An architect in early-19th century America couldn't turn his back on a construction site for long—especially an architect who was bad with money. Benjamin Henry Latrobe learned this galling lesson while supervising work on the cathedral that he designed for the Roman Catholics of Baltimore, begun in 1806.

The builders at one point read Latrobe's plans upside down. Piers and walls ended up too short; foundation stones that wouldn't be visible were hand-hammered, inexplicably and expensively. Unneeded marble was delivered for the granite-walled shell. The central dome, thanks to malformed underlying piers, turned out eight inches too wide (it was eventually corrected).

Although Latrobe visited the site periodically, the builders were incompetent, hostile, possibly drunk, and corrupt. Boxfuls of Latrobe's emotional letters to and from the Catholic bishop (and later archbishop), John Carroll, survive. The architect tried to be polite—“I beg you will not call me obstinate”—while confiding exhaustedly to colleagues that he considered the design “dead, and damned past redemption.” Latrobe threatened to quit, publish the correspondence with Carroll and the Archdiocese of Baltimore trustees, and have his name taken off the commission. As he gradually went broke, he suffered crushing bouts of anxiety, melancholy, and dysentery.

Carroll pleaded with him “not to abandon us in the present state of our building.” Latrobe—who had offered his services pro bono—caved. “I will return to the plough,” he promised, then weeks later disgustedly announced yet another “final adieu” but returned again for still more professional punishment. Before the trustees could raise enough money to finish his schemes, Latrobe died of yellow fever in New Orleans.

Despite the controversies, he achieved marvels of space, light, and engineering in the first cathedral to be built in the new United States. Based on collaborations with Thomas Jefferson at the U.S. Capitol, Latrobe set a skylight-pierced wooden dome over an oculus-pierced masonry dome. No leaks would reach the interior, and no direct sunbeams would distract worshipers. “He dealt in the awesome effect of illumination falling from a half-seen source,” notes Charles Brownell, an art history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has been studying Latrobe for three decades. The sanctuary rises to vault after vault, dome after dome, as layered and surprising as interiors by Sir John Soane, the great English architect.

In November 2006, the cathedral, now officially called the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, unveiled a skylit, pastel, colonnaded sanctuary that closely approximates Latrobe's thwarted hopes for a masterwork. The $34 million restoration project shored up and resurfaced the National Historic Landmark, which has been called “North America's most beautiful church” (Sir Nikolaus Pevsner) and “one of the finest ecclesiastical monuments of Romantic Classicism” (Henry-Russell Hitchcock). Few of Latrobe's works still stand; fewer have been treated so respectfully.

The overhaul has surprised some purists. “People are used to a simple choice between keeping later accretions or restoring to one important moment in time, and this was neither,” says preservation architect John G. Waite, whose eponymous Albany, N.Y. firm choreographed up to 125 workers a day during the two-year project. “We restored Latrobe's vision—which was never fully realized—in a way that functions for the 21st century,” he explains. The team of architects mixed real and imagined Latrobisms while selectively clearing out 19th- and 20th-century changes and using innovative preservation tools such as vibrating wire tiltmeters and dial gage extensometers (for testing materials' strength).

Latrobe was not a nostalgist and might not have approved of the retro-ization, says Patrick A. Snadon, co-author of an exhaustive new monograph on the architect, The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. “But he would have loved the high-tech aspect. He would have been right there on the computers,” Snadon says.

Latrobe, born in Yorkshire in 1764, was an iconoclast. As a   teenager, he was thrown out of Moravian schools for spreading doubt and dissent. He taught himself design and engineering by apprenticing with British canal and harbor builders as well as with Samuel Pepys Cockerell, the masterful London neoclassicist. He designed a handful of English mansions in the early 1790s. But not long after Latrobe opened his own London practice, his wife, Lydia, died in childbirth, leaving him with two toddlers to raise. His in-laws coldly cut him out of Lydia's estate. He filed for bankruptcy in 1795 and fled to Virginia, sending for the children when he got settled.

An impatient perfectionist, Latrobe bluntly described himself as “imperious and haughty.” Still, he knew how to engineer thin-shelled domes and long canals the likes of which Americans had never seen, and how to turn on the charm. He quickly befriended George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and steam engine pioneer Robert Fulton. “From the moment he disembarked from aboard ship, he exhibited a facility for meeting influential people,” Snadon and co-author Michael W. Fazio write.

The architect quickly remarried (he and Philadelphia belle Mary Hazlehurst had five children, three of whom survived infancy). While traveling to scores of mid-Atlantic job sites, he resettled the family and office often: Delaware, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington (where he served as Jefferson's Surveyor of the Public Buildings and designed much of the interior of the U.S. Capitol).

In 1804, Baltimore's Bishop Carroll, cousin of Declaration of Independence signer Charles Carroll, sent Latrobe as unsigned cathedral sketch he was considering. Maryland had been a haven for Catholics under British rule, thanks to the Catholic faith of several generations of the Lords Baltimore, and Carroll planned to make a grand architectural statement about the new country's religious tolerance. Latrobe cannily wrote back that he would be “sorry to hurt the feelings” of the anonymous architect, but the sketch was structurally and financially unsound. Its undersized Corinthian columns would not support the roof yet would run overbudget by tens of thousands of dollars, and the whole structure, if framed in timber, would “require constant and expensive repair and painting.”

He offered two of his own alternatives, one Gothic and the other classical. The bishop chose the latter, fearing that the anti-Catholic eyes, gargoyles and buttresses would connote medieval backwardness. Through the overall style was easy to choose, finalizing the details proved nightmarish. Latrobe ended up producing seven drafts of the drawings, while the trustees kept changing their minds and the builders “made changes either in ignorance or out of willful neglect of Latrobe's intentions,” Waite says. The general contractor, John Hillen, served (in conflict of interest) on the trustees' building committee. His chief henchman, George Rohrbach, would later be described by Latrobe as “drunken Rohrbach.”

Carroll frantically raised money; he asked every Catholic family in America to give $1 a year and sought advice from an Ecuadorian archbishop on tapping “the inexhaustible Christian liberality of the wealthy regions of Spain.” In the end, financing came mainly through the Baltimore working class through donations, pew rentals, land sales, and lotteries (at one point, Carrol himself suspiciously won a lottery and promptly reinvested his take in yet more construction).

Latrobe lived to attend a punch-soaked dome-closing ceremony on the roof in 1818, but major portions of his design were still only on paper when he died in 1820. (The basilica opened the next year.) The archdiocese nonetheless stuck to his drawings and hired a series of sympathetic architects, including Latrobe's own son John H.B. Latrobe. Two bulbous Saracenic towers were added in the 1830s, a portico in the 1860s and a half-domed sanctuary extension in 1890; all were based on Latrobe's ideas. During a devastating city fire in 1873, brave parishioners climbed the roof to protect it with wet blankets.

The interior, however, was considered less sacrosanct. Baltimore's Catholic population, originally dominated by German, English, and French families as well as free blacks (the first order of African American nuns was founded in the city in 1829), expanded with waves of Irish and central and southern European immigrants. Each group had different ideas of what a cathedral should look like—Gothic was an especially popular taste—and the archdiocese catered to its new parishioners.

Clutter and gilt crept in where Latrobe had envisioned limestone-gray paint, pale marble flooring, and a few murals. Columns and arches were slathered in moldings, tableaux of saints, inscriptions, and red or white faux marble. In 1919, an Irish-born dry-goods tycoon left the archdiocese much of his estate, provided they spend it on building on a new cathedral. Baltimore society then was decamping for the suburbs, so land was set aside for the new “co-cathedral” at the city's leafy northern edge.

Pope Pius XI officially made Latrobe's downtown work a “minor basilica” in 1937 (the major basilicas are all in Rome), although the exterior was decaying and the interior changing again and again. “The archdiocese knew this would be reduced to a parish church, and they wanted to make it look more parishlike, more homogenized,” explains Mark J. Potter, executive director of the Basilica of the Assumption Historic Trust, a secular nonprofit founded in 1976 to preserve the building.

A new square-towered Gothic-moderne hybrid, named the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, opened on the city outskirts in 1959. Meanwhile, downtown, Latrobe's neglected skylights were torn out, plastered over, and replaced with floodlights and turquoise-enameled chandeliers. Dark-green marble paved the floor. The clear arched windows gave way to stained-glass scenes from the Bible and Maryland ecclesiastical history. Talbot Hamlin, in his Pulitzer Prize-wining 1955 biography of Latrobe, declared the architect a tragic protomodernist genius, “a man ahead of his time,” whose nobly austere basilica had been spoiled inside by “inept ‘decorations’ and boudoir colors.”

Other massive Latrobe studies followed Hamlin's 633-page opus (no one ever seems to write a short book about Latrobe), covering the architect's journals, papers, and drawings. But his buildings were falling at alarming rates; banks and waterworks were vanishing, and the U.S. Capitol was heavily altered. Baltimore had lost its other Latrobe dome, the Baltimore Exchange, in 1901. Snadon notes that just three of Latrobe's 70-odd residential works in the United States survive (including the National Trust's own Decatur House in Washington, D.C.). The Baltimore basilica, Snadon adds, is “unquestionably the most monumental surviving building from his hand,” as well as one of just two extant Latrobe churches—the other, near Decatur House, is the diminutive and much-altered St. Johns Church.

By the time the Basilica Historic Trust hired Waite in the late 1990s, the original building parts and recent patches alike were cracking, bowing, sagging, and dissolving. The undercroft, where the builders had bungled Latrobe's plans for a chapel, was a dank maze of ducts. With grants from the Getty Foundation, Waite and his team analyzed the strength, materials, and proportions of every visible or hidden corner of the building. The resulting reports total some 740 pages and are a geekfest of graphs and charts. Between the lines of scientific documentation, however, the authors' opinions are clear: Most of the later interventions must go. They “seriously compromise Latrobe's original design”; their presence “significantly detracts from the powerful geometry.”

When plans were announced to revert to Latrobean schemes, some locals protested the erasure of time's passage. “Would anyone want to remove the present dome of St. Peter's?” one activist asked the city's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation. A prototype of a clear window was installed, stirring up sympathy for the stained glass. The archdiocese improved public relations by salvaging the windows and dark 1940s pews for other churches nearby. But then preservationists' ire stirred again last fall.

To make room for a planned “prayer garden” beside the basilica, the archdiocese razed a century-old neoclassical apartment building, which it had bought a few years before and promised to save. The structure, wreathed in scrollwork and sculpted garlands, was named the Rochambeau (after the Catholic French commander whose troops camped nearby during the American Revolution). On Sept. 17, 2006, the Baltimore Sun dramatically reported the demolition as the first crane attacked: “The iron teeth bit of 100-pound mouthfuls of trim, roof, wood and brick, and then spit it all out onto the street, where the rubble piled into a sharp-edged heap.”

Cardinal William H. Keeler, the city's archbishop since 1989, has been criticized for the decision. The Rochambeau “wasn't an A-plus building, but it was a B-plus building that could have played a role in future Baltimore housing,” says Walter Schamu, founder of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation. The downtown, after all, attracts countless tourists and has recently gained thousands of new residents, partly thanks to waterfront megaprojects like the National Aquarium and the Camden Yards ballpark. As Schamu stood mournfully watching the Rochambeau's demise, he told the Sun, “It may be the cardinal's vision, but it's a nightmare for Baltimore's architectural past—a huge mistake.”

The president of the National Trust, Richard Moe, also decries the apartment building's loss. “The restoration of the basilica is a remarkable accomplishment,” says Moe. “However, the Trust strongly opposed the needless demolition of the Rochambeau, an architectural anchor on Charles Street. This was a lost opportunity to capitalize on Baltimore's growing market for downtown housing and commercial space.”

The cardinal, for his part, insists that “the building wasn't economically savable.” He tries to focus reporters' attention instead on the reborn basilica: “It's absolutely splendid, so bright and upbeat. It's even more striking than I'd hoped for.”

More than a thousand donors nationwide, of various faiths, contributed to the restoration campaign. The basilica's own congregation of about 400 households chipped in $500,000. Waite brought in A-list artisans and suppliers from across the country. EverGreene Painting Studios of Manhattan applied traditional lime plasterwork, restored or dreamed up trompel'oeil coffers and portraits of saints, and regilded the rooftop crosses. Robinson Iron of Alabama repaired the spear-topped property fence, coating it with Missouri-made Tnemec (that's cement, spelled backward) paint. Nebraska's Ratigan-Schottler Manufacturing carved Latrobean scrollwork—based on vintage photos and illustrations of the mid-1880s church interior—onto pews and confessionals, some of which are now accessible via wheelchair. Roofers from Heildler Roofing Services of Pennsylvania crawled around the parapets and towers, cutting skylights, hand-installing copper, and encapsulating the original white-cedar shingles inside Alaskan yellow-cedar replicas to protect them from the elements. Cummings Stained Glass Studios of Massachusetts daubed a thin, milky layer of ceramic frit on the windowpanes so that they wouldn't look too new.

Potter, director of the Basilica of the Assumption of Historic Trust, says he expects huge increases in attendance during services and docent-led daily tours. The public can even tour the undercroft, which Waite dug out as a chapel alongside an 1890s marble-lined crypt for archbishops. Architectural cognoscenti will know to expect a new blaze of interior light from the reperforated dome, and passersby will likely be drawn to glimpses of a mysteriously sunny interior behind the gray granite facade.

“Even on overcast days, we get 100 percent more light now than we did before,” Potter says. “People have welled up when they walk in here. Whether you want to call this a restoration, a renovation, a decoration—to me that's immaterial. The important thing is that this National Historic Landmark is getting the quality of work and the attention it deserves. I really feel this building is smiling.”

© January/February 2007 Preservation