‘Utility, duration, and beauty’

Jefferson grounded his Manual on the foundations of the Senate’s Rules for Conducting Business. This acceptance of the framework available is best understood as calling on an architect’s appreciation of the possibilities which the site offers.

These similarities come to mind when one contemplates a house built upon

a small hill, of very easy access and... on the other... encompassed with most pleasant risings, which look like a very great theatre, and all cultured, and about with most excellent fruits, and most exquisite vines; and therefore... enjoys from every part most beautiful views, some of which are limited and some more extended, and others that terminate with the horizon.⁴⁵

This description - drawn from Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architec­ture (as the title appears in English translation) - took the reader to the Veneto and its most famous villa, La Rotonda (the Villa Capra), which Pal­ladio (1508-1580) designed. As far as Palladio was concerned this ‘fabrick’ was his masterpiece. The central dome of this residence dominated the ave­nue that guided the visitor gently up the slope to its dominating portico. In his Four Books, Palladio drew on the work of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (70 bc - 15 bc). The career of Vitruvius extended into the reign of Augustus.⁴⁶

A personal residence, like the Villa Capra or Monticello, was not complete without human beings to take pleasure in what the structure and its curti­lage offered. This edifice required, in a word, inhabitants. The interior walls, doors and windows should be regarded as conditions of possible experi­ence.

The 1715 English edition of Palladio’s Four Books was published with plates drawn by Giacomo Leoni, an Italian architect working in Great Britain. This edition was the most widely circulated there and in North America. Jefferson owned four copies. The pages of Palladio’s Four Books supplied models for the faςade of the Virginia State Capitol and the exterior of Monticello. Palladio and Leoni also inspired Jefferson’s design for the Rotonda at the University of Virginia, a work not completed until after Jef­ferson’s death (1826).

Palladio stood to Vitruvius as Jefferson must be measured against Hatsell. Suitably paraphrased or translated, the performance standards of Vitruvius, Palladio, Hatsell and Jefferson follow in this order:

Architecture depends on Order (in Greek ταξις), Arrangement (in Greek διαθεσις), Eurythmy, Symmetry, Propriety, and Economy (in Greek οiκονομiα).⁴⁷

For three things, according to Vitruvius, ought to be consider’d in every fabrick, without which no edifice will deserve to be commended; these are utility or convenience, duration and beauty.⁴⁸

Rule[s] should be established on the foundation of sound reason and argument, as it is, that order, decency, and regularity.⁴⁹

[Following my sketch] a code of rules shall be formed for the use of the Senate, the effects of which may be accuracy in business, economy of time, order, uniformity, and impartiality.⁵⁰

Vitruvius offered a precise and uncluttered notion of theory. His perfor­mance standards are fixed within the ‘the ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion’.

Just as Palladio assured his readers he had read his Vitruvius, Jefferson assured the reader - in the course of declaring his standards - that he relied on Hatsell. ‘I could not doubt the necessity of quoting the sources of my information; among which Mr. Hatsel’s most valuable book is preeminent’. Jefferson declared that ‘the effects’ of the Senate’s ‘code of rules may be accuracy in business, economy of time, order, uniformity, and impartial- ity’.⁵² These served as his performance standards for code-written rules. They trace their pedigree back to both Hatsell, on the one hand, and Pal­ladio and Vitruvius, for a second genealogy.

What Palladio praised as beauty in his declaration of standards he teased apart as harmony in design. To please the eye, the designer should surprise the viewer with curves and circles set off against lines and right-angles. What Jefferson praised as order, uniformity and impartiality he teased apart as ‘accuracy in business’. In this phrase Jefferson referenced the collaborative experience by which words were added, deleted and substituted. This effort was played against ‘economy of time’. Palladio likewise made clear that the physical and financial constraints on construction must be accounted for, just as Jefferson valued efficiency in the assembly.

There is only so much money or time to spend. ‘ “Shall the main question be now put?” can admit of no modification’, Jefferson remarked. ‘To change it to tomorrow, or any other moment, is without example and without util- ity’.⁵³ Over and above considerations of efficiency, what supplied enduring fascination for Jefferson was the proportion between majority and minority.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.⁵⁴

These remarks are justly famous; Jefferson forged an intimate link between fairness and goodness. Fairness and goodness, when visualised,

‘I have begun a sketch’ 91 enable inhabitants to join in a unified perspective - with ‘one mind’ - on the connection between civil society and its child-agent political society. ‘Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things’.⁵⁵ The construction of buildings for human use, like any collaborative activity which produces artefacts for human admiration and enjoyment, was a phenomenon to be closely observed and regarded as a whole. ‘Jefferson... himself a thorough embodiment of classical virtu^,, Robert Tavernor has remarked, ‘achieved the Declaration of Independence, religious liberty in Virginia, and the founding and building of the University of Virginia’.

These were the three accomplishments by which he wished to be remem­bered, and they are a fitting epitaph, too, to the Vitruvio-Palladianism of the English-speaking world.⁵⁶