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The drawn plans were only a beginning, however, as Monticello became Jefferson's architectural laboratory. By "putting up" and "pulling down", he was able to evaluate elements at full-scale. Its organization has been quite adequately analyzed in detail elsewhere,22 but, surprisingly, its place within Jefferson's oeuvre has not. The first Monticello has often been treated as a timid, Neo-Palladian, retardataire false start, hardly more interesting than innumerable Georgian plans found in Virginia in the eighteenth century, rectified only when Jefferson returned from Paris passionately devoted to current French planning. However, while the particulars of the first plan may not have been original, the overall conception was. In fact, this plan contains all of the germinal elements that matured in the finished design: dominant, linked central volumes, a subordinate cross-corridor adjacent to which Jefferson positioned his stairs, a variety of room sizes and shapes, including prominent half-octagons, and the treatment of the building skin as a faceted perimeter which could be glazed and oriented to gather and modulate light. With this scheme, Jefferson had obviously already left far behind both Morris and Gibbs.

Furthermore, in developing the site, Jefferson turned Palladian planning backward by suppressing his linkers behind the main block, an extraordinarily original act within the largely conservative realm of late-eighteenth-century American architectural thought. That is, instead of enclosing a forecourt at grade, Jefferson's linkers and dependencies create a platform oriented toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, comprised as they are of a crypto-portico housing service functions and made accessible from the sides by means of a clever manipulation of topography. America had seen nothing like it (Figure 12). 23

While the crypto-portico suggests a connection to ancient Roman complexes such as Hadrian's Villa, Jefferson had never visited this site or anything akin to it. Possibly he had been inspired by the existence of a basement in the Villa Rotunda, although he would not have known from the I Quattro Libri that it had been used for agricultural processing. Or he may have been influenced by the multiple levels employed in French hôtel grounds, such as those at the Hôtel Thelusson. However, it seems just as likely that his bi-level scheme reflects his own sensitivity to three-dimensional topographic organization as illustrated in his hand-drawn site plans with their accurate contour lines and his plan drawings, such as that at Edgemont, annotated with relative room elevations. Such a sensitivity befitted a man whose surveyor father would have acquainted him through example with the potential manipulation of the ground plane.

When Jefferson returned home from abroad in 1789, he exorcised the obvious vestiges of Neo-Palladianism from Monticello by removing what existed of the two-story, south portico and set out both to expand his plan to the south and to transform its appearance into that of a low-slung French hôtel. These hôtels were typically freestanding and had apparently simple partis. However, their symmetrical facade compositions masked complex, asymmetrical plans with spaces linked by enfilades and axes, sometimes denied. In the second half of the eighteenth century, French architects had built upon existing traditions of convenance and bienséance to produce an almost fanatically intricate system of domestic planning. Convenance, a broad-based term, included among its concerns the proper relationship of parts to one another and their functions. Bienséance dealt with propriety and decorum and demanded forms appropriate to purpose and social custom. In the late-eighteenth century, French designers dramatically increased their emphasis on la distribution, the proper disposition of spaces to maintain propriety and to achieve a higher degree of efficiency and convenience. La distribution was facilitated, in turn, by dégagement, the ingenious manipulation of wall poché to form a hierarchical system of residual support spaces.24 A by-product of dégagement was the creation of incongruent floor plates. Consequently, while this technique produced a variety of spaces that were carefully ranked by means of size, placement, orientation, and décor, it created structural problems, since upper-floor partitions did not always extend all the way to the ground.

Jefferson's radical alteration of Monticello after his return from Paris brought it up to date in terms of la distribution. His revised plan (Figure 13) includes a wide variety of room shapes, cleverly and artfully united by means of a tightly developed collection of service spaces acting as poché and yielding a disciplined separation of public and private domains. In a design accomplishment no less profound than his site-planning maneuvers, Jefferson, in effect, turned the typical French hôtel organization inside out. That is, instead of creating, through dégagement, a prominent but often denied central-axis organization with particularized spaces packed around a central core, he maintained an open, axial, longitudinal core, surrounded first by spaces of greater particularity and second by light-entrapping semi-octagons. 25

Monticello's innovations extended to the details. Its projecting-bay-within-portico with reentrant columns was not Palladian or even Neo-Palladian, although the English had long employed projecting bays as light-collecting chambers on domestic buildings. In various preliminary studies Jefferson included porticoes and separate projecting bays on both the main house and its dependencies. He merged the two in his 1772 plan of the entire complex, using the four-columned portico with reentrant columns on the west or garden front and only a single file of four columns on the east or entry front.

Like that at Monticello, Jefferson's site plan for Edgemont (1797) depends upon topographic manipulation. The house stands astride a raised platform, in this case of earth held back by retaining walls, a configuration which allows for the one-story front facade to become two stories in the rear and for underground passages to extend from the basement of the main block, under the lateral exterior stairs, and to terminate beneath the dependencies. The distinctive architectural features of the house are all traceable to Monticello experiments: dominant, longitudinal rooms, a transverse passage, multiple porticoes, and an octagonal, projecting bay placed on the east or garden front and encased within a portico supported laterally by reentrant columns. NEXT PAGE>>

FIGURE 12: Monticello, Overall plan of the first project at the first-floor level (Fazio). Latrobe’s sketicism notwithstanding, Jefferson produced at Monticello one of 18th-century America’s most innovative domestic site plans. Inspired by the Palladian five-part scheme with forecourt, he suppressed a complete service floor below grade but left this floor accessible at the basement level on both flanks. In addition, rather than stretching his wings forward, he turned them to the rear where they define a platform for viewing the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond. It is an innovative synthesis of great architectural ideas, as brilliant in its own way as Jefferson’s celebrated synthesis of political ideas in the Declaration of Independence. back

FIGURE 13: Monticello, Final first-floor plan (1789-1809) (Fazio). Jefferson’s radical alteration of Monticello after his return from Paris brought it up to date in terms of the French theories of la distribution or sophisticated room layout. His plan as built includes a wide variety of room shapes, cleverly and artfully united by means of a tightly developed collection of service spaces acting as poché and yielding a disciplined separation of public and private domains. In a design accomplishment no less profound than his site-planning maneuvers, Jefferson, in effect, turned the typical French hôtel plan inside out. That is, instead of creating, through dégagement, a prominent but often-denied central-axis organization with particularized spaces packed tightly around a central core, he maintained an open longitudinal core, surrounded first by spaces of greater particularity, including downplayed stairs, and second by light-entrapping semi-octagons. back

22 See for instance Pierson, American Buildings, Vol. I, 292-316. back

23 See Kerry Albert, "Thomas Jefferson's Use of Landscape Section in the South Pavilion and Dependencies at Monticello," M.S. in Architecture Thesis, Mississippi State University, 1993. back

24 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1986, 105-127. back

25 Dennis, Court and Garden, 233. back