Class 06 High Style: Architecture by the Book

ARCH 416

Spring 15

Charles Willson PealePortrait of Jefferson1791oil on canvas23 ¼ x 19 inches

Jefferson’s c.v.

accomplishments

• author of Declaration of Independence

• US Secretary of State

• US Minister to France

• US President (3d)

• founder of University of Virginia

Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom• drafted 1777

• broadside 1779

• tabled by General Assembly which contained many members of Church of England

• enacted 1786 in the wake of an attempt to impose a public tax to support Christian institutions

Jefferson as architect

• classical education that led him to value Greek and Roman philosophy, politics, natural sciences, and architecture

• in a colonial context, books will be more important than built examples

“Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.”

—Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782 (published 1786)

The Orders are a set of rulesgoverning proportion and structure.

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580)

• celebrated architect with many buildings in Venice and the Veneto (churches, urban palazzos, rural villas)

• author of Four Books on Architecture (1570), extremely influential architectural treatise

• https://archive.org/details/iquattrolibridel01pall

Digitized version of:

I quattri libri dell’architecture di Andrea Palladio (1570)

• creation of a villa prototype copied in many other locations in Europe (and subsequently at Monticello)

• one example: Villa Almerico (or Villa Rotonda), outside Vicenza

• giving a private home the dignity, magnificence, and durability of a temple

Chiswick House, completed 1729, designed by Lord Burlington

Monticello

Jefferson inherited in 1764

“big house” of a 5,000 acre plantation*: a home but also a corporate HQ for a large economic enterprise

*acquired another 11,000 acres through his marriage

tobacco farming; after 1790 greater diversification and wheat for European market

other industries and a large labor force on site (textile production, nail factory)

120-140 African slaves were the workforce

2 campaigns of building

• Phase 1 begins 1768

• Martha arrives 1772

• she dies in 1782

• August 1784: Jefferson to Paris until September 1789

• Phase 2

• after return from Paris

Jefferson in Paris

"Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe!...You are perhaps, curious to know how this new scene has struck a savage of the mountains of America...Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I should want words. It is in these arts they shine.”—letter to Charles Bellini, September 30, 1785

Houdon, Bust of Jefferson, 1789marble, MFA, Boston

"While in Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hôtel de Salm, and used to go to the T[h]uileriesalmost daily, to look at it.”

—letter to Madame de Tessé, March 2, 1787

enjoying the fine arts

• architecture

• art (attended the Salon of 1787)

• theater (plays by Moliere and Racine, among others)

• bookstores

• shopping for home goods

• bought furniture, kitchen utensils, candlesticks, teapots, tablecloths, fabric and other household items

• 86 crates worth!

plan of Monticello with Phase 1 in heavier shading and Phase 2 superimposed

Mulberry Row

University of Virginia

University of Virginia

• 1817 old cornifeld of 43 ¾ acres puchased for the college (Jefferson was 74. He did the surveying and grading (done by hand by a team of ten people).

• Onsite brickyard turned out 180,000 bricks per month.

• 1817-1826 construction of the “AcademicalVillage”

• Jefferson eventually hired someone to supervise construction

1853 with annex1895 fire

Academical Village

• Lawn

• Pavilions: 2-story buildings to house a professor and subject: classroom downstairs, living space upstairs

• Colonnade: covered walkways plus one-story student rooms

• Rotunda: library, (gathering space, can be used as a chapel)

pavilion sources

Giacomo Leoni's The Architecture of A. Palladio(1742)

Roland Fréart de Chambray and Charles-EdouardErrard's Parallèle de l'Architecture Antique avec la Moderne (1766).

The pavilions should “be models of good taste and good architecture, & of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the architectural lectures.”

each pavilion makes use of an unique order/specific source(I) Doric of Diocletian's Baths, Rome, from Chambray(II) Ionic of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, Rome, from Palladio(III) Corinthian from Palladio;(IV) Doric of Albano, from Chambray (though Jefferson added a base); (V) Ionic from Palladio; (VI) Ionic of the Theater of Marcellus, Rome, from Chambray; (VII) Doric from Palladio;(VIII) Corinthian of Diocletian's Baths, Rome, from Chambray; (IX) Ionic of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, Rome, from Palladio

(originally Jefferson intended Tuscan, but altered it in construction);

(X) Doric of the Theater of Marcellus, Rome, from Chambray.

rotunda sources

• For the Rotunda (inspired by Latrobe's suggestion and by drawings that have been lost), Jefferson turned to the Pantheon in Rome as shown in Palladio, and, as he explained, changed the scale: “The diameter of the building 77 feet, being ½ of the Pantheon, consequently ¼A, area, H ⅛ volume.” Jefferson specified a wooden truss for the dome, derived from Philibert Delorme's book Nouvelles Inventions (1561). The upper floor was the library, and the lower floors were for classes. Jefferson also noted that chapel services could be accommodated in the Rotunda.