Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals

Abstract

The word “paradoxical” appears twice in Erik H. Neil’s introduction to the timely and beautifully illustrated volume Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals, edited by Lloyd DeWitt and Corey Piper. Published in conjunction with a 2019 exhibition of the same name at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, the book contains, in addition to the introduction, seven individually authored essays and a series of large and well-chosen color plates. The first time “paradoxical” appears in Neil’s opening salvo, the bind described is domestic: on the one hand, the ideal shapes and coherent rules drawn from Vitruvius, Palladio, and Vignola that Jefferson used when designing houses like Monticello, and on the other, the fact that these places were “reliant upon slaves for their construction and operation” (3). The second time Neil uses “paradoxical” is in reference to Jefferson’s first public building, the Virginia Statehouse; here Neil notes the opposition between Jefferson’s appeal to ancient, classical “democratic” principles via architectural form and the symbolism of “the distinctly undemocratic institution of slavery,” given that this building served for a few years as the capitol of the Confederacy (4). Why the bind that Neil describes in either of these projects—domestic or public—might be considered a paradox goes to the heart of a tension in this collection, and in much of the work addressing Jefferson’s architectural ambitions.This is certainly not the first book to interpret Jefferson as an architect, and indeed not even the first with this title. In 1916, Fiske Kimball published a volume on Jefferson’s architectural drawings under the same name, and a decade and a half later I. T. Frary added and Builder to the end of Thomas Jefferson, Architect in his title for a volume documenting Jefferson’s built works through photographs.1 In 1976, the National Gallery of Art celebrated the nation’s bicentennial with the exhibition and catalogue The Eye of Thomas Jefferson, offering a detailed study of the national and global impact of this “uniquely creative man,” here also presented, by catalogue editor William Howard Adams, as a product of paradox.2 Since then, numerous other books (some again with similar titles) and articles have been published on Jefferson’s architectural works, interrogating in particular the intellectual and formal sources of his architectural ideas. DeWitt and Piper’s volume is a welcome addition to this interpretive literature, providing an expansive range of essays connecting the vicissitudes of Jefferson’s architectural legacy to his larger intellectual, cultural, and material worlds.In Query 15 of his Notes on the State of Virginia, written between 1781 and 1784, Jefferson described British colonial architecture as a “malediction” spread from the Eastern Seaboard into North America, and stated that he hoped education in “first principles of the art” could undo this evil. The first five essays in the current volume, by Howard Burns, Guido Beltramini, Richard Guy Wilson, Lloyd DeWitt, and Barry Bergdoll, dive into various aspects of Jefferson’s attempts to lift the curse that afflicted the national built environment. Burns builds a biographical and material case for how Jefferson drew from Palladio, not only in terms of formalist ideals but also in building materials and construction techniques. Beltramini places Jefferson in a web of Palladianisms that took form primarily on the other side of the Atlantic, while Wilson follows Jefferson as he acquired architectural ideas during his travels in England in 1786, and DeWitt follows Jefferson on grand tours through Italy, France, Holland, and Germany in the mid-1780s as he encountered ancient and modern European architecture. Bergdoll focuses on the makeup of Jefferson’s library and his architectural book collections that enabled him “to understand architecture as not only the science of building but also an intellectual discipline, a body of knowledge and a practice with a role in the formation of citizens in a new form of political life” (66).The last two essays, by Mabel O. Wilson and Louis P. Nelson, shift the book’s focus through accounts of Jefferson’s architectural projects that move the conception of Blackness and the use of enslaved labor from the margins to the center.3 Wilson addresses Jefferson’s conception of Black inferiority, examining how this was woven into the very theories of classicism and aesthetics that drove his architectural work at the Virginia State Capitol. Through an extended reading of Jefferson’s evolving designs for the cellars of the University of Virginia pavilions from 1817 to 1819, Nelson shows how these spaces went from an afterthought to carefully considered places for enslaved occupants, suggesting Jefferson’s gradual admission through the medium of design that “his architecture of democracy” depended on “a landscape of slavery” (106).Between the first five essays and the last two, an interpretive gap opens up in terms of how to reckon historically with the “paradox” that Neil lays out in his introduction, between architectural idealism on the one hand and the material reality of slavery on the other. At the end of his essay, Burns frames the paradox as a historian’s choice between highlighting the positive in Jefferson’s architectural advances and, alternatively, focusing on his moral failures. Burns notes, “Jefferson is easy to criticize for his awkward quick sketches or for the fact that he never moved, publicly or privately, against slavery.” He follows this remark, which curiously seems to parallel dilettante sketching and the institution of slavery, with the observation that Jefferson’s “limitations do not cancel out his enormous achievements” (30). Here the paradox appears not so much a conflict between an aspirational conception of democracy and an illiberal material reality as a conflict between two separate traditions, one that places an innocent architecture on one side and the institution of slavery on the other.But in fact, this bind between classical architecture and illiberal slavery is paradoxical only if one conceives of Enlightenment idealism—particularly in its architectural form—as being in conflict with the worldly conditions of imperialism and slavery. It is a paradox only if we think of architectural idealism as the innocent bellwether of democratic aspirations, held back by the unsavory side of illiberal material reality. In a sense, we might say that this form of interpretation is possible in part because of a tendency that Barry Bergdoll identifies in his contribution: we separate our interpretation of Jefferson’s architecture from his philosophies of aesthetics and human existence, which were key arenas in his formulation of racial inferiority and superiority. This is an interpretive move that Wilson goes to great lengths to undo in her chapter. Blackness treated as a kind of inferiority was not in contradiction to Enlightenment philosophy. It was central to it.The paradox in Jefferson’s work—either domestic or public—is perhaps not so much of a paradox if, rather than considering his formal architectural exercises as metaphorical images of democratic ideals, we instead interrogate the aesthetics and practices that would allow us to conceptualize architecture in this way in the first place. And indeed, these architectural practices are embedded in material realities, ones in which the alignments of Palladian villas, Jeffersonian agrarianism, and the plantation South may be less surprising when assessed through interpretive lenses that highlight the continuities of accumulation on which architecture so often depends, from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Connecting the Veneto, London, and Richmond is not just an intellectual exercise in ideal or rational architectural form—it is also a study of the material realities and epistemologies from which a conception of architecture, and of architectural progress and goodness, emerges.We might wonder if, to a certain extent, architectural scholarship will continue to see a paradox in figures like Jefferson, framing slavery as a flaw in the ideal system rather than as one of its ingrained features, in order to avoid architecture’s uncomfortable relation to exploitation and expropriation. Perhaps it is the case, as Louis Nelson argues, that Jefferson was never able to come to terms with the degree to which his architectural projects, such as his Academical Village, depended on slavery (114). But while this may have been a self-inflicted paradox for Jefferson, that does not have to be the case for contemporary scholars. Rather, it is a painful truth—a truth that is further revealed by the essays in Thomas Jefferson, Architect.