, a style that soon became closely associated with the young republic's self-image as a new democracy modelled loosely on ancient Athens, and Philadelphia's pioneering waterworks.

Latrobe trained as an architect in London before crossing the Atlantic to build a career in the young United States^{[2, p. 3]}. He moved between Newcastle, Wilmington, Philadelphia and other towns, working wherever commissions could be found, at a time when there was barely such a thing as a professional American architect^{[1, p. 18]}. Early work included Old West at Dickinson College in 1803, praised for the scale and proportion a formally trained architect and engineer could bring to an American campus building^{[2, p. 2][2, p. 3]}. That reputation reached Thomas Jefferson, who corresponded with Latrobe directly about federal building work in Washington^{[1, p. 1][1, p. 3]}.

Latrobe was appointed the United States' Surveyor of the Public Buildings, taking charge of construction on the Capitol and the President's House under Jefferson^{[1, p. 1][1, p. 50]}. He designed the Capitol's south wing and worked alongside fellow architect Maximilian Godefroy on Baltimore's Basilica of the Assumption, one of the era's most ambitious American church buildings^{[3, p. 11]}. In 1814, British forces burned the Capitol and the President's House during their occupation of Washington^{[1, p. 32][1, p. 36]}. Latrobe returned to the capital in April 1815 to rebuild what had been destroyed, producing new plans for the House of Representatives and Senate wings out of the ruins^{[1, p. 36][1, p. 39][1, p. 45]}.

Latrobe died of yellow fever in New Orleans in September 1820 while overseeing construction of the city's waterworks, just three years after his son Henry died of the same disease while continuing his father's work. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the city's Protestant cemetery.

Latrobe is remembered as one of the first professionally trained architects to practise in the United States, having brought formal London training to a country that had few such specialists^{[2, p. 3]}. His Capitol and President's House work, and the post-1814 rebuilding drawings he produced, remain part of the historical record used to understand the buildings' original design and reconstruction^{[1, p. 39][1, p. 45]}. Two of his sons, John H. B. Latrobe and Benjamin Henry Latrobe Jr., grew up around his federal building projects and went on to their own careers^{[1, p. 15]}.

Latrobe was not only a builder but a working scientist: he prepared a formal report to the American Philosophical Society answering a query from a Rotterdam society about improvements made to steam-engine construction in America, a sign of how far his interests ran beyond bricks and columns^[4].

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