8 - Thomas Jefferson and the creation of the American architectural image

Summary

The importance for Thomas Jefferson of a building's design and appearance is revealed in his observation: “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements.” As a plantation owner, he needed functional structures and he designed them along with his dwellings, whether in Virginia, Philadelphia, or Paris. His main house, Monticello, became a life-long experiment in new ideas and forms. He took obvious pride in the praise it engendered, as with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's observation that Monticello “was infinitely superior to all other houses in America.” During the Frenchman's visit in 1796, Jefferson showed him a scheme for a major rebuilding and Rochefoucauld-Liancourt claimed that the new Monticello: “will certainly deserve to be ranked with the most pleasant mansions in France and England.” Jefferson also saw architecture as existing with a public purpose. He explained that he drew upon the first-century BC, Roman, Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France, for the new Virginia State Capitol in Richmond because “How is a taste for a chaste & good style of building to be formed in our countrymen unless we seize all occasions which the erection of public buildings offers, of presenting to them models for their imitation?” He advised Americans who might travel in Europe to look at the paintings and sculpture; however, architecture was “among the most important arts,” and, along with gardens, the only one worthy of real study. Buildings, as Jefferson knew, had a purely functional element: they provided shelter, but also they should inspire and convey identity. He wrote to James Madison that the classical Virginia state house would “improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile them to the rest of the world, and procure them its praise.”