Searching for Ramée

After more than a decade of research, writing, and dealing with publishers, Paul Turner's book on the architect Joseph Ramée has finally appeared in print.

As an architectural historian, Turner was prompted by professional reasons to undertake the project, but there was also a personal motive: a desire to contribute something to his alma mater by answering an often asked question about Union College's history: .

Who was this mysterious French architect who created the Union campus?

In this account, Turner discusses his project-what caused him to begin it, how he carried it out, and some of the discoveries he made in the process. One of them, by the way, was that the architect should be called Joseph Ramée, not Joseph-Jacques Ramée, as he is often referred to. He used various names in his early years, but in his later life-including his period in America-he called himself simply Joseph Ramée.

Turner says he hopes his book will prove beneficial to Union by filling a gap in its history, revealing the importance of Ramée's design for it, and promoting appreciation and enjoyment of its splendid campus.

I was familiar with the Union campus even before I was a college student. Born and raised in Schenectady, I often walked or bicycled through the campus as a child, and was impressed by the old buildings that faced each other symmetrically across the broad field with the great domed structure at its center. In retrospect, I think this was probably one of the early experiences that sparked my interest in history and architecture.

As an undergraduate at Union, I learned of the architect who designed the campus in 1813, and heard that almost nothing was known about Ramée's life or his other works. After graduating in 1962, I pursued graduate degrees in architecture and art history, wrote a doctoral dissertation on modern French architecture, and went to Stanford University in California to teach the history of architecture. Like Union, Stanford has a beautiful campus based on an orderly design, and I developed there a special interest in the history of American college and university planning, which resulted in my book, Campus: An American Planning Tradition, published in 1984.

In the process of writing Campus, I came to realize for the first time how unprecedented Ramée's design for Union College was, and what an important role it played in the development of the American campus. This is when I conceived the idea of trying to reconstruct Ramée's entire career, in order to understand how he came to design Union College the way he did. But I had no idea what a complex and lengthy project I was getting myself into.

I should say something here about what was known of Ramée when I began this work. In 1932, Union professor Codman Hislop discovered Ramée's long-forgotten plans for the College in the attic of Old Chapel (the drawings now preserved in the archives of Schaffer Library), and this discovery led Professor Harold A. Larrabee to look for information on the obscure French architect. By various means, such as correspondence with a researcher in France, Larrabee collected some facts and documents, the most important of which was a short article on Ramée published in 1830 when the architect was sixty-six years old. It revealed that besides his sojourn in America (from 1812 to 1816), Ramée lived and worked successively in Belgium, Denmark, and several cities and principalities in Germany, as well as his native France-an amazingly international career.

Larrabee also found that Ramée had published three collections of engravings and lithographs of his designs-a copy of one of which, Parcs et jardins, was located and acquired by Union. (For some unknown reason these publications are unbelievably rare. Only two copies of Parcs et jardins, for instance, are known to exist in the world.)

In the 1930s, Professors Hislop and Larrabee wrote several articles reporting their discoveries about Ramée, and later some research on the architect was done by other American scholars. It also turned out that Denmark was the only other country in which there was knowledge of Ramée, due to the fact that several fine country houses designed by him near Copenhagen survived and were documented. (See illustration p.18.)

But there were vast gaps in the story of Ramée's life and career, and puzzling questions.

• Why did he move so often from country to country? 
• What kinds of work had he done in each of these places? 
• Did any of his works still exist, besides the ones known in Denmark and the United States?

My desire to answer these and other questions induced me to embark on my Ramée project, although I realized that there was little chance of discovering much about a forgotten architect after nearly 200 years.

In the summer of 1983, while visiting Paris, I went to the Archives Nationales to try to follow up on clues that indicated that Ramée had designed buildings there before he left France as a young man during the Revolution. After only a couple of days of going through old catalogues and documents and enlisting the help of the archive's librarians, I began to make some remarkable discoveries, which suddenly raised my hopes that the reconstruction of Ramée's lost career might actually be possible.

Recounting one of these discoveries may suggest the excitement of this kind of archival detective work. A petition Ramée wrote to the French government in 1800 referred to some of the architect's early works, including a house for a man named Berthault on the Rue du Mail in Paris. Going through dusty boxes of eighteenth-century building permits (French archives save everything!), I found an application by a Monsieur Berthault to build a house on the Rue du Mail, dated in early 1789. To my amazement, this application was the only one in its box that had drawings attached to it, and these drawings-with notes on them in Ramée's handwriting included an elevation drawing of the street facade of the proposed house.

Although I realized that this design had perhaps never been constructed, since the building application was dated just a month before the fall of the Bastille, I made a quick sketch of Ramée's design, left the Archives, and hurried to the Rue du Mail in the Marais district of RightBank Paris. Walking down this narrow and now somewhat seedy street, I experienced a thrill as I came upon the Berthault Housestill looking exactly as Ramée had designed it. (See photograph p.17.)

Later, I found that this house is recognized by French historians as an important architectural work of the period, but that its architect had previously been unknown. Designed by Ramée when he was twenty-five years old and just beginning his own career after an apprenticeship with an established architect, the house shows Ramée already using the simplified neoclassical style that would characterize his mature work, including the buildings at Union College.

The Berthault House and other discoveries spurred me on to pursue Ramée vigorously in the following months and years, both through investigations I could conduct at Stanford and through research trips to all the places where Ramée had worked. In the process I corresponded with hundreds of people, visited sites and worked in libraries and archives in six countries, and accumulated thousands of documents and records that are stored in boxes which clutter my Stanford office and my home. The project became almost an obsession and definitely a labor of love, fueled by the archaeologist's pleasure in uncovering a forgotten part of the past.

Not all was excitement and discovery, of course. The great bulk of the work was plodding and there were seemingly endless frustrations and wild-goose chases. But gradually the outlines of Ramée's forgotten career were fleshed out, and answers to many of the questions about his life and work emerged.

It became apparent, for example, that Ramée's almost nomadic migrations from country to country were due largely to bad luck-especially the architect's unfortunate tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After establishing an architectural practice somewhere, he was repeatedly forced to give it up and move because of war, economic collapse, or other calamities in this turbulent period of the French Revolution and its aftermath in Europe.

I also discovered that Ramée's flight from France in 1793, which began his years of wandering, was due not to his professional connections with the aristocracy, as historians had previously assumed, but to his involvement in a disastrous plot to overthrow the French government-a story I was able to reconstruct in some detail.

Living for brief periods in many countries, Ramée often had trouble getting architectural work because of his status as a foreigner. In the United States, for instance, he entered the competition in 1813 for a Washington Monument in the city of Baltimore; although his proposed design (cover illustration) was the most skillful and sophisticated entry, it did not win the prize, evidently because the jury felt that the commission should be given to a native-born American architect.

One would think that Ramée, leading such a difficult and unstable life, could not have had a very successful or influential architectural career. But as I found out more about him, I came to realize that he was actually a much more significant architect than historians had realized-precisely because of his nomadic life. Moving frequently, Ramée transmitted new architectural ideas and styles from one country to another, and he often created a unique synthesis of the artistic trends of the period. His design for the Union College campus is a good example, as it introduced to America new notions of planning, in particular a type of environmental design that integrated buildings, formal open spaces, and informal gardens-a concept far ahead of its time in the United States.

I was also struck by the diversity of Ramée's clients and associates, among whom were some of the most remarkable figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They included the Marquis de Lafayette, members of the French royal family, the eccentric English author William Beckford, prominent merchants and bankers in Germany and Denmark, the author Goethe, various dukes of Saxony and other German regions, the Danish poetess Frederikke Brun, the international financier and adventurer David Parish-and, of course, Eliphalet Nott.

Since records of Ramée himself were scarce, these famous clients proved invaluable for reconstructing his career. By examining the papers, diaries, and other records of many of these individuals, I found references to the architect and clues to other aspects of his career. And I gained insight into the dynamics of the architect-client relationship Ramée had with these strong-willed people.

The Union College design again is an example. My reconstruction of the evolution of Ramée's plans for the College revealed a creative give-and-take between him and President Nott that contributed much to the final design for the campus.

By analyzing closely Ramée's many drawings for the Union buildings and grounds, I was also able to solve some mysteries that had puzzled previous scholars. One of these was the identity of a large and elegant building represented in several of the drawings, which is different from any of the structures shown in Ramée's overall campus plans. (See illustration 1).16. )

Some observers had suggested that this unidentified building was not even the work of Ramée. But various clues led me to the realization that this building was part of a first plan that Ramée presented to Nott, later superseded by the plan that was eventually executed. (One of the clues is that fragmentary parts of this "mystery" building are drawn on the backs of several of the drawings of the final campus plan, revealing that Ramée recycled some of the sheets of paper from his first design by cutting them up and turning them over to use for the later design.)

Ramée's Union College drawings constitute the largest group of his drawings for a design or commission. I found additional drawings by the architect in several places in Europe and America, but the total number of his known drawings is still small-only about sixty. From the beginning of my study, one of my hopes was to discover somewhere a cache of his personal papers and drawings, perhaps in the possession of descendants of his. This got me involved in genealogical searches, but although Ramée did have a family (his wife and young son accompanied him to America, and the son later had an architectural career himself), it turned out that no Ramée descendants exist.

I did, however, eventually find a family in France that had inherited some Ramée material in the nineteenth century, including a group of lithographic prints of cottages designed by the architect late in his career. (See illustration p.19.) Some of these cottage designs had previously been unknown. They are remarkable because they show Ramée, late in his life, creating fantastic and whimsical picturesque structures that are completely different in character from the simple, neoclassical forms of his earlier work such as the Union College buildings. This and other discoveries reveal Ramée to be a much more complex creative figure than previously suspected.

One of the most agreeable things about my Ramée project was, of course, the research trips it required to far-flung places in Europe as well as America. But the geographical dispersion of the architect's work also created problems. In the early stages of the project, I conducted research in France, Belgium, Denmark and West Germany, but my attempts to work in East Germany (where Ramée was said to have been active in several cities) were frustrated because some of these places were difficult or impossible for Westerners to visit. I was able to acquire some information through correspondence with archives in the East German cities of Weimar, Erfurt, and Schwerin, but I felt that more could be discovered if I were there in person. In 1990, after I had finished most of my research and was concentrating on writing the book, the Berlin Wall fell, and I arranged to return to Germany to work in the newly opened East. There I made some discoveries that fully justified this last-minute excursion.

One of these finds illustrates the serendipity that occasionally aided my project. The small hill town of Gotha, in Saxony, was one of the places where Ramée had reportedly worked, laying out a park for the Duke of SaxeGotha in the 1790s. I traveled there and spent a day in the archives of the former ducal castle but could find no records concerning Ramée. In the late afternoon, accepting defeat, I left the archives, and as I was finding my way out of the castle I passed a door inscribed as the ducal library. Although this was a less likely source of information on Ramée than the archives, I entered and asked the lady in charge if there was anything there relating to the architect. She consulted various old catalogues, found a reference to an item she said she had never heard of, went into a back room, and eventually emerged with a slim volume. Bound into it were five exquisite watercolor drawings-each signed and dated "Ramée, 1796"-with plans, elevations, and perspective views of a splendid country house, evidently designed for the duke but never built. (See illustration p.16.)

Ramée was an extremely talented artist; his watercolor drawings, in particular, are superb, and these Gotha drawings are among his best. They are also significant because of the nature of the country house represented, revealing the architectural influences on Ramée's work at this point in his career-and, incidentally, employing arcaded walls remarkably similar to those of Ramée's buildings at Union, seventeen years later.

Another East German city, Schwerin, yielded further discoveries. A nineteenth-century article on Ramée states that he built a mausoleum for the young princess of MecklenburgSchwerin (a daughter of Czar Paul of Russia), but nothing else was known about this structure. In Schwerin I found that the mausoleum-a large and magnificent building-still stands in the forested park of the former ducal palace at Ludwigslust.

More important, I discovered in the Mecklenburg State Archives a voluminous correspondence between Ramée and Mecklenburg court officials, recording the design and execution of this building. This correspondence is the most complete document of one of Ramée's works, giving an intimate view of the architect-client relationship, the construction process, financial complications, problems with the work force, and other details.

Besides the geographical range of Ramée's work and the diversity of his clientele, I came to appreciate the multiplicity of his talents. Besides being an architect and an accomplished watercolor artist, he was an important landscape designer (introducing new park and garden concepts to Germany, Denmark, and the United States), a fortification engineer, and a designer of furniture and other decorative arts.

Regarding this last sphere, it was known that Ramée established a furniture factory in Hamburg and designed wallpaper at various times in his career, but no examples of these products were known to survive. Another bit of serendipity changed that. Toward the end of my research, an acquaintance of mine at the Library of Congress in Washington informed me that he had just inventoried an unusual collection of early American wallpapers (actual rolls of wallpaper that had originally been submitted to the government for copyright purposes), and that they were identified as the work of Ramée, manufactured in Philadelphia in 1815. This revealed an aspect of the architect's career that had been completely unknown, his production of highly innovative wallpaper designs-several of which are just now being reproduced and marketed again.

There are still some gaps and unanswered questions in the story of Ramée's life. But the remarkable diversity, quality, and significance of his work has now been documented. In particular, it can now be seen that Ramée was a major player in the transmission of artistic innovation from country to country in Europe and America in the period following the American and French revolutions. Ramée's plan for Union College epitomizes this phenomenon in its introduction to America of a new type of environmental design.

With this understanding of Ramée's career, the influence of his work can now be assessed. In the case of the Union design, we can appreciate the extent to which it helped shape the subsequent development of the American college and university campus.

One example is of special interest. For many years, historians have pointed out the similarity between the Union design and Thomas Jefferson's plan (of four years later) for the University of Virginia-both having groups of neoclassical buildings arranged symmetrically around a courtyard, linked by arcades or colonnades and dominated by a central rotunda. But it remained an open question whether Jefferson was influenced by, or even knew of, Ramée's plan for Union.

When I wrote my book Campus and mentioned this question, I felt it was inconclusive. Now, however, I have determined that Jefferson was indeed influenced by Ramée, especially in the use of a domed rotunda as the centerpiece of a campus plan. The University of Virginia later became the most popular model for American college and university campuses, and Union College thus helped shape hundreds of institutions throughout the country.

Several years ago I recognized another, quite unexpected influence of the Union plan. The central campus of Stanford University, where I work, is a large quadrangle of buildings linked by arcades, conceived in the 1880s by Frederick Law Olmsted (creator of New York's Central Park) and the university's founder, Leland Stanford.

The architectural style of the Stanford buildings is very different from that at Union, but I was struck by the similar concepts of arcaded linkage around a formal courtyard. The possibility that Ramée's Union plan influenced the Stanford design seemed remote-until I found that Leland Stanford had been born and raised between Albany and Schenectady, and thus must have been familiar with the Union design. Olmsted also knew Union College. It seems likely that Stanford and Olmsted drew partly on Ramée's design, consciously or unconsciously, in planning the new campus on the other side of the continent.

As I pursued my research in the library and my office on the Stanford campus, I sometimes thought of the coincidence that this place, inspired partly by Ramée's work, was now the site of my reconstruction of the mysterious French architect's life and career.

This story was featured in Union College Magazine on January 1, 1997