Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, has also become a place of pilgrimage of a rather different kind (Figure 12). Jefferson built the house for himself to live in, and it served him well. However it is visited not principally because it made a good house, but because of the other things that Jefferson did such as writing the Declaration of Independence that announced, in particularly sonorous phrases, that America would no longer be a colony but would be a free land. He had an illustrious political career that made him one of the most important founders of the USA. His house however was not the home of a president but of a plantation-owner. It was from here that he ran his estates, which were vast by European standards, and prosperous. Jefferson travelled in Europe and took a particular interest in architecture, designing not only the central group of buildings at the University of Virginia (around The Lawn) but also the Virginia State Capitol — hiring some trained professional help in order to have the work carried out properly. The decisions he took about his house say a great deal about him — what he cared about and what he hoped to be. First, this is not a showy and extravagant dwelling. It is larger than many houses, but not large by the standards of stately homes. Moreover it is clear from the whole approach to the design and furnishing of the house that Jefferson did not aspire to make it a sumptuous palace, but was trying for something more sturdy and austere that nevertheless remained cultivated and comfortable. It deliberated avoided flamboyance, and stylistically we could call it Neoclassical, because it belongs with other post-Baroque attempts to go back to the fundamentals of classical architecture. In doing this he was not alone, but in Jefferson’s case the ambition is particularly resonant because it echoes his efforts to think through from first principles what a nation should be, and what rules would govern an ideal society. Jefferson’s estate can be seen as a microcosm of the new nation, and the house was the estate’s seat of government.

_{12. Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia (1796–1808); architect: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1836). Thomas Jefferson is best known for writing the 1776 Declaration of Independence, stirringly calling for the nation to support ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. He went on to be the third president of the United States (1801–9). He built a house at Monticello (1770–9), and then extended and remodelled it (1797–1808), and it has the reputation of being the finest house in America of its age. It has a commanding position, looking out over a great fertile plain. Jefferson’s accomplishment was all the more surprising because he had no formal training but picked up his knowledge of building while travelling in America and Europe, and his architectural accomplishment was shaped by his meetings with foreign professional architects, so he was engaged with the thinking of the artistic élite in a way that his contemporaries at home were not.}