Review: Robert Morris's Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder, by Ryan K. Smith

Abstract

Ryan K. Smith Robert Morris's Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014, 346 pp., 56 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780300196047 The extraordinary house that Robert Morris left unfinished when he was taken to debtors’ prison in 1798 is at the center of one of the earliest and most significant stories of architectural failure in the United States. This unusual topic makes Ryan K. Smith's Robert Morris's Folly a surprising examination, but a welcome one, not only for its attention to the building's economic and architectural failings but also for its demonstration of broader social and political friction in the new country. Little known beyond an occasional mention in architectural histories that typically refer to its French baroque style's being out of step with the rising vogue for the crisp and sparing neoclassicism that would later be called the Federal style, the house is also infamous for its cost overruns, which allegedly ruined its patron. Precious little visual evidence survives for it, although its inclusion (as “An Unfinished House in Chestnut Street”) in William Russell Birch's famous Views of Philadelphia (1800) raises the question of why such a noteworthy spectacle is routinely ignored.1 Smith, a historian whose training in an American civilization program is evident in the breadth of this book, makes a convincing argument that this house manifested the virtual impossibility for Morris, a member of America's elite, to emulate the European taste that would evince high financial and social achievements while also striking a tone that could be understood to be adequately republican. Smith opens the book by establishing the significant status that Morris achieved as member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and financier of …