Background
The place and date of his birth remain unknown.
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Peter Banner
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Banner trained in London.
Career
He appeared in the New York Directory as house carpenter and master-builder from 1795 to 1798 inclusive, and in 1806 we find him listed in the Boston Directory as architect. He seems to have lived in Boston till at least 1828, the date of the last appearance of his name. He may have moved to Worcester, for his grandson, George H. Banner (son of Peter Banner, Jr. ) was born in Worcester in 1834, and moved later to Washington, New Hampshire.
Banner's name appears once in the Boston Directory as Baner (1822), and it was also occasionally spelled Bonner. It is so spelled in Ellen S. Bulfinch's Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch (1896), who refers on page 118 to the Park Street Church, built in 1810 "from the design of Peter Bonner, an English architect. " W. W. Wheildon, in the Memoir of Solomon Willard (designer of the Bunker Hill Monument), published by the Monument Association of Boston in 1865, states on page 29 that Banner had practised his profession in England before coming to this country.
The internal evidence apparently bears this out, for the Eben Crafts House in Roxbury, Massachussets, attributed to him and built in 1805, shows a developed sense both of composition and technique. The attribution of this design to Banner has been questioned, notably by C. A. Place, in Charles Bulfinch, Architect and Citizen (1925), but it appears to be justified. It is made on the basis of Wheildon's statement, and is followed without question by S. Fiske Kimball. The house is manifestly a work differing from the usual traditional New England mansion of the time; its combination of monumental conception with slimness and extreme refinement of detail seems markedly English; the attribution to Banner is therefore probable.
Banner's great work was the Park Street Church in Boston, in which he was assisted by Daniel Brigham as chief mason, and Solomon Willard (who later himself became an architect) as chief carpenter. The treatment of the front, with high, simple central - entrance motive and the two curved vestibules with a slim colonnade, is unusually fresh, original, beautiful; the whole forms a pleasant foil to the arched windows and severe forms of the church proper. Again, as in the Crafts House, there is a personal note different from the fine New England tradition - a note of finish, monumentality, gracious sophistication. Yet it is the spire which has made the Park Street Church, and Peter Banner with it, famous.
Although in one sense it is the final flowering of the tradition of New England spire design, a close examination reveals again and again in the designer a personality and a training different from that of the usual carpenter-architect of the period. The superposed orders are, of course, usual in New England, but the simple way in which the octagonal plan is expressed, and the daring slimness of the columns, with the lightness and delicacy of the detail throughout, reveal a new kind of beauty. Certain critics have found in this steeple the influence of Wren's tower of St. Bride's Church, Fleet St. , London. Certainly the contrast of plain base and rich spire, and certain tricks in the octagonal plan are the same in each, but nevertheless Banner's interpretation in wood is masterly, and the directness of design and the unassuming expression of the material are even finer than in the Wren example. Of buildings now standing, only the Crafts House at Roxbury and the Park Street Church at Boston can be attributed with any certainty to Banner. It appears, however, that he was the architect of the Old South Parsonage Houses, built in 1809, and long since destroyed. The records of the Old South Church show that Banner won this work over his competitor of the time, Asher Benjamin. In fact, after approving the Benjamin plan, the church, at a meeting June 7, 1809, voted to reconsider its former action and to adopt Banner's plan, which was carried into execution, at a total cost of $16, 310. In 1819 Banner designed the first building of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Massachussets, which remained standing until 1910.
Achievements
Religion
In 1819 Banner designed the first building of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Massachussets, which remained standing until 1910.
