Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard

Author:Hugh Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2006-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The plan for Jefferson’s first Monticello, as of circa 1772, with a west-facing portico covering the semi-octagonal parlor. The two semi-octagons at the extremes of the building were added to the plan a few years later, and it was the north “bow room” in which Mrs. Thornton first glimpsed the diners upon her first arrival at Monticello. Massachusetts Historical Society

For his next attempt, he copied another plate from Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture. This one illustrated an octagonal pavilion with smaller, square structures attached on either side. It proved not to be the solution he wanted, so he moved on to a three-room cruciform plan. Dissatisfied with that, he tried subdividing the rooms on either side of the large middle room.

Before he was able to devise a suitable plan, Jefferson’s life was thrown into disarray when Shadwell, his mother’s house and his own domicile at the time, burned to the ground on February 1, 1770. Lost in the flames were the young lawyer’s legal papers, correspondence, accounts, and other records. But the coup de grâce was the loss of most of Jefferson’s books. Until he could reconstitute his library, he—like Latrobe almost thirty years later—had to go it alone. The absence of architectural books seems to have worked to his advantage, as he was left with the surviving earlier sketches, which no doubt were at Monticello, perhaps in the nearly finished pavilion. In the end, like molecules bonding to form a new compound, a distinct plan emerged, one descended from but different than its printed precursors. It would be the basis of the first Monticello, the home that Jefferson’s builders constructed between 1770 and 1782.

His working plans emerged slowly as the design evolved. Construction progressed as he refined and rethought aspects of his house, and more than a few changes in the plans resulted from problems that presented themselves as the walls of the building rose. But the evolution represented not only a design transformation: The designer himself went through a key transition, too. He had begun by working as his contemporaries did, picking a plan from a book he liked. While most gentlemen amateurs of his era simply went about building houses based upon favored plates, Jefferson didn’t settle for mere imitation. He moved chimney flues, repositioned arches, and changed the fenestration. He adjusted the dimensions, computed and recomputed the number of bricks that would be required, and shifted staircases. He spotted mistakes and omissions and corrected them. On the exterior, the result would be a tall, gable-roofed structure with entry and garden porticos on the opposite façades; the central block would be flanked by two shorter, hip-roofed wings. Inside, the ground floor of the central block would contain the entrance hall and main parlor, with a dining room in the north wing and the master’s bedroom to the south. The scale was generous, but it was not to be a large house, consisting of four main rooms down and one upstairs.

Though indebted to Gibbs’s plates, Jefferson combined familiar elements in a new way, adding two porticos and a semi-octagonal room to a cruciform shape.

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