Washington, as the greatest fiat city of the period, might well have been, rather than Edinburgh, the Romantic Classical city par excellence. Even so, as it was laid out by a French engineer in the 1790s the prototype of its plan was not the Baroque city but the French hunting park. And L’Enfant envisaged for it no walled-in streets and squares but rather the isolated block-like structures that once stood around his ‘circles’ as some still stand around Fischer’s Karolinenplatz in Munich. In Washington, moreover, from 1803 when Jefferson made him Surveyor of Public Buildings until 1817, Latrobe generally had his headquarters; there his pupil Mills became Government Architect and Engineer in 1836, retaining the post until 1851.
Figure 11. John Haviland: Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, 1823-35, plan
The great monuments of the thirties still stand in Washington, mostly designed by Mills himself at the peak of his career. But at the Capitol (Plate [82A]), rising at the head of the main axis of the city, the Romantic Classical elements of the edifice completed in 1827 by Bulfinch are now all but invisible between and below the wings and the dome added after 1851 by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87). Hoban’s White House, moreover, on the cross axis, remains, despite its restoration by Latrobe after the War of 1812 and two twentieth-century campaigns of enlargement and reconstruction, a quite Anglo-Palladian—indeed, almost Gibbsian—work. These focal edifices largely belie the Romantic Classical ideals so boldly epitomized in the tallest of all nineteenth-century obelisks, Mills’s Washington Monument. This was designed in 1833, begun in 1848, and not completed until 1884, when T. L. Casey, an Army engineer, sharpened the pitch of the pyramidon and crowned it with solid aluminium.
Immediately beside the White House, however, the Grecian granite of Mills’s Treasury (Plate [38A]), worthy of Playfair if not of Schinkel, is overshadowed by the former State, War and Navy Department Building with its tremendous Second Empire plasticity (Plate [82B]). Begun in 1836, when Mills received his official appointment, the Treasury was largely completed by 1842; the west wing was added by Isaiah Rogers (1800-69) in 1862-5 following the original design.
Mills’s career got under way decades before he was called to Washington (see Chapter 1). Churches in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Baltimore occupied him first, of which the most notable is the octagonal Monumental Church in Richmond begun in 1812. This is an austere structure with a strongly geometrical organization of the elements, but much less suave and refined than Latrobe’s Baltimore Cathedral. Polygonal planning also gives original character to his Insane Asylum of 1821-5 in Columbia, S.C.; but this has, at the front, a giant Greek Doric portico such as was just becoming even more conventional in America than in Europe at this time.
In an age so monumentally-minded it was a much earlier work, for which Mills won the competition in 1814, the monument erected in honour of Washington at Baltimore in 1815-29, that first made his national reputation. This was the first giant column to be erected in the New World. Superbly placed on a square podium of almost Egyptian severity at the centre of cruciform Mt Vernon Place, this Doric shaft is one of the most effective of the many that this period produced, even if it lacks the megalomaniac scale of his later obelisk in Washington. Mills claimed credit also for proposing the obelisk form for the Bunker Hill Monument[[85]] which Solomon Willard (1783-1861) erected in Charlestown, Mass., in 1825-43.
In Washington Mills’s Government buildings include, besides the Treasury and the Monument, the Patent Office and the old Post Office Department, both begun in 1839. These are sober masonry edifices of wholly fireproof construction incorporating much vaulting. They are dominated by Grecian porticoes, like the Treasury, but without that more conspicuously sited structure’s peristyles along the sides. Mills’s smaller custom houses in various seaboard towns are simple and massive blocks of granite ashlar, the best preserved today being that in New London, Conn. These provided worthy symbols of Federal authority among the slighter edifices of wood and brick that filled the seaports of this period. Like Latrobe, Mills was as much engineer as architect, which helps to explain his preoccupation with fireproof construction; moreover, lighthouses and waterworks figured prominently in his total production.[[86]]
Mills, more than anyone else, set the high standard of design and construction for Federal buildings that was fortunately maintained by his successors until after the Civil War. These were Ammi B. Young (1800-74), who took over the Government post[[87]] in 1852, and Rogers, who followed him ten years later in 1862. In remote San Francisco the Grecian rule in Federal architecture continued very late, as the U.S. Mint there of 1869-74 rather surprisingly indicates. This was possibly designed by Rogers just before his death even though A. B. Mullet had succeeded him in office in 1865.
Related to the Romantic Classicism of Washington is certain Virginia work. Arlington House, as remodelled by the English-born and English-trained Hadfield, rises just across the Potomac River on a high hill-crest; by its tremendously overscaled Paestum-like temple portico, added in 1826 to give grandeur to a modest earlier mansion, this provides a more monumental note in the Washington scene than anything of this period inside the city except Mills’s obelisk and his Treasury.