In his research on the career of Joseph Ramee we owe to Paul V. Turner one of the more amazing rescues of recent architectural history. Before Turner's book, almost nothing had been published on Ramee and, despite his extensive European career, the architect was mentioned only occasionally in survey texts on American architecture for his brief stay in the United States and for his one well-known design, the 1812-14 neoclassical plan for Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Ramee is a challenging subject due to the geographical range of his work and the scattered and fragmentary documentation on it. Born in France in 1764, before his death in 1842 Ramee had moved above a dozen times and had practiced in France, Belgium, several German-speaking countries, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States. No large collection of his papers or drawings survived, so Turner had to chart the architect's complex trajectory across Europe and America, unearthing and translating local documents in several languages along the way. In the process, Turner discovered dozens of heretofore unknown drawings, designs, and still-extant buildings, landscapes and interiors by Ramee. Because of the difficulties of his investigation, Turner occasionally (and appropriately) breaks into the first person in his text to explain particularly challenging pieces of detective work. His book is enlightening reading for anyone interested in the methods of architectural history research.
Ramee's story is fascinating. Trained in pre-revolutionary Paris under Francois-Joseph Belanger (1744-1818), architect to the Comte d'Artois (brother of Louis XVI), Ramee assisted Belanger with several commissions, including the Comte's famous entertaining pavilion, the Bagatelle. In 1790 Ramee began practice on his own. It was in the midst of the French Revolution and a difficult time for artists and architects. As Turner discovered, Ramee played both sides of the political fence. Despite his earlier work for the Bourbons under Belanger, he designed pageants and decorations for the revolutionary government, then later selectively suppressed parts of his career depending upon changes in government or the politics of the clients he hoped to cultivate--his own contradictory accounts of his oeuvre added to Turner's difficulty in accurately reconstructing his career.
In 1793, Ramee got into serious political trouble with the revolutionary government and fled France to begin a thirty year course of peregrinations. With his geographical shifts, his clients ran the gamut from French aristocrats to German burghers, to Danish intellectuals, to American merchants and educators. Among his works Turner discovered a series of severe neoclassical villas in Denmark and Germany which, with their cubic forms and unornamented stucco surfaces, might almost be mistaken for the more classicizing buildings of the early Modern Movement. Mingled with these villas were occasional designs for public buildings and numerous plans for picturesque gardens and parks. In his neoclassical designs, Ramee managed to combine the power of the "revolutionary" architects such as Ledoux, whom he admired, with the Louis XVI-style elegance and eccentricity of his mentor Belanger. As Turner perceives, Ramee's greatest contribution may well have been the synthesis and cross-fertilization of architectural forms and ideas which resulted from his movement among different regional contexts. With his frequent moves and diverse practice, it is difficult to imagine that Ramee always adjusted sensitively to the varying social and cultural expectations of his clients, or to regional factors of environment, materials, and building practices. His elegant and abstract neoclassicism, however, smoothed over such local particularities and his provincial clients were undoubtedly glad to have what they conceived to be the latest fashions from Paris. In this regard, Ramee's work is not unlike that of some large American architectural firms today, which practice internationally and produce buildings that may not be profoundly sensitive to local contexts but satisfy their clients' thirst for the latest American styles. In Ramee's defense, if his major neoclassical private and public buildings had an abstract, international quality, his numerous picturesque park and garden designs and their attendant agricultural and ornamental outbuildings showed considerable sensitivity to the genius loci of site and to regional vernacular building traditions. In addition to his architecture and landscape designs, Ramee began an interior design and furnishing business, based in Hamburg, which produced many high-quality neoclassical interiors, both for his own architectural commissions and for remodelings of existing buildings.
In 1812, a rich Swiss-German entrepreneur, David Parish, lured Ramee to the United States. Parish had purchased vast tracts of wilderness in northern New York State which, with the mixed motives of the idealist and the speculator, he intended to settle and civilize. For Parish Ramee laid out towns, constructed forts and designed numerous public, domestic, industrial and agricultural buildings. Parish's ambitious plans were interrupted by the War of 1812, but not before Ramee had completed many structures, from houses and barns to churches and blast furnaces, some of which survive, and all of which Turner carefully documents.
Turner had already reconstructed Ramee's designs for the Union College campus at Schenectady, New York, of 1812-14, and had placed them within the context of American campus planning of the Federal period in his critically acclaimed book, CAMPUS: AN AMERICAN PLANNING TRADITION (1984), but his discussion of Union College in the current book is the most detailed to date of that important plan. Like Jefferson's better-known plan for the University of Virginia, Ramee's design comprised a grand neoclassical scheme with a central rotunda connected to arcaded ranges defining a central lawn, open to nature at one end (and which, like Jefferson's plan, has also unfortunately been closed off by later additions). Ramee's plan for Union College preceded Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia by several years. Numerous scholars have noted their similarities and have speculated that Ramee's plan influenced Jefferson. Turner argues convincingly that, in fact, the influence probably came indirectly through Latrobe who was familiar with Ramee's plan and then suggested the idea of a central, Pantheon-like rotunda as a focus for Jefferson's developing scheme. Turner's account of Union College is more laudatory and documentary than critical, but Ramee's Union College plan has both strengths and weaknesses. It is grand in scale and highly unified, but the east-west ranges awkwardly intersect the centers of the rear, north-south buildings, and the whole plan opens to the west, whereas, had it opened to the south, it would have had (like Jefferson's campus) a more pleasant environmental orientation. In designing Union College Ramee was admittedly constrained by a previous plan and the already-existing foundations of the western range of buildings, which he was forced to incorporate into his scheme, but he is open to criticism that his plan was too grandiose to assimilate well with the existing elements of the previous plan. (Ramee's plan was also too ambitious financially for the College--the rotunda and its encircling arcade was finished only later in the 19th-century in an aggressive High Victorian Gothic idiom by architect Edward T. Potter). Ramee's plan was also calculated to be seen from a single perspectival point-of-view (the west) and composes much less successfully from any other direction, where one sees only the backs of the ranges and arcades.
Ramee's most successful American design and one of the best of his career, was his beautifully rendered competition entry of 1813 for the Washington Monument in Baltimore. This design was a highly original interpretation of a Roman triumphal arch, with a column-screened interior enframing a statue of Washington. In an imaginative stroke, Ramee treated the arch not as a traditional gateway or an object-of-passage, but as an elevated, sculptural form within a unified urban setting. One can only wish that Ramee's design had been selected, rather than the dull triumphal column of native American architect Robert Mills, which was actually built.
Ramee returned to Europe in 1816, after the fall of Napoleon, and though he could have lived permanently in France under the restored Bourbons, he kept moving between France, Germany and Belgium, as if by then his itinerant lifestyle had become a permanent pattern.
While Turner's book on Ramee is carefully researched, lucidly written and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of international neoclassicism, American architecture, and late 18th and early 19th-century architectural practice, it is not without problems. While Turner does impeccable documentary architectural history, his analysis of Ramee's villas and other domestic designs is disturbingly traditional in its concentration only upon the formal qualities of composition and style, to the almost complete exclusion of any concern with context, whether it be the effects of site and landscape on the design of the houses, or the effects of the cultural and personal circumstances of the clients upon the plan. Indeed, Turner provides no explanations of how the occupants of the houses might have used their spaces. With admirable thoroughness, he measured and drew many of his plans from the surviving buildings, but rarely does he attempt to assign room functions to the plans. His treatment of Ramee's houses neglects over two decades of notable social and spatial analysis of domestic architecture and interiors by English scholars such as Mark Girouard and Peter Thornton, as well as American vernacular scholarship on the social use of space in domestic buildings. Any architectural historian writing today on domestic architecture neglects this literature at his or her peril. It is also unfortunate that not all the drawings Turner mentions in his text for each of Ramee's projects are illustrated in the book (for example, on pp. 32-33, the discussion of Ramee's Berthault-Recamier House in Paris--the architect's most important extant townhouse--mentions that plans survive for all three stories of the house, but only one of them is illustrated). Finally, the design and layout of the book serves both Ramee's work and Turner's scholarship poorly. The illustrations are often confined to the margins so that the photographs and drawings are frequently too small, or, conversely, the margins are too big when they are left empty. The littleness of the illustrations and the spotty quality of the page layouts increases the already somewhat fragmentary and marginal character of Ramee's work and career. Further, many of the photographs were taken by the author himself, presumably with a 35mm camera. For small buildings such as landscape pavilions and agricultural outbuildings this treatment may suffice; the quality of the photographs is inadequate, however, to do justice to Ramee's villas and other major buildings.
Despite these criticisms, Turner's architectural biography of Ramee is as welcome as it is unexpected, and will long remain a model for the careful researching and writing of architectural history under the most difficult of circumstances and on the most elusive of subjects.