William Strickland
b. Navesink, NJ, 1788;
d. Nashville, Tennessee, 1854.

William Strickland, a versatile and prolific American famous architect and engineer, best known for his Neo-Classical public buildings. Strickland studied architecture and engineering under Latrobe (1801-c.1805) and worked as a theatre set painter in New York before setting up in practice in Philadelphia (c.1818). He visited Europe for the first time in 1838. His early buildings were varied in style and included the Gothic Philadelphia Masonic Hall (1808- 11) and the somewhat Middle-Eastern Temple of New Jerusalem (1816-17). The Neo-Classical style of his maturity, developed from Latrobe, was distinguished by a conscientious use of Greek vocabulary based on Stuart and Revert’s Antiquities of Athens (published in five volumes 1762- 1830). He achieved fame with his competition-winning design for the Second Bank of the United States, similar in plan to Latrobe’s Bank of Pennsylvania, and fronted by an octastyle Doric portico modelled on the Parthenon. He went on to design further commercial and administrative buildings, theatres and churches, and also undertook major engineering projects, including the “Mixed System” (combined railroad/canal) of Eastern Pennsylvania, several other railroads, the Fair Mount dam, and the Delaware Breakwater.