"This Beautiful Art": Jefferson's Public Architecture

We're spending August wandering through some US public buildings in the company of four American architects.  Our goal is to experience some of the regional flavor and peculiarities of American architecture.  Today: Thomas Jefferson's two big public building projects: the Virginia State Capitol and The University of Virginia.

The closest most US presidents get to a set of architectural blueprints is when they authorize the building of their presidential library.  While the Kennedy Library at Harvard actually promotes education and conversation, most presidential libraries (Reagan, Bush especially) are simply examples of a grandiose edifice complex in which we are invited (or charged admission) to idolize a whitewashed version of their administration’s accomplishments, built as quickly as possible after they leave office. 

Library, it’s called, but it’s more info-tainment center than research collection.

Not so our third president, Thomas Jefferson, a self-trained and devoted architect in his own right.  He predated the fetish of presidential library, but he did design a genuine educational library for his beloved University of Virginia as part of his revolutionary recasting of European buildings and institutions in his new nation.

Jefferson's sketch plan for The Rotunda at the University of Virgina The RotundaJefferson was a fine draftsman, putting pen to paper not just to declare independence, but also creating meticulous designs for public architecture he hoped would embody this new political philosophy.  A scientist, man of letters, ardent classicist, gentleman farmer, (and yes, a slave owner,)  he helped construct the new nation, literally, with buildings.  As the first US Secretary of State he oversaw the building of the new federal city, Washington DC.  He drew on his experience and taste in architecture gained from designing his own home Monticello, and in drafting plans for the new Virginia state capitol in Richmond and the new University of Virginia, his home state.  In each case, home, capitols and university, he consciously rejected the English Georgian and Colonial architectural styles of the day, and instead promoted a new Roman Revivialist style, linking the ancient Roman ideals of democracy and education with the literal building of a new nation.

When the British established the colonial state capitol in Williamsburg, Virginia they erected a grand Georgian edifice. After Independence, Jefferson lobbied tirelessly that the state capitol be moved to a new city, Richmond, and that it follow a new, unusual architectural style, the neoclassical “temple” style.  He submitted drawings imitating his favorite Roman building, the Maison Carre in the French city of Nimes, an ancient Roman temple he called “the best morsel of ancient architecture” still standing.  Hence was built the first example of a “temple” style building in America, but the temple was government, not religion.

He had seen the Maison Carre (“square building”)  and other Roman ruins, while serving as the new nation’s ambassador to France.  Inspired by these embodiments of the Roman ideal of republicanism, and by French Enlightenment thought, he wrote his fellow Virginian James Madison to encourage Virginia to adopt this radical new building style, neo-classicism: "How is a taste of this beautiful art to be formed in our countrymen unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to be erected, or presenting to them models for their study and imitation?" 

This beautiful art – that’s architecture.

(Can you imagine George Bush writing Dick Cheney about architecture?  There actually was a time when our presidents had some sense of beauty and education.)

Jefferson also found time to submit drawings for a new university in his home state, and he likewise proposed a radical new design of an old institution.  American universities like Harvard and Yale had up until then followed the European university model; a cloister-like collection of large multipurpose buildings focused around a central church. 

Academic Village at University of Virginia Jefferson designed his university in an unusual new form, as an “academic village.” The ten smaller buildings in the academic village were each unique in design, copying different architectural styles Jefferson had learned from Italian Renaissance neoclassicist Palladio.  Jefferson owned a rare copy of Palladio’s recently translated Four Treatises on Architecture and widely copied his use of columns, pediment and rotunda.  The ten different buildings were themselves labs of architecture and philosophy.  The medium was the message. 

Jefferson was an early advocate for public education for all, funded by the state, and he intended that these smaller buildings might help promote more egalitarian, democratic conversations between students and faculty.

But he disagreed with Palladio’s insistence that churches have a central place in public architecture, since, Palladio said, religion was the “safeguard and protectorate” of citizens.

Jefferson advocated the separation of church and state, and insisted that education was now the “safeguard and protectorate” of the citizens of a new nation.  So the central focus of Jefferson’s academic village was not a central church, but a central library.  This he designed in imitation of another of his favorite classical buildings, the Pantheon in Rome.  So Jefferson’s presidential  library actually is one, an accurate monument to his values.

Jefferson was so hopeful about the power of education: "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day...the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which this is to be effected."  “Knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness.”  “If a national expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.  Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  Were it so today. 

I’ll leave you with one last Jefferson quote.  He and John Adams had a long friendship, some feuds and power struggles, a regular correspondence, and they died on the same day, July 4^th, 1826, the 50^th anniversary of Independence. Often they wrote each other about the past and the meaning of their history changing work.  But late in life Jefferson wrote Adams that he hoped the nation would live more to its future:

"I live the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, - so good night.  I will dream on."

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter