Thomas Jefferson and Neoclassical Architecture

No single American embodied the principles of Neoclassicism more than Thomas Jefferson. His views on contemporary architecture reveal his Classical education and humanist outlook. While in France, Jefferson had become familiar with the elegant Paris hôtels and French Neoclassical architecture. He visited the ruins of Roman Gaul and saw the so-called Maison Carrée in Nimes in southern France. This was a small, well-preserved Roman temple, similar to the Temple of Portunus. Jefferson used it as the model for a new State Capitol of Virginia in Richmond, with its projecting Ionic portico surmounted by a Classical pediment. Both buildings were thus designed in the context of representative government – the temple during the Roman Republic and Richmond’s State Capitol during the early years of the American democracy.

The pride and joy of Jefferson’s later years was the University of Virginia, the first state-supported educational establishment, located just a few miles from Monticello. Its centerpiece is the Rotunda, originally the library. Although its proportions are somewhat taller, its inspiration is the Pantheon in Rome. Among the purely Jeffersonian features are an entablature encircling the building and two layers of windows (pedimented on the ground floor, plain on the second). On either side of the Rotunda, framing the central lawn, are two symmetrical rows of low, colonnaded buildings, which were (and still are) student quarters. These link a series of pavilions built in the form of Roman temples. Each pavilion faithfully reproduces an architectural order according to a Classical prototype.^[1]