At Home - Bill Bryson [159]
Jefferson, at the time he began Monticello, had never been anywhere larger than Williamsburg, the colonial capital, where he had attended the College of William and Mary, and Williamsburg, with some two thousand people, was hardly a metropolis. Although he later traveled to Italy, he never saw the Villa Capra and would almost certainly have been astounded by it because the Villa Capra is enormous compared with Monticello. Though they look very similar in illustrations, Palladio’s version is built on a scale that makes Monticello seem almost cottagelike. Partly this is because Monticello’s service areas—the dependencies, as they were known—are built into the slope of the hill and are invisible from the house and garden. A lot of Monticello is essentially underground.
The Monticello visitors see today is a house Jefferson never saw but only dreamed of. It was never finished in his lifetime, or even in really good shape. For fifty-four years Jefferson inhabited a building site. “Putting up and pulling down is one of my favorite amusements,” he remarked cheerfully, and it was just as well, for he never stopped tinkering and messing. Because the work was so protracted, some parts of Monticello were actively deteriorating while others were still abuilding.
Many aspects of Jefferson’s designs were tricky. The roof was a builder’s nightmare because it involved unnecessarily complicated joining of hips to slopes. “It was one place where he was definitely more amateur than professional,” Bob Self, architectural conservator of Monticello, told me while showing me around. “The design was perfectly sound, but just a lot more complicated than it needed to be.”
As an architect, Jefferson was fastidious to the point of weirdness. Some of his plans specified measurements to seven decimal points. Self showed me one measuring a strangely precise 1.8991666 inches. “Nobody, even now, could measure anything to that degree of accuracy,” he said. “You are talking millionths of an inch. I suspect it was just a kind of intellectual exercise. There isn’t anything else it could be really.”
The oddest feature of the house was the two staircases. Jefferson thought staircases a waste of space, so he made them only two feet wide and very steep—“a little ladder of a staircase,” as one visitor put it. The stairs were so narrow and twisting that almost everything that needed to go up them, including all but the smallest pieces of visitors’ luggage, had to be winched up and hauled in through a window. Buried so deep in the house that no natural light reached them, the stairs were forbiddingly dark as well as steep. Negotiating them, particularly in descent, is an unnerving experience even now. Because of the danger, visitors are not allowed up to the second or third floors, so much of Monticello is, of unhappy necessity, off limits. (The space is mostly used for offices.) This means that visitors cannot see the most agreeable room in the house—the sky room, as Jefferson called it, occupying the space within the dome. With its yellow walls and green floor, its cool breezes and expansive views, this would make a perfect study or studio or retreat of any kind. But it has always been difficult to get to, and in Jefferson’s day it was unusable for about a third of the year because there was no effective way to heat it. In consequence, it became an attic room used for storage.
In other ways, the house was a marvel. The dome, Monticello’s defining feature, had to be built in an odd way to fit onto existing load-bearing walls at the back. “So although it looks completely regular,” Self said, “it isn’t. The whole thing was a huge exercise in calculus. The ribs that support it are all of different lengths, but they had to span the same radius, so its design was all about sines and cosines. Not many people could have got that dome up there.” Other flourishes were generations ahead of their time. For one thing, Jefferson put thirteen skylights into the house, so it is unusually bright and airy.
Outside on the terrace Self pointed out