Learning from Jefferson learning from Palladio

The best way to learn architecture is to visit buildings. Luckily my family enjoys learning about architecture as much as I do as I repeatedly hold them forced hostage without food and water treat them to fancy vacation itineraries organized around amazing building visits like our recent visits to UVA, Monticello, and Williamsburg. Despite the eye rolls, and endless “can we go now?” remarks I’ve endured, I think my kids will appreciate architecture someday. Inevitably I plant architecture seeds in their head like, “Only by approaching a building, can you see how it engages its context... look how its materials relate to its site and how the building choreographs sequential views through its design of circulation... the bathrooms are usually tucked by the stairs...” 

Just as music is best conveyed through rhythm and pitches and writing is conveyed through words, architecture is best conveyed through space. Unfortunately, not all great architecture is easily accessible. If  long flights and drives to see architecture is infeasible, one can alternatively vicariously look at how other architects like Corbusier, kahn or utzon visited architecture around the world, digested ideas and used their experiences of spaces to create spaces.

To understand and write about Jefferson’s architecture, I felt I had to understand his greatest influence, Palladio. Thomas Jefferson never had the luxury of experiencing a Palladian building in person.  Instead, Jefferson’s architectural self-education began in college at Williamsburg when he purchased Palladio’s treatise ‘The four Books of architecture” from a local cabinet maker. It was a love affair with architecture that delighted Jefferson all his life. He would spend the rest of his life collecting and reading books on classical architecture amassing at one point, the largest architectural library in america. Jefferson studied Palladio’s books closely to create UVA and Monticello. Endless hours spent sifting through secondary source youtube documentaries about palladian villas with narrators singing his praises yielded the following nuggets of wisdom which I’ve never managed to achieve in my own work:

(1) always align your windows over other windows in the façade,

(2) take a Greek temple front and attach it to the front of houses, banks, or government buildings to grace structures with the elegance of classical sensibility.

Of all the videos I’ve watched regarding Palladio, however, the one that stood out the most was a short interview of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki speaking about Palladio. click here for interview He managed to provide distinctively Japanese insight on Palladio which had nothing to do with Palladio,  “Since the Church of Redentore and many of Palladio’s other buildings were built after his death, we feel through walking through these kind of spaces what Palladio imagined. Although Palladio didn’t live long enough to see it built, his drawings were so strong and perfect, that we can experience its reality which was constructed by others.”   

It was awful to dream about the future prospect of my death before seeing my greatest creation (animal veterinary clinic and community cat shelter) built, but then I was consoled by the fact that many of the great spaces in this world were designed by architects that were never visited by their creators before their deaths– Sydney opera house by utzon, national assembly at dakha by kahn, and Brooklyn bridge by Roebling…

Then I thought it was strange to think about Jefferson drawing inspiration for his house at Monticello from palladio’s villa Capra despite having never visited the Palladian villa that Palladio himself never visited. 

Fortunately for those not able to visit Palladian buildings, like Jefferson, they could find inspiration by reading his Four Books of Architecture. Somehow Jefferson was able to extract his architecture education through Palladio’s drawings and ideas. Aldo Rossi joke, “if you want to be a builder, you build. If you want to be an architect, you write books.” can be changed to read “I you want to be an architect, you read books by architects who want to be architects by writing books.” 

Forget going to grad school or visiting buildings, Jefferson learned how to become a great architect by reading architecture books. By looking vicariously at Palladio’s insights, drawings, and travels to the Pantheon he was encouraged to paste a temple front to a library whose form is derived from the sphere at UVA’s rotunda. US Capitol building architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe remarked that Jefferson was an “excellent architect out of the book“.