https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1VFdfh9zf4
1) Based on the this week’s lecture and Mary Wood’s article,
please explain what Thomas Jefferson meant when referring to
the University of Virginia as an Academic Village? Please refer to
a specific passage in Mary Wood’s text and quote it with page
number(s).
2) How do you imagine living in such a setting would be like?
What are the pros and cons for teacher and students? Please list
3 pros and 3 cons.
3) List 3 different inspirations from other countries that Jefferson
considered when designing the University of Virginia’s campus.
Each of them needs to be listed
example:
键⼊入说明。
Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia: Planning the Academic Village
Author(s): Mary N. Woods
Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Oct., 1985), pp. 266-
283
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia:
Planning the Academic Village
MARY N. WOODS Cornell University
Thomasefferson’s arrangement of buildings around an open lawn at
the University of Virginia represents an innovative approach to colle
–
giate planning. Yet it is not this plan but the individual structures that
have dominated architectural discussions of the university. While pro-
totypes for the latter have been meticulously researched, the origins of
the university plan have remained relatively unexplored. Focusing on
the University of Virginia as an institutional building type, this study
relates its plan to hospital and school designs available to Jefferson
through either his library or professional contacts. It reveals his appre-
ciation of the university as a self-contained community-the academic
village-and his sensitivity to the efect of the architectural arrangement
on education, discipline, health, and morale
.
THE UNIVERSITY of Virginia’s architectural significance rests
to a great degree on Thomas Jefferson’s use of a comprehensive
plan to organize the university’s constituent elements. The plan
features a domed building and ten pavilions interspersed with
one-story dormitories arranged around a terraced lawn in a con-
figuration like the Greek letter pi; colonnades in front of these
buildings link them together. Two outer ranges, composed of
six pavilions, parallel the inner rows, and gardens with serpen-
tine walls separate the buildings on the lawn from these struc-
tures (Fig. i). The pavilions on the lawn served as classrooms
and apartments for the faculty while the outer parallel ranges
contained student dining halls and additional dormitories.
Crowning the complex, the Rotunda originally housed the uni-
versity library, observatory, laboratories, and additional lecture
halls. When the university admitted its first students in the
spring of I825, the campus was unprecedented in terms of the
sheer number of its buildings and their carefully considered
relationship to one another.’ Developed in conjunction with
the curriculum, the architectural program was not an after-
thought but the tangible expression of Jefferson’s educational
concerns.
Jefferson recognized the unique architectural character of his
design. He remarked on its originality in his correspondence,
as did Benjamin Henry Latrobe, this country’s first profession-
ally trained architect, who complimented Jefferson on the uni-
versity’s “entirely novel plan.”2 The University of Virginia dif-
fers rather markedly from the two architectural models available
to Jefferson, the first American colleges and the early colleges
at Oxford and Cambridge. The former lack the complexity and
variety of its elements and the coherence of its plan while the
latter cannot equal its spacious character.
This study was begun as a seminar report for George Collins’s graduate
colloquium at Columbia University and was then expanded into a re-
search paper for William Foulks. In addition to their help, I also ben-
efited from the advice of Christian F. Otto, Joseph Connors, Rosemarie
Bletter, Hellmut Hager, and Eugenio Battisti. Finally, I am especially
indebted to Adolf K. Placzek for his careful reading and discerning
criticism of the manuscript.
i. University officials obviously recognized that the Virginia campus
was unique and could be used to promote enrollment. Peter Maverick’s
engraving of the plan was sold to students and other interested people
for fifty cents. See E. Betts, “Groundplans and Prints of the University
of Virginia, I822-1826,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
90 (x946), 87. The term campus was first used
to refer to Princeton
University in the 1790s, where Nassau Hall was set back behind a
greensward; see P. V. Turner, Campus: An American Tradition, Cam-
bridge, Mass., and New York, 1984, 23.
2. See: Jefferson to John Adams, 15 August 1820, Thomas Jefferson
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.,
as reproduced in Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. L. Cappon, 2 vols., Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1959,11,565, and Latrobe tojefferson, 7 June 1817, Benjamin
H. Latrobe Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Md. Others
who have commented on the plan’s originality include: M. Schuyler,
“Architecture of American Colleges,” Architectural Record, 30 (July 1910),
71; W. A. Lambeth and W. H. Manning, ThomasJefferson as an Architect
and Landscape Designer, Boston and New York, 1913, 31-32; F. Kimball,
Thomas Jefferson Architect (19×6), New York, 1968, 8o; W. H. Pierson,
Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: the Colonial and Neo-Classical
Styles, Garden City, N.Y., 1976, 319-325; and B. Pickens, “Mr. Jefferson
as Revolutionary Architect,”JSAH, 34 (1975), 278-279. Jefferson’s plan
still exerts an influence on architects, as seen in Edward Larrabee Barnes’s
arrangement of the State University of New York at Purchase, 1969-
1979. Barnes designed the buildings at either end of a lawn, while Philip
Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Gunnar Birkerts, and The Architects Collab-
orative created the flanking structures; see K. Herdeg, The Decorated
Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy, Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1983, 72-74.
266 JSAH XLIV:266-283. OCTOBER 1985
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 267
k . o
F -?
ir
‘V Kyfz:iI m
Alf “
i
— flL
~~1BI, *
.*1 I Itft8 ‘ left.
it/41-g’g C VS -0HO ?L ( 1_,e.
4. ______________v ~
Fig. i. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Plan, study for i822 Peter Maverick engraving (Virginia State Library).
In his first statement on the design of a Virginia university-
a letter of 5 January x8o05 to L. W. Tazewell-Jefferson casti-
gated the architecture of the typical American college as nothing
more than a large house that was “always ugly, inconvenient,
exposed to accident in case of fire, and bad in cases of infection.”‘3
The first colleges established in the English-speaking colonies-
Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), and the
College of New Jersey (1746, later to become Princeton)-
originally consisted of a single multipurpose building. Like the
smaller colleges founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1700oos,
these colonial institutions simply could not afford to build the
monastery-like compounds of the first English colleges.4 Fur-
thermore, the architectural talent available in the North Amer-
ican colonies consisted either of gentlemen-architects or builders
who were generally more familiar with residential than with
institutional design. It is no wonder then that these early colleges
resembled nothing so much as large houses. When a college
outgrew its original quarters, it constructed other similar build-
ings and gradually a compound developed. Yet there was limited
success in creating an ordered and coherent relationship among
these buildings; they were constructed only as funds became
available and were rarely placed according to any master plan.’
3. Letter in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscripts Department,
University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
4. A. Bush-Brown, “College Architecture,” Architectural Record, I22
(1957), 156.
5. There were exceptions. By I786 Harvard College consisted of a
pi-shaped arrangement of three separate buildings, and the so-called
Wren Building at the College of William and Mary and the House of
Burgesses were the respective termini for the Duke of Gloucester Street
in Williamsburg; see Pierson, American Buildings, 318-319-
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268 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
These American colleges differed from their European coun-
terparts in their spacious park-like settings and accommodations
for students on campus. Located in urban centers, the Conti-
nental universities neither housed nor fed their students.6 It was,
instead, the English universities that provided models for resi-
dential colleges in the colonies.
Founded in the 12th and i3th centuries, respectively, Oxford
and Cambridge drew on the monastery as a prototype for their
architectural design: chapel, library, dining hall, and residences
were all grouped around a quadrangle. Originally, living ac-
commodations within the college were restricted to the faculty,
the students finding their lodgings elsewhere. Only after the
Reformation did it become common practice for students to
reside within the college.7 These cloistered colleges lacked the
spacious character of the first American colleges and the Uni-
versity of Virginia. Furthermore, their association with English
privilege and the church made Oxford and Cambridge unac-
ceptable architectural prototypes for Jefferson’s university. As
he wrote in the I805 letter to Tazewell, a university education
was essential in a society where “the people are the only safe
depositories of their own liberty.”8 Just as necessary was the
exclusion of sectarianism from such an institution, as evidenced
by his omission of any chapel from his university plan.
Throughout his architectural career, Jefferson brought to bear
on his designs a highly refined sense of architectural symbolism.
By advocating the adoption of the Maison Carrie at Nimes as
the prototype for the new Virginia capitol, he sought to legit-
imize the new republic’s institutions by invoking the architec-
tural forms of ancient Rome. Writing to James Madison in 1785,
he described the Maison Carr&e as
one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsels
of architecture left to us by antiquity … it is very simple, but is noble
beyond expression, and would have done honor to any country….
You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an
enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the
taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to
them the respect of the world, and procure them its praise.9
In a similar fashion Jefferson attempted to link the university
structures to the monuments of antiquity. Since he had described
I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura as the Bible only a year before
designing the first pavilion in 1817, it is not surprising that the
ancient Roman monuments extolled by Palladio should have
inspired the university buildings.1o As William B. O’Neal has
shown, Jefferson ordered that the capitals for Pavilions II, III,
and V be based on plates from Giacomo Leoni’s 1721 edition of
Palladio, and its illustration of the Pantheon be used in working
out the Rotunda’s plan and details.” The individual pavilions
drew their orders from those of such Roman monuments as the
Temple of Fortuna Virilis, the Baths of Caracalla, and the Thea-
ter of Marcellus.12 In selecting these Roman motifs, Jefferson’s
purpose was as much didactic as aesthetic. As outlined in an
I825 letter, he envisioned the university buildings as teaching
tools:
The introduction of chaste models of the orders of architecture, taken
from the choicest samples of each order was considered as a necessary
foundation of instruction for the students in this art [architecture]….
We therefore determined that each of the pavilions erected for the
accommodation of the schools and their professors should present a
distinct and different example of the art and, these buildings being
arranged around three sides of a square, the lecturer in a circuit attended
by his school, could explain to them successively these examples of the
several orders, their varieties, peculiarities, and accessory circum-
stances.13
Although Jefferson’s designs for the individual pavilions have
been meticulously studied, the plan’s origins and development
have received comparatively little attention.14 The few models
6. Oxford and Cambridge initially adhered to the Continental model
in their curricula and in the practice of students boarding off campus;
see Turner, Campus, 9-12.
7. T. Atkinson, Cambridge: Described and Illustrated, London, I897,
243-244.
8. Jefferson Papers,
University of Virginia Library.
9. Letter to James Madison, 20 September 1785, Thomas Jefferson
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1o. Jefferson’s remark about Palladio’s treatise is recorded in a letter
of 23 February i816 of Colonel Isaac Coles to General John Cocke as
reproduced in The Eye ofJefferson, ed. W. Adams, Washington, D.C.,
1976, 283.
ii. Jefferson specified that the Italian stone carvers use plates xciv-
cii in the Leoni edition of Palladio for the aforementioned pavilions.
He also noted this edition’s illustration of the Pantheon on his drawing
of a plan for the Rotunda’s dome room and referred to it as the model
to be followed in carving its capitals; see O’Neal, Jefferson’s Fine Arts
Library, Charlottesville, Va., 1976, 283.
12. O’Neal relates the orders of six pavilions (two directly and four
indirectly) to plates in Roland Freart de Chambray’s Parallile de l’Ar-
chitecture Antique avec la Moderne (1766), which Jefferson acquired after
1789: Pavilion I with the Doric of Diocletian’s Baths, Pavilion VIII
with the Corinthian of Diocletian’s Baths, Pavilion IV with the Doric
of Albano near Rome, Pavilion VI with the Ionic of the Theater of
Marcellus, Pavilion VII with the Doric of Palladio (as illustrated in
Chambray), and Pavilion X with the Doric of the Theater of Marcellus;
ibid., 118-ii9, 132.
13. Jefferson’s motivation in this instance was not purely idealistic
but monetary. Import duties of $2,715-47 had been levied on the marble
bases and capitals for the Rotunda. This quotation is taken from a letter
he wrote to Virginia’s legislators in Washington asking for relief from
these tariffs because these architectural elements were “specimens of
modelling or sculpture for use of any seminary of learning or for en-
couragment of the fine arts” and therefore exempt under the law. See
his 25 November 1825 Letter to Senator L. W. Tazewell and Repre-
sentative William Cabell Rives, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
14. Fiske Kimball and Albert Bush-Brown proposed Marly-le-Roi as
a prototype for Jefferson’s plan. See the former’s “Genesis of the Plan
for the University of Virginia,” Architecture, 48 (December 1923), 399,
and the latter’s “College Architecture,” 156. Christopher Tunnard sug-
gested the H6tel de Salm and the Hotel des Invalides in his “Jean-
Jacques Rambe,” Union Worthies 19 (1964), 13. Paul Turner has recently
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 269
I~ U””.V” 11 . 41-1 1 . – . r ? r rW-
277
MD.
is A #4 w v it- ?’ ? ~” i ??
IIm
AY-
A& JL 3. to
(314r
L-” –
-•.L T•L).
?
t
, “–“7
1S % – . .
…..-
i
– –
I .7AAI’?t d 1 *A
0
IAAJ
76aGr
4
,YI;-. ir,,eLW?J
Fig. 2. Thomas Jefferson, plan of pavilion and dormitory unit, x804-1805? (Jefferson Collection, The
Massachusetts Historical Society).
that scholars have adduced fail to address Jefferson’s insistence
that the plan embody and promote certain pedagogic concerns.
From his first pronouncements on the university, Jefferson saw
as the genesis of his plan not a single building, but faculty houses
joined to student dormitories which he referred to as the “ac-
ademical village.” In the 18o5 letter to Tazewell, his first written
statement on a proposal pending before the Virginia legislature
to establish a state-supported university, he outlined his ideas
for the design of such an institution:
the greatest danger will be their [the university board] overbuilding
themselves by attempting a large house in the beginning, sufficient to
contain the whole institution…. a plain small house for the school &
lodging of each professor is best. These connected by covered ways out
of which the rooms of the students should open would be best. These
may then be built only as they shall be wanting. In fact an University
should not be an house but a village. This will much lessen their first
expences [sic].”s [author’s italics]
A plan, now in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical
Society and tentatively dated 1804-1805 by Fiske Kimball, may
be one of Jefferson’s first drawings of the academic village’s
basic unit: a pavilion-like block with dormitories to either side
(Fig. 2).’6
The image of the university as a planned and self-contained
community continued to develop and evolve in Jefferson’s mind.
As a letter to the trustees of a lottery for East Tennessee College
indicates, he had arranged the village dwellings for faculty and
students around a lawn by ix8o:
I consider the common plan, followed in this country, but not in others,
of making one large and expensive building as unfortunately erroneous.
It is infinitely better to erect a small and separate lodge for each pro-
fessorship, with only a hall below for his class, and two chambers above
for himself; joining these lodges by barracks for a certain portion of the
students opening into a covered way to give a dry communication
between all the schools the whole of these arranged around an open square
ofgrass and trees would make it, what it should be in fact, an academical village,
instead of a large and common den of noise, of filth, and of fetid air.17
[author’s italics]
This arrangement of professors’ pavilions and student dor-
mitories placed around a lawn was to form the nucleus of Jef-
dismissed European influences on Jefferson and instead stressed the typ-
ical American village green such as the Palace Green in Williamsburg;
see his Campus, 80. Jean-Jacques Ram&e’s design for Union College,
Schenectady, New York is visually persuasive with its pi-shaped com-
plex of buildings centered around an open lawn with a domed structure
as its centerpiece. Yet Ram&e did not come to the United States until
1812 and his plans for Union College were not presented until 1813-
Jefferson, as we shall see, evolved the plan and individual elements of
his university during the period from i805 until 18io. For a discussion
and illustration of Union College, see Turner, Campus, 63-7x.
15. Jefferson Papers, University of Virginia Library.
16. Kimball, Jefferson, 205.
17. 6 May i8io Letter, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, as re-
produced in The Complete Jefferson, ed. S. Padover, New York, 1943,
1o63-io64.
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270 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
I
I
-,
. i
ii i i
.
I
—
i –
i ” j
i
? ‘ i
–
i~ iI
.. i “? :
i
?d;
I’i~ 1
Fig. 3. Thomas Jefferson, plan, 5 May 1817 (Manuscripts Department, University of Virginia Library).
ferson’s proposal for the Virginia state university; he presented
this plan to the university board on 5 May x817 along with his
earliest known drawing of the campus (Fig. 3).18 Two alterations
to this parti for the academic village occurred in I817 and x820.
First, Jefferson realized in July of x817 that the university re-
quired a distinctive building to anchor the lawn.19 Benjamin
Latrobe, whose advice Jefferson had solicited for the design of
the pavilion fronts, also recognized the need for such an archi-
tectural focal point and suggested a domed structure. Latrobe
included an illustration of his idea in plan and elevation in a
I8. This drawing is in the collection of the University of Virginia
Library. A similar plan was included in a letter dated 9 May 1×87 that
Jefferson wrote to Dr. William Thornton asking for his suggestions on
the pavilions’ design. This letter is also in the Jefferson Papers at the
University of Virginia Library.
19. According to Paul Turner, Jefferson observed in his notes of i8
July 1817 that the center point of the campus’s northern end was “des-
tined for some principal building.” This was brought to Turner’s at-
tention by John C. Van Home, associate editor, The Papers of Benjamin
H. Latrobe; see Turner, 83, 314 n. 72. See also D. Malone, Jefferson and
His Time, 6 vols., Boston, 1981, 6, 259-
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 271
ot,
-? rAK
rAN
?It~ :.0 :two
At3
a 7-1
*? ~ )i~?i-r pc~c9~SI Alft h ~c~Of
u ~Imp–
4 vp
4Mim
Fig. 4. Benjamin H. Latrobe, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 24 July 817 (Jefferson Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress).
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272 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
letter dated 24 July x8x7 (Fig. 4).20 The second modification to
his original plan was the design of two outer ranges of student
dining halls and lodgings lying parallel to the inner rows of
pavilions in 1820.21
Just as Jefferson consciously tied the Richmond capitol to
ancient Rome, he may have tried to link the University of
Virginia to the Greek academies through his reference to the
academic village. This association of the ancient academy with
a village occurred in the entry on colleges in Quatremere de
Quincy’s first volume on architecture in the Encyclopidie Mith-
odique (1789). The relevant passage excerpts part of a Monsieur
Paw’s researches on the Greek schools of philosophy:
When the highly celebrated philosophers, such as Polemon, had so
many disciples that they could not be accommodated within the enclo-
sure of a garden, they constructed for their use, some huts around their
master’s dwelling, which are called calybia in Greek, that is to say some
very primitive huts made of wood and covered with thatch where the
Greek students resided with a singular satisfaction…. Meanwhile this
manner of living preserved the youth from the city’s corruption and
diminished considerably the costs of public education…. An accumu-
lation of such habitations presented from afar the appearance of a village where
one learned ethics like a trade.22 [author’s italics]
Jefferson described himself as one of the Encyclopidie’s first
subscribers and even toyed with the idea of becoming the Amer-
ican agent for the publication.23 Beginning in 1786, bills from
his French book dealers indicate that he had begun purchasing
a number of the Encyclopidie volumes, and it is conceivable that
he acquired the volume on architecture when it appeared in
1789, the final year of his posting as American minister to France.24
After returning to the United States, Jefferson continued to
subscribe to the Encyclopidie. On 24 June 1805, he wrote to
Reibelt, his Baltimore book dealer, that he was an original
subscriber to the publication and had received “as far as the 67th
livraison inclusive and compleat.”25 The sections on architecture
were numbered 6i through 63; some six months after his de-
scription of the university as a village this letter confirms that
the volume containing Paw’s account of the ancient academies
was in his possession.
The Encyclopidie description of the Greek philosophers and
their students residing in a village-like compound would surely
have exerted a strong pull on Jefferson’s imagination. Paw’s
account also stressed the close association of master and pupil
and a system of learning based on discourse and dialogue. Jef-
ferson too believed that a professor should relate to his students
as a father to his sons and envisioned a course of study based,
not on the usual program of memorization and recitation, but
on lectures and discussion.26
Paw’s allusion to the city’s corruption and the necessity of
shielding students from it also accorded with Jefferson’s views.
Writing to George Washington in 1795 about a scheme to
transplant the University of Geneva faculty to America, Jeffer-
son proposed a location adjacent to the new federal city but
removed from what he saw as its potential moral contamina-
tion.27 “I am not a friend of placing young men in populous
cities,” he later wrote in 1807, “because they acquire there habits
and partialities which do not contribute to the happiness of their
afterlife.”28
20. With reference to the letters on his sketch, Latrobe wrote:
AA, will be the least expensive pavilions because the lower story will
be covered by the Dormitories one story high (which I suppose will
also be study rooms) and having the same dimensions, and general
Mass but exhibiting different styles of Architections CC d*d* DD
dod*. Center building which ought to exhibit in Mass and details as
perfect a specimen of good Architectural Taste as can be devised. I
should propose below, a couple or 4 rooms for Janitors or Tutors,
above, a roomQ for Chemical or other lectures, above a circular
lecture room under the dome; the pavilions to be, as proposed, hab-
itations of Professors and lecture rooms. -But, if professors are mar-
ried will they not require more than 2 rooms each, and a kitchen. I
have exhibited such an arrangement. –
The above is the arrangement, I believe, sketched in your first letter,
and might be executed on ground, falling each way East and West
from the Center, and descending as much as may be N. & South,
because the E & West sides of the Quandrangle might be detached
from the upper range.
Latrobe Letter in Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
21. Lambeth,Jefferson, 41-42.
22. Encyclopidie Mithodique: Architecture, 3 vols., Paris, 1789, I, 715:
Lorsque les philosophes forts c6lbres, tels que Polemon, avoient tant
de disciples qu’on ne pouvoit les reunir dans l’enceinte d’un jardin,
ils construisoient pour leur usage, autour de la demeure du maitre,
des cases qu’on nommoit en grec calybia, c’est-a-dire des huttes tris
chetives, faites de bois et couvertes de chaumes oCi les 6tudiants de la
Grace se logoient avec une satisfaction singulire. . .. Cependant cette
maniere d’exister preservoit l’enfance de la corruption de la ville et
diminuoit considerablement les frais de l’education publique…. Un
amas des semblables habitations offroit de loin l’aspect d’un hameau
ou l’on enseignoit la morale comme un metier.
23. E. M. Sowerby, ed., The Catalogue of the Library of ThomasJefferson,
5 vols., Washington, D.C., 1952-1953, v, 149-i50, and Jefferson to
Francis Hopkinson, 26 January 1786, Jefferson Papers, Library of Con-
gress, as reproduced in The Papers ofJefferson, ed. J. Boyd, ix, Princeton,
N.J., i954, 224.
24. Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, v, 147.
25. Letter in the Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, as quoted in
Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library, v, 149-150.
26. Jefferson’s other innovations in the university curriculum were
a system of elective courses and the inclusion of modern languages and
the natural sciences in the academic program; see P. K. Bruce, History
of the University of Virginia r8r9-r199, 5 vols., New York, 1922, II, 128-
129, and R. Honeywell, The Educational Work of ThomasJefferson, Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1931, zo6, 133.
27. 23 February 1795 Letter, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress,
as reproduced in Writings of Thomas efferson, ed. A. Bergh, Washington,
D.C., 1907, xIx, 113.
28. Jefferson to Caspar Wistar, 21June 18o7, Jefferson Papers, Library
of Congress, as reproduced in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. Ford,
N.Y., z899, Ix, 78.
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 273
The Encyclopidie Mithodique’s account of ancient Greek aca-
demies also sounded another theme Jefferson was to emphasize
in his subsequent descriptions of his university plan: the eco-
nomic advantages of the academic village. He shrewdly realized
that the parsimonious state legislators would be more willing
to fund a university consisting of modest units rather than a
single monumental building.29
In addition to the concept of the academic village, Jefferson’s
letters of 1805 and i8io repeatedly address the concerns of fire,
infection, noise, and filth that confronted the designer of an
institutional complex. Although the university pavilions with
classrooms below and the professors’ lodgings above possessed
certain functional shortcomings (the faculty complained that
their living quarters were too cramped and their student neigh-
bors too noisy), Jefferson sincerely believed that they would be
less vulnerable to fire and the spread of disease than would a
single, multipurpose building.30 Even before he became involved
with the university design, Jefferson had dealt with the problems
raised by a wide variety of institutional building types: an ad-
dition to the so-called Wren Building at the College of William
and Mary between 1771 and 1772; a Virginia state prison from
1785 through 1786 and again in 1797; the Virginia state capitol
in 1785; and ajail in Washington, D.C. between 1802 and 1803.31
While he served chiefly as a consultant and advisor for the prison
and jail projects, he played an active role in the college and
capitol commissions.
The proposed addition to the Wren Building is of particular
interest. Jefferson drew up a plan for the addition at the request
of Lord Dunmore, then royal governor of Virginia (Fig. 5). The
foundations for the addition were actually laid, but further work
was suspended because of political unrest.32 Construction of the
original building was begun in I695 and substantially completed
by 1700. Evidence suggests that as originally planned the build-
ing was to be an enclosed quadrangle, but limited funds per-
‘El
.
0
Wl –
h^” A – ~K~ [3 C1 ..r.
Fig. 5. Thomas Jefferson, plan for the extension of the Wren Building,
College of William and Mary, c. 1771 (Jefferson Collection, The Hun-
tington Library).
mitted construction of only a portion of this rectangular com-
plex, the principal facade to the east and a northern wing.33
This building burned in 1705 and was subsequently rebuilt,
while a chapel, added in 1732, created a southern wing. Jeffer-
son’s task in i771 was to erect the long-postponed western por-
tion of the quadrangle, which would contain additional dor-
mitories and classrooms. As indicated in his plan, Jefferson
proposed to continue the existing arcade on the eastern facade
around the three other sides of the fully developed quadrangle.
Although Jefferson was later to condemn William and Mary’s
architecture–“rude, mis-shaped piles, which, but that they have
roofs, would be taken for brick kilns”-his experience designing
the Wren Building’s ill-fated addition did foreshadow certain
features of his plan for the University of Virginia: the com-
mingling of classrooms and dormitories and a covered passage-
way connecting all parts of the complex.34 Finally, his associ-
29. His arguments were disproved, however, when construction be-
gan on the University of Virginia buildings. He consistently underes-
timated costs. In a 28 November I820 letter to Joseph Cabell, he esti-
mated that the total cost for all university buildings (ten pavilions, six
hotels, and 1o4 dormitories) would be S117,400. When the university
opened on 7 March 1825, expenditures totaled $221,514.13; see N. Cabell,
ed., Early History of the University of Virginia as Contained in the Letters of
Joseph C. Cabell, Richmond, Va., 1856, 188-189, and Bruce, I, 287.
30. After the university opened, many professors moved their classes
from the pavilions to the Rotunda or other locations; see Turner, Cam-
pus, 87.
31. See: A. L. Kocher and H. Dearstyne, “Discovery of the Foun-
dations for Jefferson’s Addition to the Wren Building,”JSAH, io (Oc-
tober 1951), 28; H. C. Rice, Jr., “A French Source for Jefferson’s Plan
for a Prison at Richmond,” JSAH, 12 (December 1953), 28-30; N.
Pevsner, History of Building Types, Princeton, N.J., 1976, 164. It is in-
teresting to note that Jefferson advocated solitary confinement at the
Richmond prison, an innovative approach at the time; see Autobiography
of Thomas eferson, ed. P. Ford, New York, 1914, I.
32. Kocher and Dearstyne, “Wren Building,” 28.
33. Ibid.,
28-29.
34. See his Notes on Virginia (1784) reprinted 1904 in The Writings of
ThomasJeferson, ed. A. Lipscomb, ii, Washington, D.C., 212.
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274 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
AL-, -.to t 1
;al
ILr
IL:
Fig. 6. Sir Christopher Wren, The Royal Hospital at Chelsea, c. 1700.
View from the southeast. Engraving by S. Nicholls.
Th~TiI
A,_–,
Fig. 7. Rowehead (?), Royal Hospital at Stonehouse near Plymouth.
Perspective, 1756-1764 (from John Howard, The State of Prisons in En-
gland and Wales, 1784).
ation with the Wren Building may have led to an interest in a
related building type, the hospital.
Hugh Jones, a professor of natural philosophy and mathe-
matics at William and Mary from 1717 until 1721, is the source
for the attribution of that college’s principal building to Sir
Christopher Wren. In a 1724 publication Jones wrote:
The building is beautiful and commodious, being first modelled by Sir
Christopher Wren to the nature of the country by the gentlemen there;
and since it was burnt down, it has been rebuilt and nicely contrived,
altered and adorned … and is not altogether unlike Chelsea Hospital.35
Although there is no record of Jones’s book in the catalog of
Jefferson’s library, he could have become acquainted with it
while a student at William and Mary between 176o and 1762
.,
•;~
C:r
‘?n~
$-:i
r r
Fig. 8. Rowehead (?), Royal Hospital at Stonehouse near Plymouth.
Plan, 1756-1764 (from Howard, The State of Prisons in England and
Wales).
or consulted its account of the Wren Building while designing
the addition some ten years later. Jones’s comparison of the
Wren Building with Chelsea Hospital may have inspired Jef-
ferson to examine the hospital as an apposite building type when
designing a university because of similar problems of sanitation
and ventilation.
Founded in 1682, Chelsea Hospital was established for the
care of Charles II’s superannuated soldiers. Designed by Wren,
it consisted of a three-sided brick building arranged around a
lawn. Containing the hall and chapel, the structure at the head
of the lawn had a colonnade across its fagade while the two side
wings contained the hospital wards (Fig. 6).36 Interestingly, the
hospital was generally referred to as a college. This conflation
of the two building types was due to the fact that the hospital
occupied the site of Chelsea College, an institution established
for the study of theology in 1609 by James I.37
35. The Present State of Virginia (1724), Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956, 67.
Coincidentally, Wren disliked the enclosed quadrangles of English uni-
versities. He is reported to have said that if colleges must have a
quadrangle “let them have … a lame one, somewhat like a three-legged
table”; see M. Briggs, Wren the Incomparable, London, 1953, 36, and
Turner, Campus, 33, 3xo n.
52
•
36. K. Downes, The Architecture of Wren, New York, 1982, 84. The
buildings at right angles to either side of the pi-shaped complex were
later additions constructed during the reign of James II.
37. C.G.T. Dean, The Royal Hospital at Chelsea, London, 1950, 29.
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 275
-r I as r 4r r – — I ~ Y n Eli lop bee
Fig. 9. Lord Burlington, Sevenoak School and Almshouses, Kent. Plan and elevation (from William Kent,
The Designs of InigoJones, 1727).
Another English hospital whose plan and individual elements
recall those of Jefferson’s university is the Royal Hospital at
Plymouth. Constructed between 1756 and 1764, its design made
an unprecedented use of a separate pavilion for each ward. The
wards were linked by a colonnade and placed around three sides
of an open lawn (Figs. 7, 8).3″ The hospital at Plymouth was
discussed and illustrated in John Howard’s State of Prisons in
England and Wales (1784), a publication Jefferson acquired for
his library.39 Howard, an English sheriff, wrote a series of pub-
lications on prisons, hospitals, and lazarettos; his meticulous and
graphic descriptions of the appalling conditions he found in
these institutions shocked the public and led to a general outcry
for reform.40 In discussing the Plymouth building, Howard
quoted extensively from a report by the hospital’s chief phy-
sician, who extolled the separate pavilions for their salubrity in
terms reminiscent of those Jefferson used for the academic vil-
lage in his letters of i805 and i8io:
It consists of eleven large buildings and four lesser, the whole forming
a square, but detached from each other, for the purpose of admitting a
freer circulation of air, and also of classing the several disorders, in such
a manner as may prevent the spread of contagion. The buildings are of
rough marble, raised in the neighborhood with purbeck rusticated quoins,
and in front is a handsome colonnade supported by more stone pillars
with a flat roof covered with lead, which serves as an airing ground for
convalescents in bad weather.41
The hospital as illustrated by Howard is closer in form and
layout to the University of Virginia than was the building as
actually constructed. Howard eliminated in the perspective
view-but not in the plan-the two pavilions that stood at right
angles to the terminating wards of the parallel ranges, thus
intruding into the lawn.
Before concluding this discussion of the similarities of English
hospitals to the design for the University of Virginia, reference
should be made to another institutional building, the Sevenoak
School and Almshouses. Designed by Lord Burlington, the lead-
ing patron of the Neo-Palladian movement, this project ap-
38. Pevsner identifies the architect as Rowehead; see his Building
Types, 151. Strictly speaking, the hospital is located in Stonehouse near
Plymouth, but it is referred to in the literature as the hospital at Plym-
outh. The pavilion plan for hospitals did not become common until
later in the i9th century; see Pevsner, 154.
39. Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library, Im, 271.
40. Pevsner, Building Types, 159-60o.
41. The State of Prisons in England and Wales, 3rd ed., Warrington,
England, 1784, 389-390. This book went through several printings and
was also translated into French and went through two editions, one in
1788 and the other in 1791. Marcus Binney has also noted the resem-
blance between the University of Virginia and the Royal Hospital at
Stonehouse; see his “University of Virginia,” Country Life, January I2,
1978, 77. My own discovery of the English hospital was first presented
in a graduate research paper dated ii October 1977 at Columbia Uni-
versity. This contribution was also cited in D. Malone,Jefferson and His
Time, Boston, 1981, vI, 258 n. 23. Furthermore, Binney does not tie the
design to the Howard book but instead to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s
Recueil et Parallile des Edifices de Tout Genre, Anciens et Modernes, Paris,
I8oo. As the instrument of diffusion, the latter is not as convincing as
the Howard treatise. There is no record of Jefferson’s owning the Dur-
and volume; it only appeared on the want list for the university library
that he compiled; see O’Neal,Jefferson’s Library, io8. Furthermore, Dur-
and illustrates only a plan for the hospital whereas the Howard book
contains both a plan and a perspective.
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276 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
peared in William Kent’s The Designs oflnigoJones (r727), which
Jefferson acquired as early as 1778.42 Burlington planned a cen-
tral block housing the school flanked by wings containing the
cubicles for lodging the students; the entire complex opened
out onto an arcaded passageway (Fig. 9). Jefferson, of course,
devised a strikingly similar solution for the outer parallel ranges
of dining halls (called hotels) and dormitories.
Jefferson served as American minister to France from 1784
until I789. As previously mentioned, it was during this period
that the Virginia state legislature solicited his advice on a pro-
posal to construct a new prison. It is possible that Jefferson then
acquired Howard’s book on prisons with its account of the
Plymouth hospital. Yet he may also have become familiar with
this building and the current state of hospital planning as a result
of investigations by the Royal Academy of Science into this
issue from 1785 until 1789.43 The Academy established a com-
mission composed of such distinguished members as Antoine
Laurent Lavoisier, a pioneer in the field of chemistry, the nat-
uralist Louis-Jean Marie Daubenton, and the surgeon Jacques-
Rene Tenon to determine whether the H6tel-Dieu, which had
been almost completely destroyed by fires in 1756 and 1772,
should be renovated or whether a new hospital or hospitals
should be constructed to serve the city of Paris. Although the
commission issued reports from 1786 until 1788, these docu-
ments were not published until 1788 and 1789, respectively.
”
In their first report, the commissioners proposed the construc-
tion of four hospitals, all to be designed as a series of parallel
wards arranged along two sides of an open court. Jean-Baptiste
Le Roy, they noted, had proposed just such an arrangement in
a manuscript submitted to the Academy in 1777 but never pub-
lished. Le Roy, a scientist and academician, was an acquaintance
of Jefferson’s, as was commissioner Daubenton.45 The commis-
sioners’ subsequent report of 1787 noted the absence of members
Tenon and Coulomb, who were away inspecting hospitals in
England and Holland. The results of these travels abroad ap-
peared in a third report which enthusiastically described the use
of separate pavilions at the Royal Hospital near Plymouth:
Plymouth, composed of isolated pavilions, and arranged around a very
large court, has a disposition almost similar to that one which we have
already preferred. The Plymouth Hospital is recognized as being very
healthy.’6
At this same March 1788 meeting the commissioners rec-
ommended that a system of isolated pavilions be adopted for
the four hospitals they advised the king to build. As published
in their third report, the commissioners’ proposal was developed
by architect Bernard Poyet into an arrangement of 14 pavilions
(seven for men and an equal number for women) divided into
two rows paralleling an arcaded courtyard. Poyet placed a build-
ing containing an anatomy theater, chapel, and morgue at the
head of this court opposite a series of waiting rooms and ad-
ministrative offices.47
Tenon, the commission member who had visited England,
issued a separate publication on his own investigations and rec-
ommendations for hospital design in 1788.48 The preface to his
treatise contains the observation that the H6tel-Dieu, with its
1,8oo to 2,000 patients, had become a city unto itself, a remark
reminiscent of Jefferson’s likening the university to a village.
Like his fellow commissioners, Tenon praised the hospital at
Plymouth, but he cautioned that this institution intended for a
limited number of naval pensioners was not completely appli-
cable to the requirements of the large, urban hospital destined
to replace the H6tel-Dieu. 49Finally, he made a most intriguing
association when he coupled Le Roy’s hospital plan of 1777 with
Marly-le-Roi, the royal retreat that Jules Hardouin Mansart
designed for Louis XIV in 1679. Such a connection is tantalizing
because historians have cited Marly as a possible influence on
the University of Virginia.50 Marly-le-Roi, which Jefferson vis-
ited on 7 September 1786, consisted of 13 pavilions arranged
around a parterre; the royal pavilion stood at the head of the
terrace while the smaller pavilions for courtiers stretched out
in two parallel rows beyond it (Fig io). Tenon’s association of
Marly with contemporary hospital design may have inspired
Jefferson to see it less as a royal pleasure ground, hardly an
apposite model for a public university, and more as part of a
continuing development in institutional building.
42. Kimball, Jeferson, 95.
43. Professor Robert Bruegmann of the University of Illinois first
observed that Jefferson’s residence in Paris overlapped with discussions
on the H6tel-Dieu, the city’s chief hospital; see Turner, Campus, 83,
314 n. 57.
44. “Examen d’un projet de translation de l’H6tel-Dieu de Paris et
d’une nouvelle construction d’h6pitaux pour les malades,” Histoire de
l’Acadimie royale des Sciences pour l’annie 1785, 98 (1788), i-iio, and
“Second rapport des Commissaires charges par l’Academie des projets
relatifs a l’6stablissement des quatre h6pitaux,” Histoire de l’Acadimie
royale des Sciences pour l’annie 1786, 99 (1788), 1-42.
45. H. C. Rice, Jr., Thomas eferson’s Paris, Princeton, N.J., 1976, 31.
Bailly, another member of the commission, was a friend of Benjamin
Franklin’s so it is conceivable that Jefferson knew him as well as Le
Roy and Daubenton; see Pevsner, Building Types, 15x. Constructed be-
tween the late x2th century and about 1260, the H6tel-Dieu stood to
the west of Notre Dame. It originally consisted of four long two-naved
wards, three in a row and the fourth at right angles. In the x7th century,
it was expanded to extend across the southern arm of the Seine and on
to the far bank. Its overcrowding was notorious and by the late i8th
century six to eight patients shared the same bed; see Pevsner, 14x-142,
146.
46. “Troisieme rapport des Commissaires charges par l’Academie des
projets relatifs a l’6stablissement des quatre h6pitaux,” Histoire de I’A-
cadimie royale des Sciences faits 12 Mars 1788, 99 (1789), 16:
Plimouth, composes de pavillons isoles, et ranges autour d’une cour
tres-vaste, a une disposition presque semblable a celle que nous avons
debj preferee. L’h6pital de Plimouth est reconnu pour tres salubre.
47. Ibid., 27. Poyet’s plan was published here also, see 41-42.
48. Mimoires sur les hdpitaux de Paris, Paris, 1788.
49. Ibid., 306.
50. Ibid., vii.
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 277
~~Aa
Fig. io. Jules Hardouin Mansart, Marly-le-Roi. Perspective, 1679.
The association of Jefferson’s design for the University of
Virginia with hospital planning is not as incongruous as it might
initially seem. Hospitals and universities both accommodate large
resident populations; both institutions also raise issues of dis-
cipline, sanitation, flammability, and circulation. Jeremy Ben-
tham, a leading figure in the English utilitarian movement, even
advocated that a single building type be used for institutions
where it was necessary to keep individuals under constant ob-
servation and supervision. In The Panopticon (1791), Bentham
argued that a circular plan was the ideal architectural arrange-
ment for schools, prisons, hospitals, asylums, manufactories, and
poorhouses.51 Jefferson, who owned a copy of The Panopticon,
was not impressed by its advocacy of a circular plan for all
building types, yet its commingling of a number of institutions
may have persuaded him to consult such related programs before
beginning work on the university.52 As we shall see, Benjamin
Latrobe, whose work Jefferson admired, used the same basic
plan for the three institutional complexes he designed: a national
military academy (i8oo), a national marine hospital (x812), and
a national university (xi86).
Jefferson may have looked to hospital design because it too
had to solve the question of maintaining order among its various
residents. Such considerations were essential at American col-
leges, which were frequently settings for physical violence and
civil disturbance. Male students (ranging in age from 13 to 33
years) were boisterous and rambunctious at best; their spirits
and energies often exploded into fist fights, food riots, vandal-
ism, arson, gunplay, and-on occasion-murder. At Princeton,
for example, there were six student insurrections between 18oo
and x830. In i8oo a riot broke out when two popular Virginia
students were expelled for scraping their feet during chapel.
Another expulsion of three students for minor offenses in 1807
led to what was referred to as the Great Rebellion. Brickbats
were hurled, a tutor badly beaten, and when a hundred students
barricaded themselves in Nassau Hall, the president closed the
college down for five weeks.53 Food served in college dining
halls was often a flashpoint for student anger. According to
Andrew Peabody, a student at Harvard in the early i9th century,
meals were
so mean in quality and so poorly cooked and so meanly served so as …
to encourage a mutinous spirit, rude manners, and ungentlemanly habits;
so that the dining halls were seats of boisterous misrule, and nurseries
of rebellion.54
“Crimes worthy of the penitentiary,” Peabody also commented,
“were of frequent occurrence at Harvard.”55
Jefferson often brooded on the problems of maintaining dis-
cipline in a university community. In his i8io letter to the East
Tennessee College trustees, he stressed that his academic village
was conducive to order, while “large and crowded buildings in
which youths are pent up, are equally unfriendly to health, to
study, to manners, morals, and order. Every professor [in the
5I. The Panopticon or the Inspection-House, Dublin, i791,
title page.
52. Although listed in the 1815 catalog ofJefferson’s library, its exact
date of acquisition is not known; see Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the
Library, mII,
28-29.
53. N. Burt, “Student Life at Nassau Hall,” in Nassau Hall z756-
z956, ed. H. L. Sauvage, Princeton, N.J., 1956, 126-128.
54. Peabody, Reminiscences of Harvard, Boston, x888, 29.
55. Ibid., 32.
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278 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
“•-
T I-
+ ? .
A. s
itr
’em’
‘.’ %L
Fig. ii. Benjamin H. Latrobe, project for national military academy, plan, i8oo (Architecture, Design, and
Engineering Collections, Prints and Photography Division, Library of Congress).
G iaew Plan f N EU1TLvib\ C
1
cLl/
i L~k-d~~Q1 iT” .. .. …. f:: …… ?,,+, • L, .- . . , -.
Mgt—
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i
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ido
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: –
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‘t
,,iv. ….
b
*…..
.
.*
t1
#0 o AO4 6s
< L a /. II
Fig. x2. Benjamin H. Latrobe, project for national marine hospital, plan, x812 (Architecture, Design, and
Engineering Collections, Prints and Photography Division, Library of Congress).
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 279
+ ……~
Z,
a•,
: .
+?•?+
+ : •+ ?-.
i
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Fig. 13. Benjamin H. Latrobe, project for national university, site plan, x816 (Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress).
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280 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
h-,’ /~
-7.
i’~ii I I
Fig. 14. Benjamin H. Latrobe, project for national military academy,
north elevation, i8oo (Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collec-
tions, Prints and Photography Division, Library of Congress).
academic village,]” he continued, “would be the police officer
of the students adjacent to his lodge.”s56
His fears of student disorder were borne out during the Uni-
versity of Virginia’s first year. A few weeks after the term began
in 1825, his letters allude to “incipient irregularities” and a
general lack of discipline among the students.57 Scattered inci-
dents occurred in June and August of 1825, and a full-fledged
riot (with two-thirds of the student body participating) broke
out on the evening of 30 September. Drunken students broke
windows and assaulted two professors. In the aftermath, the
injured teachers resigned, three students (including Jefferson’s
great-great-nephew) were expelled, and one rioter was re-
manded to the civil authorities.58 Jefferson was so distraught
that when he attempted to address the students after the riot
his emotions overwhelmed him and he was speechless.
Benjamin Latrobe was an architect who obviously perceived
the relationship of hospital to school design. His three insti-
tutional projects of the i8oos-the aforementioned military
academy, marine hospital, and national university-are all based
on the same parti: a pi-shaped arrangement of buildings around
an open lawn. Although none of the three projects was ever
realized, Latrobe prepared elaborate drawings for the military
academy and marine hospital and a site plan for the university
(Figs. 11, 12, 13).
Since the military academy and national university were ed-
ucational institutions, they can be compared more directly with
the University of Virginia than can the marine hospital. Like
Kil
lit A It it I’l I A It It 11 a A it
: ;~~ AS
Fig. 15. Benjamin H. Latrobe, project for national military academy,
south elevation, i8oo (Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collec-
tions, Prints and Photography Division, Library of Congress).
Jefferson, Latrobe arranged for the faculty members to reside
next to their student charges in parallel ranges. Since it was
Latrobe who suggested that a domed structure be placed at the
head of the University of Virginia’s lawn, it is not surprising
that he crowned his own institutional complexes with similar
buildings. Located under the military academy’s dome was the
library, just as it was at the Rotunda of the University of Vir-
ginia. The military academy’s lecture rooms were in an apsidal
projection at its rotunda’s rear, while in Jefferson’s they occupied
the lower floors. The national university’s domed building was
to contain an observatory, just as the University of Virginia’s
Rotunda once did. Covered passageways linked all parts of the
complex in both the military academy and Jefferson’s univer-
sity.59
There are, however, some significant differences between the
Latrobe projects and Jefferson’s university. The military acad-
emy lacks the Charlottesville campus’s sense of openness. It
turns in on itself; the lawn is closed off by an entrance gate
(Figs. II, 14). Befitting its function, it is a fortified structure.
Apart from the domed library there are no other projecting
buildings in the military academy complex. The stark, three-
story facade presents a grimly institutional face (Fig. i5). The
barracks-like character of the ranges, which Latrobe later re-
ferred to as “the principal evil of college design,” contrasts
markedly with the domestic scale and stylistic variety of Jef-
ferson’s pavilions.60 Apart from a plan he drew, nothing is known
of Latrobe’s intentions for the national university. It is clear
56. Letter of 6 May 18io.
57. 13 April I825 Letter to John Spear Smith, Jefferson Papers, Uni-
versity of Virginia Library.
58. Malone,Jefferson, VI, 465-468, and Bruce, University of Virginia,
II, 298.
59. Latrobe’s plan for the national university project, the only draw-
ing he did for the complex, does not indicate a covered passageway
connecting all buildings.
60. 17 June 1817 Letter to Jefferson, Jefferson Papers, Library of
Congress.
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 281
from this drawing that he planned projecting structures, perhaps
more akin to Jefferson’s pavilions, to house the professors (see
Fig. 13).
Although the Latrobe projects differ in their individual ele-
ments from the University of Virginia, their overall organiza-
tion is still quite close to the latter’s plan. Since Jefferson’s first
reference to his academic village did not occur until I805, it is
possible that Latrobe’s plan for the national military academy
could have influenced him. He was Vice President in John
Adams’s administration when the Department of War com-
missioned Latrobe to prepare drawings for the academy. The
architect completed the assignment in January i8oo, and Pres-
ident Adams then presented the proposal to Congress. No action
was taken, and discussion dragged on through Jefferson’s term
as President. Latrobe lobbied strenuously for the project’s ac-
ceptance, but in the end he was not even able to collect his fee
for the original set of drawings.61
Since Jefferson served first as Vice President and then as Pres-
ident during the years that the military academy proposal was
under discussion, it is difficult to believe that he was unaware
of Latrobe’s plans, especially since the architect served as his
Surveyor of Public Buildings from I803 until I809. It was Jef-
ferson who established a corps of army engineers at West Point
to constitute a national military academy in 1802. His i8o8
presidential message to Congress recommended the military
academy’s removal from West Point and relocation in Wash-
ington, D.C., presumably in the complex Latrobe had de-
signed.62
When Latrobe submitted his plans for the marine hospital
(1812) and the national university (i8x6),Jefferson had long since
retired from public life to Monticello. The Latrobe-Jefferson
correspondence contains only one passing reference to these
projects, the architect’s ill-founded hope, expressed in a letter
of July I812, that work on the marine hospital would begin
soon.63 There is no mention of the possible relevance of these
designs to the university plan Jefferson was devising. Latrobe,
if anything, wrote that he found the academic village to be
wholly unique:
I have derived important professional improvement from the entirely
novel plan of an academy suggested by you. … I have long considered
the common plan of a college as most radically defective. In your design
the principal evils of the usual barrack arrangement appear to be avoided.”64
Warming to the architect’s praise, Jefferson responded with an
account of his plan’s genesis:
The general idea of an academical village rather than of one large
building was formed by me about 15 years ago, on being consulted by
one L. W. Tazewell then a member of our legislature, which was
supposed to be then disposed to go into that measure. When called
upon 2. or 3. years ago by the trustees of Albermarle Academy, I rec-
ommended the same plan and drew the ichnography and elevations for
them, but this was all before any actual site was acquired, consequently
imaginary and formed on the idea of a plain ad libitum.65
The tenor of Latrobe’s letters to Jefferson in the summer of
1817, when the latter asked his advice about designs for the
pavilions, is sycophantic. He repeatedly emphasized his pleasure
in studying the university plan and his pride and gratitude that
Jefferson had sought his counsel.66 An excerpt from a letter of
24 July 1817 is typical:
I have now only to request of You one favor, namely, that you will
believe that, the pleasure I derive from the study and occupations which
that project gives me, is much greater than any possible trouble which
you ought to suppose it occasioned, nor does it at all interfere with any
business…. In truth, I pride myself much more on the power which
my profession gives to me to be useful to the public and to my friends,
than I should on any wealth which I might acquire by practising it.67
Latrobe quickly undercuts these admirable sentiments by recit-
ing in great detail his current financial difficulties. He thereby
chides Jefferson, however subtly, for the latter’s request for free
professional advice:
Your very kind invitation to visit you, so often given and so impossible
to accept, has my best thanks! But with a large family to support,
dependent upon a salary of 2.500 maximum, and having a heavy debt
of Mr. Fulton’s to discharge, which it will require years to recover from
his heirs, I am obliged to shut myself up from the society of my neighbors
even, and dare not indulge any hope of pleasure abroad.68
It appears that Latrobe was angling for an appointment as
university architect. He was then very unhappy in his post as
61. He was owed six hundred dollars for the drawings. See his letters
of 28 May 80oi and 1o February 1809 to James Eakins and Colonel
Jonathan Williams, respectively, Latrobe Papers, Maryland Historical
Society.
62. For Jefferson’s involvement with West Point, see E. C. Boynton,
History of West Point, New York, 1863, 186, 208. His proposal for the
academy’s removal to Washington, D.C. is in his “Special Message to
Congress, March I8, i8o8,” in Writings of ThomasJefferson, ed. A. Bergh,
III, 471-472.
63. Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
64. 17 June 1817, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
65. 3 August 1817 Letter to Latrobe, Jefferson Papers, Library of
Congress.
66. See the following letters from Latrobe to Jefferson in the latter’s
papers at the Library of Congress: 17 June 1817, 24 July 1817, and 7
August 1817.
67. 24 July 1817 Letter to Jefferson, Jefferson Papers, Library of Con-
gress.
68. Ibid. The salary he refers to is from his post as Surveyor of Public
Buildings. Latrobe had entered into an agreement with Robert Fulton
in 1813 to design steamboats in Pittsburgh. The project foundered, and
Fulton refused to honor Latrobe’s drafts for funds to build the ships.
After Fulton’s death in 1815, Latrobe tried to recover the money he had
invested in the project from the inventor’s estate; see T. Hamlin, Ben-
jamin H. Latrobe, New York, 1955, 395, 410, 429-432.
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282 JSAH, XLIV:3, OCTOBER 1985
Surveyor of Public Buildings, which he would resign in No-
vember 1817.69 In subsequent letters to Jefferson, he indicated
his willingness to provide complete working drawings and de-
tails for the university pavilions he sketched out in the summer
of 1817. Jefferson, however, was not about to let control of the
university’s architectural development slip from his hands.7o
Besides, he probably did not relish the thought of a reprise of
the arguments he had had with Latrobe over the Capitol’s design
and construction.71 Therefore Latrobe’s curious silence on the
similarity of his own institutional projects to Jefferson’s plan
perhaps can be understood as a desperate architect’s attempt to
flatter a potential client. On the other hand, he may have gen-
uinely found Jefferson’s plan novel because of its use of indi-
vidual pavilions, each with a distinctive facade, connected by
one-story dormitory ranges.
William Alexander Lambeth regarded the University of Vir-
ginia as the result of an “evolution out of the meditation of an
intellect made fertile by a long life crowded with accurate ob-
servations and exceptional experience.”72 Recognizing the
drawbacks of designing a college as a large house, Jefferson
turned to the ancient Greek academies as the basis for his uni-
versity’s plan. Although the idea of the academic village rep-
resented a classical revival of sorts, Jefferson’s awareness of con-
temporary examples of English and French hospital design and
of Latrobe’s projects of the i8oos puts him in the forefront of
institutional planning. With the University of Virginia, Jeffer-
son was no longer the gentleman-architect who amused himself
by designing a country house, but a modern-day architect and
planner who anticipated the environmental, social, and symbolic
ramifications of a complex institutional building type.
69. See his letter to Jefferson, 20 November 1817, Jefferson Papers,
Library of Congress.
70. See his letters of 6 October x817 and 28 October 1817
to Jefferson,
Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
71. Jefferson and Latrobe had clashed over the latter’s design of a
cupola for the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol.
Jefferson objected to its use on the grounds that no classical building
had such a covering and insisted that skylights be installed. Latrobe
warned him that skylights would leak and strenuously fought this sug-
gestion. He lost, skylights were installed, and they leaked; see P. Norton,
Latrobe,Jefferson, and the Capitol, Ph.D. diss., 1952, Princeton University,
University Microfilms, 1975, 174-175, and his “Latrobe’s Ceiling for
the Hall of Representatives,”JSAH, io (May 1951), 5-10o. 72. Lambeth,Jefferson, 31.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
Letter from Thomas efferson to
L. W. Tazewell
Washington Jan. 5. 05
Dear Sir
Your favor of December 21 never came to my hands till last night.
it’s [sic] importance induces me to hasten the answer. no one can be
more rejoiced with the information that the legislature of Virginia are
likely at length to institute an university on a liberal plan. convinced
that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, &
that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have
looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless
the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree. This
requires two grades of education. first some institution where science
in all its branches is taught and in the highest degree to which the
human mind has carried it. This would prepare a few subjects in every
state to whom nature has given minds of the first order. secondly such
a degree of learning given to every member of the society as will enable
him to read to judge and to vote understandingly on what is passing.
This would be the object of the township schools. I understand from
your letter that the first of these only is under present contemplation.
Let us recieve [sic] with contentment what the legislature is now ready
to give. The other branch will be incorporated into the system at some
more favorable moment.
The first step in this business will be for the legislature to pass an act
of establishment equivalent to a charter. this should deal in generals
only it’s provisions should go i. to the object of the institution. 2. it’s
location 3. it’s endowment. 4. it’s Direction. on each of these heads I
will hazard a first thought or two. i. it’s object should be defined only
generally for teaching the useful branches of science leaving the par-
ticulars to the direction of the day. science is progressive, what was
useful two centuries ago is now become useless. e.g., one half the
professorships of Wm & Mary what is now deemed useful will in some
of it’s parts become useless in another century. The visitors will be best
qualified to keep their institution up in even pace with the science of
the times. every one knows that Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne etc.
are now a century or two behind the sciences of the age. 2. the location.
the legislature is the proper judge of a general position within certain
limits; as for instance the county in which it shall be. to fix on the spot
identically they would not be so competent as persons particularly ap-
pointed to examine the grounds. This small degree of liberty in the
location would place the landholders in the power of the purchasers:
to fix the spot would place the purchaser in the power of the landholder.
3. it’s endowment. bank stock or public stock of any kind should be
immediately converted to real estate. in the form of stock it is a dead
fund, it’s depreciation being equal to it’s interest. every one must see
that the money put into our fund when first established (in 1791) with
all it’s interest from that day would not buy more now than the principal
would then have done. Mr. Pitt states to Parliament that the expenses
of living in England have in the last 20 years, increased 50 percent: that
is that money has depreciated that much. even the precious metals
depreciate slowly, so that in perpetual institutions, as colleges, that ought
to be guarded against. but in countries admitting paper, the abusive
emissions of [illegible] produces two, three, or four courses of depre-
ciation & annihilation in a century. lands will keep advancing nominally
so as to keep even really. canal shares are as good as lands; perhaps better:
but the whole funds should not be placed in any one form. They should
be vested in the visitors, without any power given them to lessen their
capital or even to change what is real. 4. the Direction. this would of
course be in the hands of Visitors. The legislature would name the first
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WOODS: JEFFERSON AND THE ACADEMIC VILLAGE 283
set, & lay down the laws of their succession. on death or resignation
the legislature or the chancellor might name three persons, of whom
the visitors should chuse [sic] one. the visitors should be few. if many,
those half qualified would by their numbers bring every thing down to
the level of their own capacity, by outvoting the few of real science. I
doubt if they should exceed five. for this is an office for which good
sense alone does not qualify a man. to analyse science into it’s different
branches, to distribute these into professorships, to represent the course
practised by each professor, he must know what these sciences are and
possess their outlines at least. can any state in the union furnish more
than 5 men so qualified as to the whole field of the sciences. The Visitors
should receive no pay. such qualifications are properly rewarded by
honor, not by money.
The charter being granted & the Visitors named, these become then
the agents as to every thing else. Their first objects will be i. the special
location. 2. the institution of the professorships. 3. the employment of
their capital. 4. necessary buildings. a word on each. i. special location
needs no explanation. 2. Professorships. they would have to select all
the branches of science deemed useful at their day, & in this country:
to groupe [sic] as many of these together as could be taught by one
professor and thus reduce the number of professors to the minimum
consistent with the essential object. having for some years entertained
the hope that our country would someday establish an institution on a
liberal scale, I have been taking measures to have in readiness such
materials as would require time to collect. I have from Dr. Priestly a
designation of the branches of sciences grouped into professorships
which he furnished at my request. he was an excellent judge of what
may be called the old studies. of those useful and those useless. I have
the same thing from Mr. Dupont, a good judge of the new branches.
his letter to me is quite a treatise. I have the plan of the institutions of
Edinburgh, & those of the National Institute of France, and I expect
from Mr. Pictet, one of the most celebrated professors of Geneva, their
plan in answer to a letter written some time ago. From these the Visitors
could select the branches useful for this country & how to groupe them.
a hasty view of the subject on a former occasion led me to believe Io
professorships would be necessary, but not all immediately. half a dozen
of the most urgent would make a good beginning. the salaries to the
first professors should be very liberal, that we might draw the first names
of Europe to our institution in order to give it a celebrity in the outset,
which will draw to it the youth of all the states and make Virginia their
cherished & beloved Alma Mater. I have good reasons to believe that
we can command the services of some of the first men of Europe. 3-
the employment of their capital. on this subject others are so much
better judges than myself that I shall say nothing. 4. buildings. the
greatest danger will be their overbuilding themselves by attempting a
large house in the beginning, sufficient to contain the whole institution.
large houses are always ugly, inconvenient, exposed to the accident of
fire, and bad in cases of infection. a plain small house for the school &
lodging of each professor is best. These connected by covered ways out
of which the rooms of the students should open would be best. These
may then be built only as they shall be wanting. in fact an University
should not be an house but a village, this will much lessen their first
expences [sic]. not having written any of three lines of this without
interruption it has been impossible to keep my ideas rallied to the subject.
I must let these hasty outlines go therefore as they are. some are pre-
mature, some probably immature; but make what use you please of them
except letting them get into print. Should this establishment take place
on a plan worthy of approbation, I will have a valuable legacy to leave
it, to wit, my library which certainly has not cost less than 15,ooo
dollars, but it’s value is more in the selection, a part of which, that
which respects America, is the result of my own personal searches in
Paris for 6 or 7 years, & of persons employed by me in England, Holland,
Germany and Spain to make similar searches. such a collection on that
subject can never again be made. with my sincere wishes for the success
of this measure accept my salutation & assurances of great esteem &
respect.
Th Jefferson
APPENDIX II
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Trustees
for the Lottery of East Tennessee College
Monticello, May 6. i8io
Gentlemen:
I received some time ago your letter of Feb. 28. covering a printed
scheme of a lottery for the benefit of the East Tennessee College, &
proposing to send tickets to me to be disposed of. it would be impossible
for them to come to a more inefficient hand. I rarely go from home &
consequently see but a few neighbors & friends who occasionally call
on me and having myself made it a rule never to engage in a lottery or
any other adventure of mere chance, I can, with the less candor or effect,
urge it on others, however laudable & desirable its object may be. no
one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind
than I do, and none has greater confidence in it’s [sic] effect towards
supporting free & good government. I am sincerely rejoiced therefore
to find that so excellent a fund has been provided for this noble purpose
in Tennessee. 50o,ooo Dollars placed in a safe bank will give I,ooo D.
a year & even without other aid must soon accomplish buildings suf-
ficient for the object in its early stage. I consider the common plan,
followed, in this country, but not in others, of making one large &
expensive building as unfortunately erroneous. it is infinitely better to
erect a small and separate lodge for each separate professorship, with
only a hall below for his class, and two chambers above for himself;
joining these lodges by barracks for a certain portion of the students
opening into a covered way to give a dry communication between all
the schools the whole of these arranged around an open square of grass
and trees would make it, what it should be in fact, an academical village,
instead of a large & common den of noise, of filth, & of fetid air. It
would afford that quiet retirement so friendly to study, and lessen the
dangers of fire, infection & tumult. every professor would be the police
officer of the students adjacent to his own lodge, which should include
those of his own class of preference, and might be at the head of their
table if, as I suppose, it can be reconciled with the necessary economy
to dine them in smaller & separate parties rather than in a large &
common mess. These separate buildings too might be erected succes-
sively & occasionally, as the number of professorships & the students
should be increased, or the funds become competent. I pray you to
pardon me, if I have stepped aside into the province of counsel but
much observation & reflection on these institutions has long convinced
me that the large and crowded buildings in which youths are pent up,
are equally unfriendly to health, to study, to manners, morals & order:
believing the plan I suggest to be more promotive of these & peculiarly
adapted to the slender beginnings & progressive growth of our insti-
tutions, I hoped you would pardon the presumption in consideration
of the motive, which was suggested by the difficulty expressed in your
letter of procuring funds for erecting a building. but on whatever plan
you proceed, I wish it every possible success, to yourselves the reward
of esteem, respect & gratitude due to those who devote their time and
efforts to render the youth of every successive age fit governors for the
next. to these, accept in advance the assurances of mine.
Th Jefferson
Mss Hugh L. White
Thos McCorry
Jas Campbell
Robt. Craighead
John M. Gamble
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p. 266
p. 267
p. 268
p. 269
p. 270
p. 271
p. 272
p. 273
p. 274
p. 275
p. 276
p. 277
p. 278
p. 279
p. 280
p. 281
p. 282
p. 283
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Oct., 1985), pp. 205-299
Front Matter
The Frankish Cathedral of Andravida, Elis, Greece [pp. 205-220]
Sanmicheli’s “Tornacoro” in Verona Cathedral: A New Drawing and Problems of Interpretation [pp. 221-232]
The Façade of Leone Leoni’s House in Milan, the Casa degli Omenoni: The Artist and the Public [pp. 233-249]
Robert de Cotte and the Baroque Ecclesiastical Façade in France [pp. 250-265]
Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia: Planning the Academic Village [pp. 266-283]
Note
On Preserving Architectural History: The Armenian Experience [pp. 284-286]
Books
North American Architecture and Cities
Review: untitled [pp. 287-288]
Review: untitled [pp. 288-289]
Review: untitled [pp. 289-290]
Review: untitled [p. 290]
European Architecture
Review: untitled [p. 291]
Review: untitled [pp. 292-295]
19th-Century Urbanism
Review: untitled [pp. 296-297]
Indian Architecture
Review: untitled [pp. 297-298]
Letters [p. 299]
Back Matter