Please join the Latrobe Chapter for a members-only a tour of the Octagon House (1799 New York Avenue NW). Katherine Somerville, Director of Programs at the Octagon, will be leading us on an hour-long tour. Ms. Somerville will present the history of change at the Octagon, one of America's finest early residences. 

In 1799, wealthy Virginian John Tayloe III, purchased an oddly-shaped lot at the intersection of 18th Street and New York Avenue, a few blocks north of the Potomac River, to build his family an urban home in the new capitol city. Rather than imposing a regular form upon the irregular site, architect Dr. William Thornton (first architect of the U.S. Capitol) designed a house composed of rectangular masses pivoting off a round entry pavilion, an innovative approach that fitted the functional and social needs of one of the wealthiest men in the new nation onto a difficult, if beautiful property. Taut massing and restrained but well-informed detailing mark the house as one of the finest in the Federal Style period. After it opened in 1801, President Madison occupied the Octagon after the White House burned in 1814, and he signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war of 1812, in the house. In the second half of the 19th century, the Octagon housed a hospital and an apartment building. In 1899, the Octagon became the headquarters for the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1973, the AIA relocated to a larger building just northeast, which was designed around the historic structure. Now operated as an historic site by the AIA, since 1990 the Octagon has undergone several restoration projects. 

Mount Vernon is the most replicated building in the United States. Americans slap those spindly white columns onto funeral homes, dry-cleaners, motels, and McMansions. But how and why did George Washington's eccentrically vernacular mansion get translated onto such a wide range of commercial and residential buildings? Over the past 200 years, Mount Vernon has become an iconic architectural image that is flexible enough to serve an astonishing range of building types and functions, political points of view, and understandings of the American past.

Lydia Mattice Brandt is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches architectural history; the history of American art; and the theory, methods, and practice of historic preservation. This summer, she is a fellow at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, where she is finishing her book on the image of Mount Vernon in popular American architecture and culture.

Washington, DC, may be the United States’ official capital, but the northern Virginia area is the covert capital of a secret empire. Anchored at one end on the Pentagon and at the other on CIA headquarters, the area has been profoundly affected in its architecture, culture, and politics by the covert business done there, business which touches every part of the globe. 

Join Professor Andrew Friedman of Haverford College for a fascinating discussion of an aspect of the secret world of espionage that you probably never considered: architecture. Afterwards, Professor Friedman will sign his book Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia, and you can examine photographs from the secret files of the International Spy Museum showing long-gone classified CIA facilities around the Washington area.

Cosponsored by the International Spy Museum and the Historical Society of Fairfax County

For more than one hundred years, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has worked to promote high artistic standards in the design of national symbols, particularly for the design of Washington, DC. The most visible— and controversial—part of the Commission’s work has been the design of national memorials in the heart of the city’s monumental core. Reflecting aesthetic, cultural, and political trends, the memorials reveal a larger perspective about Americans and the presentation of the country’s history in built form. Commission of Fine Arts Secretary Thomas Luebke will present this story of art, planning, and politics as explored in his recent book Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. There will be a limited number of books for sale at the lecture. 

Thomas Luebke has served as Secretary of the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal design review agency for the nation’s capital, since 2005. He is an architect with over twenty years’ experience in design, planning, and historic preservation in both public and private sectors and was the design leader in the development of the 2009 Monumental Core Framework Plan for Washington, D.C. He is the editor of the 2013 book Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. 

November 11, 2018 will mark the centennial of the Armistice ending the Great War. In its aftermath, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) was established to enhance the overseas military cemeteries for the fallen and erect memorials to the combat accomplishments of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Just as the events of World War I are largely forgotten by the American public, the original commemorative program of the ABMC has been overshadowed by its massive World War II American cemeteries in places like Normandy. 

Initially the War Department established eight World War I cemeteries in France, England, and Belgium. ABMC was created in 1923 to improve these cemeteries and manage an ambitious program of overseas monument building. Paul P. Cret became their consulting architect and subsequently guided every aspect of the AMBC construction program. Cret brought in an impressive roster of his architectural contemporaries, including John Russell Pope, Ralph Adams Cram, and George Howe. The architecture and landscapes of the ABMC display a sophisticated Beaux Arts approach, with the Art Moderne, Neoclassical, or Gothic Revival details and forms that characterized some of the best civic architecture of the 1920s and 30s. This lecture will examine overseas military cemetery policy after World War I, the social and political role of the ABMC sites in creating a public memory of the war, and design practices and ideals of the time. 

Lisa Pfueller Davidson, Ph.D., is a historian with Heritage Documentation Programs of the National Park Service. Her work on ABMC is part of a multi-year documentation effort by ABMC and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) leading up to the World War I Centennial.

Located in the Brookeville Historic District in Montgomery County, Madison House is the oldest and arguably the most significant structure in this once bustling market town founded by local Quakers. The house was erected ca. 1798 as the residence and store of Caleb Bentley and is a vernacular expression of the Federal style. It is elegantly understated and includes many architectural refinements, yet as originally planned it lacked the formality common to other houses in the region constructed both for families of middling status and the more affluent. Madison House was later altered and expanded to conform to rising and more rigidly defined middle-class expectations, providing a case study for the evolving use of domestic space as it related to gentility and class formation in the early nineteenth century.

Madison House also holds a significant place in the history of the War of 1812. Its present name originated with its use in 1814 as a place of refuge by President James Madison and others fleeing Washington when the British invaded and set fire to the city. The careful stewardship of Madison House was recognized in 2012 when it received the Washington Post award for best historic rehabilitation.

Sandy Heiler, homeowner and Vice Chairman, Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission, and Catherine Lavoie, Chief, Historic American Buildings Survey, will lead the tour. Guidebooks for a short self-guided walking tour of the Brookeville Historic District will also be made available.