Wills - Mr. Jeffersons University

A date given alone refers to an entry of that day in the Library of Congress Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson, available online from the Library.

A date preceded by the letter C refers to a Joseph Cabell letter of that day in Early History of the University of Virginia as Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell (J.W. Randolph, 1856).

Numbers preceded by the letter G refer to chapter and page in Frank Edgar Grizzard, Jr., Documentary History of the Construction of the Buildings at the University of Virginia, 1817-1828, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1996, available online from the library of the University of Virginia.

Asked by National Geographic to write about a favorite place I visit often, I rejected Venice, since I had already written a book about it. I turned my gaze back to America. When I began writing a book about Jefferson in the early 1970s, I made several tours of the remaining Virginia plantations, to see the world that produced him. The principal plantation, of course, the one I went to see most often, was Jeffersons own, Monticello. But I found the university at the foot of his mountain in some ways even more complex, complete, and endlessly fascinating than the home perched above it. Over the years, as I have gone back there year by year, the university has become more convincingly a reflection of Jeffersons entire personality, its naive flaws as well as its towering strengths. I came, at last, to realize that its construction was accomplished only by a series of truly heroic acts.

G ARRY W ILLS
September 2002

Jefferson is the only president of the United States who was also a great artist. Other presidents have noodled at the keyboard or daubed at easels. But Jefferson was a building architect of large ambition and achievement, as well as a landscape architect and an interior designer. There are no exact parallels, at least in Western culture, for this combination of political and aesthetic prominence. There are stray examples of major political figures who were artistically creativeCharles dOrlans, perhaps, for his Renaissance poetry, or Jan Paderewski for his music (which he composed as well as performed), or Vclav Havel for his plays. But Charles was royal by birth, and spent most of his life rhyming away in prison. Paderewski and Havel were mainly artists who ended their careers as leaders of, respectively, Poland and the Czech Republic. Benjamin Disraelis career similarly falls into two parts, the first as novelist, the second as prime minister.

Jefferson, by contrast, worked all his life at statecraft and at visionary building. He was commissioned to draw plans for extending William and Marys Wren Building three years before he composed his first political document; and he ended his long life just as he completed the seventeen buildings of the University of Virginias original plan. To combine the prose of power and the poetry of art, at a high and continuing level, is something no one else did. In The Tempest, Shakespeare made Prospero neglect government while perfecting his art:

And to my state grew stranger, being transported

And rapt in secret studies. (1.2.76-77)

At the end of the play, Prospero renounces his art to resume his political status. But Jefferson, unlike Prospero, managed to work simultaneously on his political and his artistic tasks. In the time between his first amateur effort and the masterful completion of his university, Jefferson designed beautiful homes for himself and others; gave Virginias State Capitol the first Roman temple form on American soil; and worked closely with Benjamin Latrobe on the creation of the federal city. He is this countrys most influential architect, since he established an ethos and a rationale for our public buildings. His great authority bound us, for good or ill, to a sense that ancient Roman forms express civic responsibility and gravitas.

His greatest artwork was the cluster of buildings in Charlottesville that he called his academical village. There he launched and completed what was the largest construction project since the development of the federal city itselfin whose construction he had also played a part. In 1976, when the American Institute of Architects polled professional critics and practitioners for the proudest achievement in American architecture, Jeffersons University came in first (Rockefeller Center was second, Saarinens Dulles Airport and Wrights Fallingwater tied for third). In 2001, the World Heritage Convention identified only eighteen world treasures in the United States, and the university was joined with Monticello as one of those eighteen. There was no other domestic building listed along with Monticello, and only one other public building (Independence Hall in Philadelphia) was listed along with the university.