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George Washington had met Hoban in Charleston in 1791 through Colonel Henry Laurens.16 Frustrated by L'Enfant's lack of both diplomacy and pragmatism, Washington sought to import a builder who could assure the timely construction of the President's House and provide the nascent country with a prominent symbol of permanence. His choice was propitious. Hoban's accomplishments suggest a complete understanding of the building process, if not imaginative architectural thinking.

This is not to say that Hoban did not have his share of challenges. L'Enfant had begun excavations on the site for an enormous presidential palace. Its form, if ever fully understood by L'Enfant himself, remains enigmatic. Washington, nervous that Hoban's design would not provide a sufficiently impressive Federal symbol, ordered its size increased by 20 per cent. Once at work on this inflated scheme, Hoban found himself constantly warding off efforts by Washington's city commissioners to modify it. Still more dramatic changes resulted from the difficulty in obtaining sufficient stone from the Acquia Creek quarry and this stone's porosity. Hoban had intended for the President's House to sit atop a high base, like Leinster House in Dublin on which it was modeled.17 In the process of changing from monolithic stone to brick with stone-veneer construction, he eliminated the base, placing the basement of the north elevation below grade but protected by a retaining wall and areaway, and compensated for the resulting loss of monumentality by adding a central pediment.18 Moreover, the Scottish masons, following their accustomed practices, applied a white sealant to the vulnerable sandstone by 1798, causing the President's House to become white by the time John Adams arrived to occupy it as the country's second president,19 although the official designation of "White House" did not come until 1902.

While virtually nothing remains and little is known about them, James Hoban produced numerous designs other than the President's House and busied himself with construction oversight, city government jobs, and elected offices in Washington. His Blodgett's Hotel of 1793-1800 is known through a post-Civil War woodcut and an 1818 watercolor drawing. Because Samuel Blodgett's speculation in Washington real estate led to his bankruptcy, his so-called hotel never served that purpose, becoming instead, under Latrobe's supervision, the city's post office and U. S. Patent Office. Atop its lonely site, the building was not unlike a number of London houses of the 1760s and 1770s, such as Robert Adam's Shelburne (later Lansdowne) House.

Two men could hardly have been more dissimilar in their approaches to architecture than James Hoban and Thomas Jefferson. While Jefferson had little knowledge of technical matters, he planned not only competently but even innovatively, and he commanded extraordinary powers of synthesis. Possessing a personal, social, and political vision which few, if any, could match in America, Jefferson produced solutions to American domestic design problems comparable to his assemblage of political theory in the Declaration of Independence. As a true product of eighteenth-century thinking, Jefferson was an empiricist and a man fascinated with the natural order of things. In creating the Declaration of Independence he fused the ideas that he had confronted in conversations, letters, printed essays, and the writings of men from Plato and Aristotle to John Locke. It was borrowing of sorts, but required the recognition of fundamental truths, amidst the flow of varied information, and their expression with clarity and lucidity. His process of architectural design was no different; his elements were diverse and eclectic, but he selected them through an intense scrutiny of their properties and a high regard for their provenance; he intended that his compositions be not only appropriate but valid and that they reflect those values and aspirations that he felt to lie in the hearts and minds of Federal Period Americans.20

Latrobe wrote to Jefferson as early as 1798, and he encountered Jefferson's architecture and planning in Richmond, Virginia. While Minister to France, Jefferson had enlisted the assistance of C.L.A. Clérisseau in his design of the Virginia State Capitol. Built in 1785-90, it would be the only public building to interest Latrobe during his early years in America. Now dwarfed amidst much larger structures, the Capitol once stood alone atop the slopes of Shockoe Hill, a dramatic harbinger of informed, unqualified Neo-Classicism in America. Jefferson eventually brought Latrobe to Washington where the two strong-willed men collaborated effectively. While Jefferson had little to teach Latrobe professionally, the force of his intellect must have challenged Latrobe's conceptual powers as an architectural visionary for the new republic.

In particular, Jefferson explored the idea of the domed residence through his studies for a Governor's House to be built in Richmond, Virginia (ca. 1783), his competition entry for the President's House (ca. 1792), the second Monticello (1789-1809), and his later schemes for the modification of Shadwell (1803) and Barboursville (1817). Only at the President's House and possibly the Governor's House did he intend the domed space to be two stories tall; in the others he employed the dome primarily as an exterior feature, revealing it on the interior only as a second-floor room. Jefferson's Villa Rotunda-like scheme for the Governor's House is known only through a partial plan drawing. Its affinity with Palladio's published plan suggests strongly that Jefferson intended the rotunda space to be covered with a dome. While he did not develop the idea fully here, he returned to it for the President's House competition.

Jefferson entered the competition anonymously, signing his entry as "A. Z." With this scheme, he unequivocally posited the dome as an appropriate symbol for the public man in America. The modifications that he made to Palladio's Villa Rotunda prototype reveal some of his predilections. While Palladio included equivalent cross-axial entries, Jefferson proposed that the longitudinal axis should dominate; therefore, he enlarged an entry hall to become a stair hall, albeit with an awkward stair. In the bedchambers he used bed alcoves with which he had first become familiar at the Hôtel de Langeac, his Parisian residence, and which he included at Monticello and elsewhere. To support the flanks of his portico, he deployed re-entrant columns, as at Monticello, rather than a pierced wall in the manner of Palladio. For his front elevation he envisioned a dome not like Palladio's, but with alternating rib-like skylights inspired by those in the Halle au Blés in Paris, a building he so favored that he had Latrobe include similar skylights in the ill-fated dome of the House of Representatives in the Capitol.

For the first Monticello Jefferson began excavating his hilltop site in 1768. He briefly explored a square plan divided into a nine-part grid and a rectangular one that included a projecting portico on one long side and a central loggia on the other. Finally, he considered several cruciform schemes taken from James Gibbs's Book of Architecture and Robert Morris's Select Architecture and settled on a composite version in 1769 and began construction of a two-story Anglo-Palladian villa with a central portico having superimposed columns (Figures 10-11).21 NEXT PAGE >>

FIGURE 10-11 Monticello nr. Charlottesville, VA, Plan and front (east) elevation of the first project (1768-85) (Fazio). Thomas Jefferson brought Latrobe to Washington in 1803 to work on the Capitol and other federal projects. Among America’s gentleman architects, Jefferson was the only one for whom Latrobe had admiration--albeit a grudging admiration. Latrobe saw the erudite Jefferson as someone who “fished” his designs out of books, which was certainly true for Jefferson’s own house, Monticello. For his plan, he first relied on a variety of English sources, particularly James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture and Robert Morris’s Select Architecture. However, this design was only the beginning, and Jefferson would spend the rest of his life using Monticello as a kind of laboratory for his architectural experiments, no different than America’s being used as a laboratory for the great democratic experiment.




For his initial entry-facade composition, Jefferson drew quite directly on the work of Andrea Palladio. It was an old-fashioned design, Italian as interpreted by way of England. It would, in fact, appear old-fashioned to Jefferson himself once he had spent his years in Paris as minister, where he examined closely the most up-to-date Parisian domestic designs, so much so that upon his return to Monticello he had the facade razed and rebuilt in the form of a French hôtel.

16 "James Hoban: The Architect and Builder of the White House," American Catholic Historical Researchers, Vol. 24 (1907), 37. back

17 Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia, in the Society of Architectural Historians Buildings of the United States series, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 152. back

18 The retaining walls appear first on Latrobe's plan but must have been planned by Hoban, as he included windows across the north facade of the basement. back

19 William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea, Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1992, 23. back

20 See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978, 364-65 and Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence, New York: Knopf, 1940, 26-27. back

21 Gene Waddell, "The First Monticello," JSAH, Vol. 46, No. 1 (March 1987), 5-29 and Pierson, American Buildings, Vol. I, 293. back