At Home - Bill Bryson [158]
Because the Georgian period went on so long, various architectural refinements and elaborations arose and either fell away or prospered independently, so that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish meaningfully between Neoclassical, Regency, Italianate Revival, Greek Revival, and other terms intended to denote a particular style, aesthetic, or block of time. In America, Georgian became an unappealing label after independence (it wasn’t actually much liked before), so there Colonial was coined for buildings predating independence, and Federal for those built after.
What all these styles had in common was an attachment to classical ideals, which is to say to strict rules, and that wasn’t always a terribly good thing. Rules meant that architects sometimes scarcely had to think at all. Mereworth, a stately home in Kent designed by Colen Campbell, is really just a copy of Palladio’s Villa Capra—only the dome is somewhat altered—and many others are not a great deal more original. “Fidelity to the canon was what mattered,” as Alain de Botton noted in The Architecture of Happiness. Though some splendid Palladian buildings were built—Chiswick House, Lord Burlington’s outsized folly in West London, springs shiningly to mind—the effect over time was repetitious and just a little numbing. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner has observed that “it is not easy to keep apart in one’s mind the various villas and country houses built during the period.”
Palladio’s Villa Capra (“La Rotonda”) (top); and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (bottom) (photo credit 13.1)
So there is a certain satisfaction in the thought that perhaps the two most interesting and original Palladian houses of the age were built not in Europe by trained architects, but in a distant land by amateurs. But what amateurs they were.
II
In the autumn of 1769, on a hilltop in the piedmont of Virginia, on what was then the very edge of the civilized world, a young man began building his dream home. It would consume more than fifty years of his life and nearly all his resources, and he would never see it finished. His name was Thomas Jefferson. The house was Monticello.
There had never been a house like it. This was, almost literally, the last house in the world. Before it lay an unexplored continent. Behind it was all the known world. Perhaps nothing says more about Jefferson and his house than that it faces away from that old world and into the unknown emptiness of the new.
What was really distinctive about Monticello was that it was built on a hilltop. People didn’t do that in the eighteenth century, and for good practical reasons. Jefferson created many disadvantages for himself by building where he did. For one thing, he had to run a road to the top, then clear and level acres of rocky summit—both huge jobs. He also had constantly to deal with the problem of water supplies. Water is always a problem on hilltops since it is in the nature of water to run downhill, so wells had to be dug unusually deep. Even then they ran dry on average about one year in five and water had to be carted up. Lightning was a chronic worry, too, as his house was the highest point for miles.
Monticello is Palladio’s Villa Capra, but reinterpreted, built of different materials, standing in another continent—gloriously original, but faithful to the original, too. The Age of Enlightenment was the perfect time for Palladian ideals. It was an intensely scientific period in which it was believed that everything, including beauty and its appreciation, could be reduced to scientific principles. That Palladio’s book of plans was also a suitable primer for amateur architects made him practically, as well as spiritually, indispensable to a man like Jefferson. About 450 handbooks of architecture were produced in the half century or so before Jefferson began work on Monticello, so he had plenty to choose from, but it was Palladio to whom he was devoted. “Palladio is