Touro Synagogue, Newport

The building, the oldest Synagogue in the US, is angled to the street on a rise so that the ark inside faces Jerusalem. Only the elegance of the entrance porch, with arching inside a pedimented Ionic enclosure and the same generous spread of stairs as those for the Vernon House, anticipates the interior. For his design, Harrison borrowed from a two-story galleried hall in William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones and Others, and, for details of columns, balustrades, and the ark, from James Gibbs’s Rules of Drawing and Batty Langley’s Treasury of Designs, all books in his personal library.