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4/2006 |
Latrobe’s Baltimore Basilica to Celebrate
200th Birthday Event marks restoration of America’s masterful first cathedral |
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by Tracy Ostroff
The basilica was born of a partnership of Latrobe and Archbishop of Baltimore John Carroll. “Everyone has always heard that it’s one of Latrobe’s greatest—if not his greatest—architectural works, so when we had the opportunity to work on the restoration we were very pleased,” Waite says. “We learned how really significant the building was, and not only for architectural reasons. It illustrates very graphically not only Latrobe’s genius, but also the collaboration of Thomas Jefferson and also the really strong influence of Archbishop John Carroll.”
The basilica, officially known as the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was the first metropolitan cathedral and major religious building constructed in America after the adoption of the Constitution. Now a National Historic Landmark and National Shrine, the church would help shape the direction of Catholic Church in America. It is the site of the country’s first Catholic archdiocese, later became the home of the first order of African-American nuns, and witnessed the consecration of many of America’s first Catholic bishops and a series of councils that guided the rapid growth of Catholicism in the 19th century.
Latrobe obliged and created a design for a Gothic Revival building, the drawings for which are still in the archbishop’s house in Baltimore. But Carroll had other thoughts. “Carroll realized that if he built a Gothic-style building that anti-Catholic forces would use it against the church,” Waite explains. The archbishop really wanted a modern building for its time, which meant the Neoclassical style. “He wanted something on the scale and sophistication of Latrobe’s U.S. Capitol,” Waite says. Carroll persuaded Latrobe to build the present Neoclassical building. After seven design schemes, which also remain in the archbishop’s house today, he went on to create the masterpiece consecrated in 1821. “The Basilica ranks as one of the great buildings in Western architecture,” says Charles Brownell, professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University in a description of the restoration project. “At the Baltimore Basilica, it is a newly visible and much more brilliant Latrobe whom we encounter and a newly knowable and much more precious edifice we have in our care.”
Detailed correspondence between the two gentlemen reveals they didn’t always see eye-to-eye, Waite says. Latrobe insisted on masonry domes for the U.S. Capitol building, making the case that a major public building had to have the architecture that would denote its significance. “He tells Jefferson that the only proper way of providing illumination in the dome is by having a lantern on top, which he did in his Bank of Pennsylvania in 1800.” Instead, Waite says, Jefferson wanted a wooden dome, a technique he used for the dome at Monticello and later for the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Latrobe resisted, but “Jefferson had the last word, and instructs him to put skylights in the dome. Latrobe tells him the skylights are going to create glare and that they are going leak. Jefferson told him to do it anyway. Guess what? Latrobe was absolutely right.”
The interactions and connections continue through the time Jefferson designs the University of Virginia, so much so the theory now is that Latrobe had a hand in doing some of the buildings at UVA. “Latrobe and Jefferson worked very closely together, and a lot of the things in the basilica are what Latrobe would have done in the Capitol had he not inherited a building that William Thornton started, and he had to work with the carcass of that initial design,” Waite says. Restoring Latrobe’s vision
“We had Latrobe’s seventh design in a cross-section watercolor that he did. It showed that in the base of the dome there were four panels for murals of the four evangelists. We did soundings around the dome and we found a hollow area, behind which was one of these panels—completely intact,” Waite says. They had the same experience in the other three locations. Now exposed, cleaned, and restored, the murals’ colors match perfectly with the restored colors, reinforcing that the analysis had really uncovered the original colors accurately, Waite says. Engineering masterpiece
The vaults, Waite says, are really a good indication of Latrobe’s deft engineering ability. “To support the huge mass of the main dome, the rotunda area, he takes and has inverted arches going into the ground so that you have these arches that are actually carrying the weight of the pendentives of the rotunda. The arch distributes those loads evenly on the soil. It’s just a really brilliant solution.” Studies reveal the dome and inverted arches have stood the test of time. “We used really state-of-the-art non-destructive investigation techniques to find out what the condition of that masonry was,” Waite says. “It was really a work of genius to use those inverted arches to carry the dome weight, because there are no cracks, no structural disturbances in that area at all.” The arches will be exposed along with a chapel in the undercroft. “One of the problems with the contractor reading the drawings upside down and constructing the buildings to the wrong dimensions was that there wasn’t enough headroom. We excavated down and underpinned all those brick walls, so that we do have the space for the chapel in the undercroft. That chapel is defined completely by Latrobe’s original brick-vaulted arch architecture. Since it was never done historically, we treated it in a very contemporary way as far as furnishings and fittings,” Waite concludes. Copyright 2006 The American Institute of Architects.
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The basilica’s grand reopening celebration takes place November, 4. A week of tours, open houses, special events, and other festivities will follow, culminating with a procession of America’s Catholic bishops into the basilica for a special celebratory service on November 12. Photographs are property of the Basilica of the Assumption Historic Trust, Inc., unless otherwise noted. |
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