ARCHITECT OF DEMOCRACY

Through his homes and government and educational buildings, Thomas Jefferson defined the look of the republic he helped create

BY DANIEL S. LEVY

An engraving from Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (top), Showing the architect’s Villa Rotonda, and Jefferson’s Monticello (above), the building it inspired

AS AMERICA’S FIRST TRULY great architect, Thomas Jefferson understood the importance of design. For him, buildings were more than just simple or elaborate shelters. Architecture embodied the same yearnings found in his Declaration of Independence and served as educational monuments that bestowed the lessons of democracy and reason. Jefferson loved buildings and had an enormous influence on the nation’s physical construction both during its formative period and beyond. This gentleman-architect accomplished this by helping to free America from the staidness of English architecture and directing its gaze back to the ancients as a way to plan for the future. His thoughts were clearly ahead of his time, but Jefferson’s vision arrived just at the right moment. As a result, he helped ensure the classical style as the de facto architecture of the early republic.

Jefferson first sensed this path for American architecture as a young man. From his early years he craved more than what he saw as the crude trappings of polite colonial society. Born in a small wood-frame home in Shadwell, Va., he learned of the wonders of Latin, Greek and the ancient world while still a lad. In 1760, at the age of 16, he arrived in Williamsburg to study at William & Mary College. There he explored the town’s notable building, the state capitol, the college and the Governor’s Palace. He found the boxy, English-style colonial and Georgian architecture uninspiring, considering the palace “not handsome” and the school’s Wren Building a “rude, mis-shapen pile.” The budding classicist was appalled by the “burthen of barbarous ornamentations” around him, commenting years later in Notes on the State of Virginia, “The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.”

Yet while he saw Williamsburg as a backwater, it was there that Jefferson started to find out about great buildings. At the time there was no school of architecture in the colonies—the first one would not exist in the U.S. until 1868—so Jefferson discovered the field the way most people did, through design pattern books as well as Vitruvius’ De architectura, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture. ­Vitruvius’ work—the only major architectural thesis to survive from ­antiquity—insisted that buildings needed to be not only useful but also beautiful. Structures therefore had to be grounded in reason, order, rational mathematical geometry and the purity of such forms as the circle, the square and the triangle.

Many Renaissance architects relied on Vitruvius, and one of the most influential was Andrea di Pietro della Gondola. Nicknamed Palladio, the 16th century Italian designer published I Quattro ­Libri dell’Architettura, or The Four Books of Architecture. Palladio described how to use the various classical styles. He then transcended the rules in his churches, palaces and homes, especially his Villa Rotonda near Vicenza, a grand, symmetrical, domed temple of domesticity. For Jefferson, Palladio’s guide, which he came to call his Bible, was a revelation. The logical architecture of Vitruvius, Palladio and other masters appealed to the fledgling Enlightenment humanist. It became clear to him that the grandeur of buildings lay in the ancient world—in democratic Greece and republican Rome, not in colonial Williamsburg or royal London.

Jefferson would soon be able to test what he had learned. His father Peter died in 1757, and when Jefferson turned 21 he inherited 5,000 acres in Albe­marle County near Charlottesville, where he would build a home. It was a project that would occupy decades of his life and pass through two main phases as the house, like his tastes, evolved with his ideas on home. Back in the 18th century, most Virginia plantations were set along rivers to make the transportation of crops easier. But taking Palladio’s advice to build “in elevated and agreeable places ... upon an eminence,” Jefferson did the counterintuitive colonial thing and staked out his building high up, a place that had been his father’s favorite spot as a boy. Jefferson called his aerie Monticello, Italian for “Little Mountain.” In 1770 the young lawyer started construction on his home. Two years later he married Martha “Patty” Wayles Skelton, a beautiful widow and gifted musician, and the couple set up house in the unfinished building, arriving at Monticello during a blizzard.

The Jeffersons had six children—only two of whom survived to adulthood—but the frail Patty died in 1782, a year after the British surrender. Jefferson vowed never to remarry and focused on his work and his home, informing a friend in 1787, “All my wishes end where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.”

The site was a place of continuous work—he commented to a visitor, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down, one of my favorite ­amusements”—with breaks due to Jefferson’s work and travels. A polymath at heart, he loved music, painting and buildings, and was constantly jotting musings, thoughts and plans in his Memorandum Books. Many of these ideas were then sent to his “undertakers,” the skilled builders overseeing the detailed and hard labor performed by whites and slaves, some of whom received on-the-job training in assorted crafts.

But what got Jefferson to truly appreciate the architecture of the ancients was his time in Europe, where he joined Benjamin Franklin and John ­Adams in 1784 to negotiate commercial treaties and then stayed on as Minister to France. Jefferson’s five-year sojourn opened his eyes to European culture. He sought out the oldest and the latest of European architecture, writing that he “fell in love” with the many buildings being built. Jefferson likewise got to spend time communing with the Maison Carrée in Nîmes in the south of France. Palladio had included this Corinthian-­columned temple in his Four Books. To Jefferson, coming face to stone with the Roman building from the time of Marcus Vipsanius ­Agrippa—the leader who would build the Pantheon in Rome—was a revelation, and he swooned that he could look at it, “like a lover at his mistress.” From his base in France, Jefferson also visited En­gland, where he saw William Kent’s Chiswick House, a neo-­Palladian home based on the Villa Rotonda; toured Holland and Germany; and headed down to Italy.

Jefferson and Clérisseau’s Virginia State Capitol (top), With flanking wings from the early 20th century, and the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France (above)

Jefferson had been governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, and he made a basic plan for the new state capital in Richmond. While he was in Paris, the state legislature asked him to prepare a design for a capitol building, a structure that would combine the government’s legislative, executive and judiciary branches. This commission gave Jefferson a chance to introduce to America “an example of architecture in the classic style of antiquity.” Working with the French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau, he created a building that reflected the Maison Carrée, with the hope that this “most perfect and precious remain of antiquity” would inculcate in Virginians the ideals of civic virtue. Yet worried that the builders would take improper liberties with their ­design, Jefferson and Clérisseau fashioned a detailed plaster model as a guide and shipped it to Virginia.

Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789 and started work as Secretary of State. In Washington he became involved in the design and plans for the new Federal City on the Potomac River. President George Washington had chosen Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant to lay out the town, and Jefferson gave the French architect-engineer maps of several European cities to guide his design. L’Enfant prepared a layout for a grand city, with diagonal avenues crisscrossing a gridiron of streets and intersecting main squares and circles. Tensions with the city commissioners led to L’Enfant’s dismissal, and before he left, Jefferson proposed that L’Enfant hold a building competition for a new executive mansion. It has been speculated that one of the submissions, a domed Palladian design simply signed by “A.Z.,” flowed from the quill of Jefferson.

The commission for what would become known as the White House went to the Irish-born architect James Hoban, and as President in 1801, Jefferson moved into the home he quipped was “big enough for two emperors, one pope, and the grand lama.” Two years later he appointed Benjamin Latrobe as the city’s surveyor of public buildings, and the British-born architect helped spread his own brand of Greek classicism through the construction of the Capitol and other buildings and interiors around town.

After his second term, Jefferson retired to Monticello. The original house with its double porticos had called to mind Palladio’s Villa Cornaro in ­Piombino Dese, Italy. But starting in the 1790s, Jefferson decided to redo the place. Finished in 1809, the Villa Rotonda–inspired structure is a glorious home dominated by a colossal pedimented portico and topped by an octagonal dome. Seeking to make the red brick and white wood facade look like a one-story building, Jefferson had a massive balustrade cover part of the second floor. Visitors entered this 33-room home through its towering parlor, where they could admire Jefferson’s Indian Hall with its Native American artifacts, great clock and the jawbone of a mastodon. But the place was also the center of a working plantation, and Jefferson incorporated storerooms, kitchens, an icehouse and other structures into the estate’s plan. Service buildings were connected by colonnaded passageways that stretched from the house and were set into the hillside so they are largely unseen from the front.

Jefferson’s original plan for Monticello reflects his interest in Palladio’s Villa Cornaro near Venice, a building that would influence many American homes, including the White House’s north portico

As the home of a national and inter­national celebrity, Monticello became a much-visited place. Yet so many pilgrims came up Jefferson’s little mountain that it caused daughter Martha to complain of a continuous “concourse of strangers.” Too many trekkers arrived for Jefferson’s taste, so near Lynchburg he set up a retreat from his retreat, a spot where his granddaughter Ellen ­Wayles Randolph Coolidge wrote, he “found in a pleasant home, rest, leisure [and] power to carry on his favorite pursuits—to think, to study, to read.” It was at Poplar Forest that Jefferson in 1806 started work on an octagon-­shaped home—one of the first in the ­nation—appropriately topped by a dome also reminiscent of his hero Palladio’s Villa Rotonda.

In 1817, Jefferson started work on what he called “the hobby of my old age” with the laying of the cornerstone of the first building at the University of Virginia. The school in Charlottesville was the Sage of Monticello’s final masterpiece, a codification of his work and ideas, an institution dedicated to knowledge and a final design profile of the man. Colleges at the time were associated with religious groups, but the deist Jefferson wanted none of that. Seeking to break free of the imprisoning weight of such institutions, he set out to meld classicism with American aspirations, the rationality of the Renaissance with the openness of the United States. Plans included a cooperative community of colonnaded teaching pavilions, red brick and white wood buildings containing accommodations for professors, and space for classes and students.

The University of ­Virginia’s “academical village”(top). Each building was made to impart knowledge of architecture, like the subtleties of the Ionic order, seen in a ­Palladio ­engraving (above)

Jefferson made sure that each of the 10 structures referenced one of the classical orders of Vitruvius and Palladio—what he saw as “models of taste and good architecture ... so as to serve as specimens for the architectural lectures.” By doing this, the school and its buildings imparted a civilizing force on the future leaders of Virginia and America. The pavilions line the long sides of the U-shaped rectangular Lawn, which is dominated at one end by a library that calls to mind the Pantheon in Rome. Jefferson intentionally left the other end open to the wilderness, where the future of America lay. He kept an eye on the school from his perch up at Monticello, where on Sundays he hosted dinners for students who made their way up his little mountain.

Throughout his life, the former President whole-heartedly encouraged design, seeking good practices for the buildings of America. The skills his “undertakers” picked up on his construction sites spread as they continued their careers. In the process, Jefferson’s belief in the elevating attributes of architecture gave physical manifestation to the buildings of democracy, and the style he ­promoted—which appropriately become known as Jeffersonian ­Classicism—influenced buildings around the nation and redefined the most basic meaning of hearth, home and the pursuit of happiness. The structures he designed are largely with us still, continuing to communicate their beauty, wisdom and ideas. As Jefferson once looked up to Vitruvius and Palladio, we now look up to him.