Architecture to Educate a Nation

Thomas Jefferson believed with more certainty than any of the other Founding Fathers that it was architecture that provided the ideal way for new nation-builders to express greatness. “From the Grounds Up:

Thomas Jefferson’s

Architecture & Design,” a new exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, explores the aspirational ways that Jefferson tried to forge that identity into something both cultured and uniquely American.

Particularly, he saw as role models and inspirations classical buildings that had already stood the test of time, such as Rome’s Pantheon with its astonishing dome (which he knew only from etchings) and, in Paris, the monumentally interminable east front of the Louvre (which he walked past every day when he was American minister to the French court, 1784-89). Jefferson inordinately praised the

Maison Carrée

in southern France as “one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity,” making it the source for one of his best designs, the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond.

By comparison, he had nothing but contempt for homegrown architecture—describing it as “ugly, uncomfortable and happily…perishable.” He even disparaged the grandiose buildings of Williamsburg as “rude mis-shapen piles” more reminiscent of brick kilns than dignified buildings of state.

If

Benjamin Franklin

chose to wear a rough-and-ready coonskin cap around Paris to make a point, Jefferson believed the American spirit was better communicated through buildings set in landscapes that married classical rigor with awe-inspiring natural wonder. At its most intriguing, “From the Grounds Up” shows how Jefferson combined his insistence on antique precedents with an appreciation for America’s expansive untamed landscapes. One of his favorite constructions was not manmade. The Natural Bridge outside Lynchburg, Va., is a craggy stone outcropping forming a high arch—shown here in an 1852 painting by Frederic Edwin Church—that Jefferson liked to crawl through on hands and knees. Jefferson owned more editions of

Andrea Palladio,

that revered source on the classical orders, than any other American, and, for a time, he also owned the Natural Bridge.

From a discussion of influences and inspirations, the exhibition moves to the buildings themselves. It provides a detailed look at the houses Jefferson designed through his own sketches and plans—primarily his masterpiece, Monticello, but also his less well-known getaway, Poplar Forest, an octagon enclosed around a perfect cube. Monticello, begun in 1770 and still under way at his death in 1826, most completely embodies Jefferson’s thoughts on architecture—and enlightened individuality, for that matter. In one early version, each room was to be detailed according to a different classical motif as a kind of live-in learning tool.

Later, Jefferson followed that model at the University of Virginia, where the famed academic village that cascades down the hillside is punctuated by mini-temple-like pavilions. Each is based on a different ancient original, as duly noted in his minuscule scrawl on the plans here on show. You can also read how he kept obsessive track of measurements and the exact number of bricks needed.

The exhibit detours to a section on construction. There’s a spade, a section of fencing and a pile of nails alluding to the nail factory operated briefly at Monticello. There’s a pine door made by John Hemmings, the gifted and indentured craftsman who ran the joinery at Monticello. This section corroborates the reality that Jefferson’s elevated pursuits were carried on the backs of slaves, but more details would have made it more meaningful.

Jefferson once wrote, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my chief amusements.” For visitors to “From the Grounds Up,” it’s a pleasure to hear Jefferson in his own words through wall texts, captions and facsimiles of his letters. The voice is lively and articulate; the intentions determined.

John Adams

spent much of his early working life in a modest farmhouse inherited from his father.

George Washington

built Mount Vernon to his own specifications, including the folksy-overblown portico overlooking the Potomac meant to suggest the great military man at ease. Jefferson wanted Monticello to mirror the ideals of the entire nation.

Only a few of Jefferson’s many designs were completed as planned. The Virginia Capitol didn’t get the grand stair he envisioned until much later; at the University of Virginia, his dream of a landscape that would flow past classical buildings to an open vista of the majestic purple mountains was curtailed by latter-day constructions; his famed Rotunda was aggressively rejiggered by McKim Mead & White in 1896.

Still, what remains indelible is Jefferson’s inspired conception of an architecture built up from proven classical principles embedded in a sublime landscape. “From the Grounds Up” gives us a glimpse of the wheels turning in this brilliant, imperfect, striving mind as it tried to apply that insight to shaping a new world that would inspire and elevate an informed and newly independent citizenry.

—Ms. Iovine reviews architecture for the Journal.