9 Taking the Attic Order Beyond Washington

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

If Latrobe was largely instrumental in bringing a Grecian taste to America, other architects were essential for its dispersal across the country, the Attic order included. Some practitioners were directly connected to Latrobe, such as his students Strickland and Robert Mills, whereas others were among his devotees, notably Alexander Jackson Davis. William Nichols, working quite independently from this group, also made a significant contribution.Emigrating around 1800 from his native England directly to North Carolina, Nichols was subsequently active in Alabama and Mississippi, where he designed state capitols. He obtained, as he once informed the governor of Mississippi, experience in the construction of State Capitols than any other individual in the Union.'00 Just as the states entering the Union used the national Constitution as the model for their governmental organization, so did Nichols look to the federal Capitol as the architectural paradigm to house each state's legislative needs. He known to have traveled north in 1817 and 1823, and to judge from his state house designs, very likely visited Washington along the way, but his taste for Greek architecture was very much his own. It seems to have been fostered during his training as a master builder in Britain and flourished with his professional emergence in America. Like others encouraging that style, he too, in a search for authentic detailing, drew heavily on the Antiquities of Athens. Yet for Nichol's work on governmental buildings, the example of Latrobe in legitimizing and encouraging the Attic and the other Greek orders must not be discounted.Recalling Latrobe's reality, however, his use of the Attic order in the state houses was always in a minor key; it never appeared on the exterior or in the larger public spaces where, not unexpectedly, the canonical three always were preferred.101 In North Carolina, 1820-24, he remodeled an earlier building in Raleigh. By changing the plan to a Greek cross with a dome over the crossing and pedimented porticos on two sides that included attached Ionic columns, he succeeded in giving it a classical guise. Of his interior finishes nothing known and all was lost in an 1831 fire.102 That Nichols may have introduced the Attic order there only can be surmised, the evidence being its presence in two of his subsequent state houses.In 1827, apparently having exhausted the professional opportunities available to him in North Carolina, he migrated to Alabama, where shortly after his arrival he was named state architect and set to work on a new state house for Tuscaloosa, 1827-31. In its exterior appearance Nichols's design very much resembled his remodeling in North Carolina. Recalling perhaps Bulfinch's gallery in Latrobe's Senate chamber, Nichols included a colonnade of slender fluted Attic columns to mark the spectators' section in the High Court of Errors and Appeals.105 In 1833 he moved on and after a brief interlude in New Orleans arrived in Mississippi in 1835, where the next year he was appointed state architect and immediately began planning a new state house in Jackson. Again, the Attic was relegated to the state's highest court (Figure 31), the Supreme Court.104 In subsequent years Nichols did come to use the Attic order more boldly, but on lesser public projects. Around midcentury, he was the architect for a court house in Yazoo City, whose Upper or principal story, according to a contemporary account, is decorated with pilasters, the capitals of which are enriched with leaves, etc., similar to those of the Temple of the Winds at Athens.105 Finally, just prior to his death in 1853, he designed a new Female Academy for Lexington, Mississippi, whose prominent hexastylepedimented portico featured monumental Attic columns.106The uses of the Attic by Robert Mills, who worked under Latrobe from 1802 to 1806, are less certain, but even if all the applications attributed to him are not entirely secure they do nevertheless represent significant uses of the order. …