Thermal Baths (Bains d'Eaux Thermales) elevation, 1868 watercolor and ink on paper

Eugène Létang, a respected graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was the first in a long line of French educators to teach architecture in the United States. He came to MIT in 1872, shortly after returning from the Franco-Prussian War, to assist William Robert Ware in the newly formed Department of Architecture. While at the Ecole, Létang had studied in the atelier of Emile Vaudremer and was greatly influenced by his patron. Vaudremer's own work shows the influence of Viollet-le-Duc in its use of a structural rationalism, such as constructional brick work, as well as in the maintaining of a blocky massing and his severe detailing. Létang, an advocate of precise draftsmanship and of the same rational classical architecture, brought many traditions and true Ecole learning to the Institute. What Létang learned from his patron, he then imparted to his own students. After Létang was established at the Institute, Vaudremer's atelier became quite popular among MIT students. Many students, including Robert Spencer, Jr. and Dwight Perkins, found their experiences under Létang's tutelage to be very significant in their lives. Reminiscing, Perkins recalled that: "The principle instructor was E. J. Létang. He was a graduate of the School of Fine Arts Paris. He was, according to the standards of the time, simply superb. He was a great reasoner and a wonderful designer and he had the proper composition which makes teachers out of men." Dwight Perkins in a letter to Margery B. Perkins August 21, 1940 Létang's had his detractors, however, and counted Louis Sullivan among them. Sullivan, in his Autobiography of an Idea, described Létang as: "... sallow earnestness itself; long and lean of face with a scanty student beard. Let us say he was thirty. He had no professional air; he was a student escaped from the Beaux Arts, a transplanted massier as it were of the atelier, where the anciens, the older students, help the nouveaux, the younger set along. He was admirably patient, and seemed to believe in the real value of the work he so candidly was doing; and at times he would say: 'From discussion comes the light.' So here was a student absorbed in teaching students." Louis Sullivan The Autobiography of an Idea, 1924