Background
Joseph-Jacques Ramée was born on April 26, 1764 at Charlemont (Ardennes), France.
Joseph-Jacques Ramée was born on April 26, 1764 at Charlemont (Ardennes), France.
Precociously interested in architecture, he was made inspector of buildings at the court of the Count of Artois when he was only sixteen.
Indicted as a suspect by a Revolutionary court in 1792, he fled to the army of Dumouriez, where he served as a major.
In 1794 he went to northeast Germany, and spent the years 1794-1811 there and in Denmark as an architect and landscape designer. A plan for an estate at Friedrichstal, Copenhagen, dated 1804, is published in his book, Parcs et jardins; he was the architect of the Hamburg Bourse, and in Denmark designed the château of Sophienholm, and with his compatriot, P. Lesueur, directed the decoration of the Eriksen Palace.
In 1811 he came to America, probably first to New York; in 1813 and 1814 Philadelphia directories show that he was resident there. The papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe indicate that in 1816 Ramée was in Baltimore, the guest of Dennis A. Smith, whose great estate, "Calverton, " he designed. In that year he was unsuccessful in the attempt to be architect of the Baltimore Exchange, despite Smith's enthusiastic backing, and in the same year he returned to Europe.
He worked in Belgium and Germany, settled in Paris in 1823, and died nineteen years later at Beaurains, near Noyon.
Some time after Ramée returned to France he published a collection of his designs. This book is called by the French biographers Jardins irréguliers et maisons de campagne, but a volume in the possession of C. W. Leavitt & Company, New York, bears the title Parcs et jardins, composées et executées dans differens countrées de l'Europe et des États Unis d'Amérique, par Joseph Ramée, architecte (Paris, no date). Ramée's most important American work was the layout and the first buildings for Union College, Schenectady, New York.
The original plan is in the college library. The scheme is truly monumental: two long buildings flanking a great semicircular court of honor, with a rotunda in the center. Unfortunately this central portion was not built until the late nineteenth century, when it was carried out in an inharmonious style, but the two flanking buildings, built 1813-20, are from Ramée's designs. They are distinguished by delicacy, simplicity, and classic dignity. Union thus became the first college in the country to be built from an architect's carefully studied and composed plan. At about the same time (1812 - 13) Ramée designed the estate of Miss Catherine Duane at Duanesburgh, and possibly designed the house (erected 1812) as well.
His original plan in water color for the Duane place is in the possession of Mr. George W. Featherstonhaugh, of Duanesburgh; it is dated 1813. Part at least of the ambitious scheme was carried out.
The triumphal arch scheme which Ramée submitted for the competition for the Washington Monument in Baltimore is in the historical museum (Peale's Museum) of that city. Besides these projects, his Parcs et jardins shows a plan of an estate on "Rapide Long Island" in the St. Lawrence, now known as Ogden Island, opposite Waddington, New York. It has been stated, that Ramée was employed by the federal government in planning "fortifications and public works, " and, by French writers, that he laid out the plan of several cities in the state of New York, but no further evidence of either of these activities has come to light. In all his gardens Ramée followed the naturalistic style that was then supplanting the earlier formality. As an architect, he seems to have been unusually adaptable; the Union buildings are surprisingly "American" in spirit, and the central rotunda shown on the early drawings is a remarkable precursor of the Jefferson rotunda at the University of Virginia.
He was married, and his son Daniel, later a well-known writer on Gothic architecture, was with his father in America.
