11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jefferson's Academical Village, January 16, 2005
This review is from: Mr. Jefferson's University (National Geographic Directions) (Hardcover)
Thomas Jefferson's reputation in America has declined greatly over the last two decades. It is now commonplace, both among scholars and the reading public, to criticize Jefferson and place him on a lower mantle of historical accomplishment, along with several of his contemporaries. His friend, James Madison, whose reputation has long lived in the shadow of Jefferson's, is now widely considered to be the superior political thinker of the two. Former political opponents, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, are now sometimes favorably compared to him. The ongoing controversy over Jefferson's affair with the slave Sally Hemings has also contributed to his reputation's decline.
But as an artist, Jefferson's historical reputation has only been strengthened in recent years. He is considered one of America's greatest architects, and his work at Monticello and the University of Virginia has been voted by modern architects as the premiere achievement in American architecture. Jefferson himself seems to have had some sense of the importance of this work when he requested his tombstone read:
HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
This is Garry Wills' third book on Jefferson. Wills wholeheartedly admires Jefferson's work as an architect. No one else in the Western tradition, Wills says, has ever combined the artistic and political talents of Jefferson. Unlike artist-politicians like Benjamin Disraeli, Jan Paderewski or Václav Havel, who were primarily artists before becoming politicians, Jefferson worked at both his entire life. According to Wills, the Virginian was no mere dilettante dabbling at design, but an experienced, masterful innovator of forms. He worked on his first university design project in his mid-twenties, a few years before writing the Declaration of Independence. While serving as president, he helped Benjamin Latrobe design the federal city. And he would cap off his long life with his finest work, the "academical village" - the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the subject of this work.
It took Jefferson nine years to complete his masterpiece. From the age of seventy-four to eighty-three, the design and building of the university dominated the final years of his life. He would die soon after it was completed. To do so, Jefferson had to outmaneuver the extremely hostile Virginia legislature to acquire the state money to finance his project; he also had to face down religious interests -- who were concerned about his decision to build a secular school; and he outlasted several local powers - particularly fellow builders and other state-financed universities - who sought to undermine his efforts in order to satisfy their own interests. Jefferson's local political struggles to build his university actually take up more of the book than details about its design.
Jefferson wanted to build a university that embodied his ideas on what learning should be about. Where universities in Europe at that time had primarily been either urban or monastic in appearance, Jefferson followed an American pattern by designing a rural university, built around a lawn. Ten unique Pavilions -- to represent Jefferson's ten important branches of learning -- would be built on the east and west sides of the lawn, five on each side. To the north of the lawn was the centerpiece of the university - a large Rotunda that would serve both as the university's library and for communal activities. Nothing was built on the south of the lawn to allow for an easy approach to the school and an open vista for those on the lawn.
Connecting the Pavilions and Rotunda was a Tuscan colonnade. The colonnade was blended in with the front of each of the ten Pavilions, a difficult design trick since each Pavilion had a unique style with -- depending on the Pavilion -- Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite columns that had to work visually with the Tuscan style of the colonnade that connected them all. The Pavilions were two-story buildings. The first story served as the classroom. The second story was the professor's home. Jefferson did not want any of the Pavilions to be considered superior to the others so he had the professors draw lots for who would live and teach in each Pavilion. The colonnade also had a two-story function. On ground level, it was covered, allowing for students to walk between Pavilions in any weather. The colonnade's second level, however, which connected the professors' homes on the second story of each pavilion, was not covered. This was meant to symbolize the connection Jefferson wanted the ten disciplines to have with each other. Professors could get together and exchange ideas, but the lack of a covered walkway meant that such exchanges would be informal and unscheduled, unlike the more regimented programs of the students walking below.
The effect of this design was striking and somewhat paradoxical. There is both regimentation and individualism in the work. Wills says that some critics seize on some single aspect of the design and complain that it is either too orderly or too chaotic. But Jefferson wanted both elements to express his ideas about education. Echoing Ruskin's comments about the cathedral front at Pisa, Wills writes that Jefferson achieved "a daring variation of pretended symmetry" that escaped "the lower or vulgar unity of law."
One of the more interesting sidelines in the book is Wills' discussion of the Bishop George Berkeley, the famous eighteenth century empiricist who was the transitional philosopher between Locke and Hume. Berkeley, who at the time was still just a parson, wanted to build a school in North America. He spent time at Yale, where a residential college was named after him. (One of the graduates of that college would later found U.C. Berkeley in California in honor of the bishop.) But Berkeley did not want to build his school in any of the colonies. He decided that Bermuda was a more appropriate location since there it would not be subject to the provincialism of the colonies, and he could allow Native Americans to attend. He believed that knowledge needed a fresh start away from the prejudices of the cities and society and that only a school built in nature could achieve this. Like Jefferson at a later time, Berkeley would struggle to find funds to build his school. But where Jefferson persevered, Berkeley would eventually give up and return to England. Nevertheless, his ideas about university design in the new world would affect many later American designers, and Jefferson was obviously influenced by him.
Also interesting is Wills' history of how the original professors - most of whom were Europeans -- would struggle with their new lives in the new world. Jefferson had originally not wanted Europeans to teach at his school, fearing they would contaminate American students with their alien ideas. But he been forced to recruit there after qualified Americans had either turned him down or been rejected by the state legislature for their unorthodox views. Universities in the early United States were largely state affairs, especially in the south. Jefferson had pushed for the founding of University of Virginia to create a regional alternative to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in the north. But now he had been forced to leave not only the south, but even the U.S., in order to find teachers to fill the new positions. The result, however, appears to have ended up harming the professors more than it did the local students. Since most students were the progeny of local Virginian plantation owners, and were used to slaves and owning guns, the professors didn't quite know what to make of them. As Wills puts it, "slave owners were used to giving, not taking orders." The students didn't like their foreign teachers for the most part, taunting them and throwing rocks through one professor's windows. Some professors attempted to resign after being terrorized by masked students (their resignations were not accepted). Stricter rules were implemented and some students were expelled. But the problems continued. The south's tradition of violence didn't help either, as undergraduates often challenged each other to duels, despite the best efforts of the faculty to prevent them. Professors were sometimes caned by students and began to arm themselves in self-defense. Fourteen years after Jefferson's death, one professor was shot and killed after stepping outside of his Pavilion to quell a disturbance.
This is a wonderful book, interesting both as a history of the early U.S. architecture and as a partial biography of a Founding Father. Jefferson's will to see through his masterpiece forms the core of the story, but the many interesting details on various subjects also delight. While Jefferson's genius as an architect is more taken for granted than demonstrated, Wills does show that Jefferson had a tremendous artistic vision and fire to see his project to completion.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A small treasure of a book about an idea and a reality, February 26, 2003
This review is from: Mr. Jefferson's University (National Geographic Directions) (Hardcover)
Although a slim volume, Gary Wills has packed this book full with information about this period in Jefferson's life that most other biographers - and I've read 22 - missed. Starting a university from scratch is just about more than one man, even Jefferson, could handle. He had to design the buidings, the dorms and rooms for the students and professors, and then hire the professors from all over the world, then make sure it ran properly even down to the rowdiness of the students. And all of this in the decade prior to his death, while he was in his 70's. That the university continues today in his spirit is a strong testament to his original thinking, his designs, and his vision for the future. This is a short book that can easily be read in one sitting, and well worth it.
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