 Now let's move on to a new topic, and that's the topic of what's going on in the United States while all this stuff is going on in Europe. Already when we're talking about the Baroque, stuff going on in the 17th century, we're talking about a period of time that the United States was also making decisions about architecture. By the time we get into the establishment of the United States proper in the 18th century, we're in the full swing of the Enlightenment in Europe. This is a statue of George Washington by Horatio Greenow, and I find this to be a funny statue. One, because, wow, look at those abs, George Washington. Chopping down those cherry trees did you some good. But in addition to that, it's a funny way to be portrayed. It's a really neoclassical way to be portrayed. The same kind of associationism, the same attempt to fix meaning by pulling in these attributes and these images from history is going on in this portraiture. So in a sense, he's portraying himself as a Roman Republican senator. Other ideas of the Enlightenment are present in the founding of the United States also. For example, the philosophes, these great French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire and Montesquieu are widely read at the time, especially by people like Thomas Jefferson, who spent five years in France as an ambassador. Rousseau promotes the value of nature over the decrepitude of culture. Rousseau suggests that history is a burden and that what you want to do is cut away through all of the cultural layering and connect to something essential. And the kinds of things you want to get rid of are things like institutions and things like property. And what you want to connect to are things like nature and things like the land. You think about the United States, just the idea of the United States, not the particulars of the United States. But if there is a civilization that loves nature and loves the wilderness and loves a place uncluttered with history, boy is the United States interesting. It is this virgin territory that seems to be a geographical representation of the noble savage, a land unspoiled by culture. Of course, this is the narrow chauvinistic view of what culture is. Culture is only European culture as far as these guys are concerned. There was an architecture associated with Enlightenment thinking and we noticed that it was kind of anti-baroque architecture. It was neo-Polladian architecture. Moving away from the flourishes and the rhetoric and the extreme language and reliance on applied ornament that had to do with the baroque, moving away from the sculptural surfaces and plasticity of wall that we associate with a baroque and coming up instead with a pristine architecture that relies on things like proportion and mathematics. It's an architecture that can be taught. It's a progressive kind of architecture. This is Chiswick House that we looked at in London, designed by Lord Burlington and William Kent who were wigs who believed in the same principles to a large extent that were espoused by the Enlightenment philosophers in France. With that wiggish attitude is also an interest in the landscape and a very different kind of landscape than the landscape we saw in France or in Italy. France and Italy, of course, are countries strongly associated with the dominance of the church in Italy or the dominance of the state in France. When you come to England, it's a place governed by citizen rule, a different kind of landscape, and a different kind of architecture comes into play. Looser, more, showing off the qualities of nature, the irregularity of view, and also beginning to conceive of architecture in a very different way than architecture was conceived of in those other examples. Here in Stourhead, architecture is seen as a folly, as an eye catcher of something that organizes your view across the landscape in a picturesque way with vistas and not with axes that are strongly and geometrically cut into the land. So now let's look at how these Enlightenment ideas and how this idea of this powerful, unspoiled landscape get acted upon at the outset of this new nation called USA. Let's not even call it USA yet. Let's just call it this new land, this territory that's been recently claimed and is in the process of being colonized. Boston, settled in 1640, has this fabulous plan. Has anybody here ever driven in Boston? Was that a great experience for you? Did you want to scream? Did you want to just drive into a concrete barrier at a certain point so you wouldn't have to drive in Boston anymore? It's really terrible. And one recent Boston is terrible, at the outset at least. The oldest part of Boston is not really rationally planned. It follows topography, river meanders through it, some ground is marshy, you don't want to build there so you move around it, some ground is high, you get funny little streets going through it. In its original plan form, Boston doesn't quite yet become a diagram for the aspirations of this new nation. One of the aspirations of the Enlightenment was to use reason to control everything. If there's a tangled landscape, there are ways to deal with that landscape. You could put a grid down. You could begin to think about ways to measure, to order, to get a system going. And so the plan of New Haven begins to use this kind of a diagram. It's just, you know, look at New Haven and you think, well, this is not such a good plan. But it's not such a bad plan either. It's incredibly simple. Grid with a common grazing ground in the middle. What's nice about this is you know where you are. It's a grid. And there's some representation of the spirit of the community in the common grazing ground here. And what's also nice about the plan of New Haven is that it's extensible. If the city is going to grow, there are all kinds of good ways preloaded into the diagram of New Haven for growth. For example, extend the streets, extend the grid, and off you go. Maybe even add a few more squares. Another nice thing about the plan of New Haven is that it's a little bit familiar to us. We've seen something like this before. It's not so different, for example, from something like a Roman town camp, where we have the four square grid with a kind of central forum in the middle. Of course, the four square grid is much, much more hierarchical, emphasizing simply one center which tends to have something of importance placed on it. The New Haven plan is a nine square grid celebrating a center but a more democratically pitched center, a center for the people. We looked earlier at the great fire in London and how this great fire began to inspire people to think about town planning. People like Christopher Wren or people like Robert Hook began to take this charred ground of London and use it to plot out new possibilities for a plan. In looking at Wren's plans for London, we observed that these were awfully French looking plans. These were incredibly French. They're so radial. They're so axial. You even get these little emblems of the Sun King, these rempoints all over the place. Wren's first plan is ridiculously ideal. And by ridiculously ideal, I mean it just pretends that there's no river here almost. It just slaps an axis down the middle and unfolds evenly on either side. His second plan makes more adjustments but it's still imposing a structure of the town that seems foreign and not simply foreign but also emblematic of different power structures than the power structures that the people in England wish to embrace. Robert Hook's plan was a grid and that also didn't get built. They just rebuilt London as it was but all these ideas were in the air. And so when Philadelphia gets founded in 1668, just two years after the great fire of London, William Penn, who owns this land, gets a surveyor to come. A man called Thomas Holm and these are both people who were bred in England, educated in England and so very much aware of these planning ideas that were circulating in England at the time. Holm comes up with this plan, which is a great plan by the way. This is the Delaware River down here and this is the Schoolkill River up here. It's a giant plan. The plan plotted out in 1668 for Philadelphia includes more land than the city of Paris at the time and Paris was the largest city, well at least the largest city people knew about, the largest city in Europe. So it's ambitious. It's this idea that you get a good plan going, you have a rational structure and off you go. These are some of the things that make the Philadelphia plan so fabulous. In one sense, we have Cardo and Decumanus and a Forum in the middle, the Roman diagram that we see over here and we get it again here. Cardo Decumanus, Market Street and Broad Street with a square in the middle, an urban square, an urban square that's the seat of the city government town hall. At least that's that's the idea in the Holm plan. When you do a four-square grid like this, especially one at a giant scale like the scale of Philadelphia, you begin to get quadrants and each quadrant gets a square in the middle of it and each of these green squares begins to behave like the public grazing square in New Haven. It becomes a place that people can share. It's a green space where animals can graze. It becomes a place to get some fresh air and vegetation. So that's an amazing diagram and what's nice about it also is that it's an inflected diagram and by inflected I mean the east west streets that we have running in this direction are wider than the north south streets so that the wider streets begin to collect certain kinds of activities. The narrower streets begin to collect other kinds of activities. Additionally there were all kinds of ideas going on in Philadelphia. People are thinking about this fire and there was an idea that Philadelphia would be a green country town. What does that mean? One thing that it meant was in its original plan the houses were to be quite far apart, didn't end up that way because there were certain parts of town that were more desirable to build in than other parts of town. It also meant that houses would not be wood, they would be brick houses so that they couldn't burn and it also meant that some of these people kicking around in the early days not exactly contemporary with home but surely thereafter people like Benjamin Franklin founded fire brigades so that if there were a fire the citizens could band together and put out the fire before it ravaged the neighborhood. So this is the diagram and it is a fabulous diagram. Democratic, logical, extensible, inflected variable capable of sustaining lots of change while still retaining its clarity. What actually happened is that these two rivers the Delaware and the Schoolkill aren't exactly equal. The Delaware is a great navigable river and the Schoolkill is full of little cataracts and you can get through quite nicely in a kayak but at that period you really couldn't use it as a mercantile port in the same way that you could use the Delaware. The old city of Philadelphia grew up largely around the Delaware River and it took a while for the rest of the city to fill out. However if we remember Edmund Bacon's notion of the second man principle if you put a diagram in place and it's strong enough you really don't have to fill the whole thing out at once you put this diagram down there and history will fill out the diagram for you which in fact is what happened. There are a number of these amazingly good town plans if we look through the history of the early town planning moments in the United States. Another great one is Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah Georgia. This one is great also grid beautiful rational variable grid that introduces little squares or green spaces super and an incredibly hierarchical grid. We saw a little bit in Philadelphia that there are different scales of streets market street and broad street are incredibly wide east west streets are wider than north south streets but when you come in here the streets heading toward the river are all big boulevards. The blocks are not square in Savannah but the blocks are little rectangles so that you have an idea of street edge here with fabric moving parallel to the river and you have the short block edges in this direction perpendicular to the river and the short block edges often get monuments things like churches things like civic buildings things like who knows what. The big commercial street in the middle no messing around with all these little green spaces but each of these little squares becoming places that are centers of neighborhoods and centers of important buildings so it's a great plan and as you can see it's an extensible plan. Here in its earliest moment we have a little four square grid with four quadrants each of which has its own center and the cemetery thrown out to the perimeter. As the city grows over time this grid simply expands we just add a few more of these cells with their own little green space and off you go. Pretty soon you begin to think ah that cemetery is in an inconvenient place but it would make a great green space so the city continues to grow the city continues to flex and there's a lot of richness in the fabric because the grid is so varied. When you get a new country like the United States of America you need a new capital for the United States of America. The task of designing this new capital Washington D.C. fell at first to a Frenchman named Pierre L'Enfant and then he was assisted by a draftsman called Ellicott. When you give a Frenchman the task of designing a town plan you know what you're going to get it's a little bit crazy you're going to get like a bunch of radial things you're going to get a bunch of tridents and round points and so forth and to a large extent that's what you get that that is what you get for Washington D.C. Here's Versailles down at the bottom and here's L'Enfant's Washington D.C. kind of French but the French are good at communicating meaning in architecture or let's say people had already developed the ability to read these French plans to pull hierarchy out of them. For example each of these diagonals in the Washington City plan organizes itself around an important building it could be the Treasury building it could be the White House it could be the capital so there are two ways to move through the town of Washington D.C. it's a double system one system is the Democratic grid Cartesian space making knowable every point in a kind of equal way. Superimposed on top of that are these diagonals linking together monuments within the city linking together important spaces within the city. Washington operates on two levels it operates on one level as a Democratic representation of the aspirations and the values of the people and as another on another level and with another plan diagram as this showcase of the great institutions of this new nation. One thing that I think is particularly nice about the plan of Washington D.C. is the mall which we see here and the mall is this lawn park this green space cut into the fabric of the city but unlike the green spaces that we saw in Savannah wrapped by fabric or in New Haven wrapped by fabric or in Philadelphia wrapped by fabric the mall in Washington D.C. in its inception is open to the Potomac River so on one end of the axis you have monuments representing the greatness of the United States on the other end of the axis you have nature because the far side of the Potomac River has not been built up yet this is just a view looking through the green sword across the river at the great western expanse of the United States. This is a very enlightenment diagram right that you have two things being opposed to each other two things holding down the axis one the institution of a rational government and two nature and these two things will keep each other in check the natural virtue of the landscape will keep the potential for self-contamination of the city in check. So it's a pretty great diagram has anybody ever driven around Washington D.C. great experience Danielle did you want to drive over a cliff yeah anybody else anybody else drive there yes how did you like it it was all right right the diagonal streets make it really distracting when you're going through the grid what did you experience New York driving is easy New York has a grid I would rather drive in New York than D.C. any day right in New York you can't get anywhere but you know where you're going in Washington D.C. you can't get anywhere and if you're a split second late in making the turn God help you because there are like 15 streets coming into these round points and it's not clear and your GPS can't talk fast enough to tell you where to go but think about it when Washington D.C. was laid out there wasn't the idea that you'd be zipping around in your smart car with your GPS but rather you would be walking or you would be in a carriage and if you're moving more slowly then you have a chance to react at a different speed and move through the city a little bit more logically so much as we can admire Washington D.C. Thomas Jefferson really hated it Thomas Jefferson came up with this better idea of Washington D.C. here's the Potomac here's a green sword which is much more irregular in its lineaments than the one that we have at the mall and the plan of the city for Jefferson should be a grid. Jefferson embraces the idea of the democratizing grid but he's very leery of the overlay of these great boulevards two French two monarchical one of my favorite moments of early town planning in the United States comes here in our beautiful state of Ohio and that is the plan of Circleville which is just to the south of Columbus Circleville is named Circleville because it was originally constructed on an annular Indian mound we have these various Indian mound villages some of which are these rings elevated ring like things I sound smarter when I say annular Indian mound which means ring-shaped Indian mound so it's high ground and why wouldn't you build on high ground it would be absolutely clever to build on high ground that way you have a better view you have a little bit protection from the weather and so forth so that was the original idea Circleville gets organized around the annular Indian mound and no sooner is it constructed than people get really nervous about it because look at the diagram this is one of those diagrams that people in the Italian Renaissance were dreaming about the idea of an ideal circular town plan such a clear idea about a center now if you're an ideal Renaissance guy you can put your palace in the center or you can put your church in the center but if you are a enlightenment farmer in Circleville Ohio what are you going to put in the center you have nothing to put in the center it's a waste of space this is not rational and so the citizens of Circleville formed a society the squaring of Circleville society they began very systematically to start buying off portions of land to get rid of the damn circle couldn't couldn't stand it it just made them crazy two European and two unfroogle so here we see progress by 1838 they got rid of a little bit of it they got rid of a little bit of it by 18 what is this 40 49 they got rid of almost all of it and then by 1856 it is just like any other piece of the United States grid grid grid I couldn't believe this was true I actually on one occasion I went into the police station of Circleville Ohio where they had this big big scale map like not not quite as big as the screen but let's say one quarter the size of the screen and I wanted to find a trace of the circle there is nothing left there is no trace of the circle all gone so classicism or rather neoclassicism becomes very popular in the United States and we have a couple of of local architects who are building these monuments early on one of them is Charles bullfinch who is the architect who designs the state house in Massachusetts and here is Charles bullfinch and one thing that distinguishes him from other architects operating at the time is he was actually born and educated in the United States we have architects like long font Pierre long font a Frenchman we have other architects like Benjamin Latrobe an Englishman but bullfinch is pretty much the first real American architect and when he sets out to build something like the Massachusetts state house he he does it in a Neopolladian style it's the only possible style with the same attitude toward Palladio's language that we saw in the Neopolladians in England that is to say you strip away the stuff that seems stupid like optical corrections like antises you find a way to simplify and really to kind of flatten the robustness of the proportions in the interest of making things more rational of course this love of the rational didn't stop him from putting a shiny golden dome on top of it because it's Boston you want something flashy and here's what it looks like and I think if you look at the interior you can see that this language looks a lot more like the language of say Robert Adam that we looked at in cyan house in England a while back where the the instead of having a dome with coffering that has depth and cast shadow you get this plaster work that gives you the sense of the dome without the the real plasticity of the dome there is a kind of clarity a kind of severity a brittle flattened a plastic classicism that gives character to bullfinch's work here another one of these early American architects also working in a classical revival sense is Benjamin Latrobe although he was born in Britain Latrobe has earned the sobriquette America's first architect by the New York Times architectural critic and other people and the reason he earns this title is twofold one he was probably the first architect to have the design talent and and structural knowledge to execute complex projects at a large scale and when a country is trying to express its values express its cultural aspirations and its civic aspirations through architecture you really need someone who can pull off these projects that can dazzle the world or that can exemplify and and make visible these these complex ambitions of a new nation and two Latrobe was handpicked by Thomas Jefferson to design the most important symbol of this new nation the United States Capitol Latrobe is now really becoming fairly specific about what style he's looking at in the case of a bullfinch it's a broad cut through Neapolitanism Latrobe is purifying it he's contracting it down to specifically Greek revival the association between Greek architecture and the democratic values of this new society seem appropriate Jefferson picked Latrobe for this project solely on the basis of the excellence of one of Latrobe's existing works the Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia all you have to do is look at these drawings here of the plan and section to understand that in fact it is quite complex quite eclectic quite hybrid in so far as there is a Ionic Greek revival volume that contains within it a series of shaped vaulted spaces one of which is a complex coffered dome but Latrobe could pull these things off and pull them off in a gutsy and ambitious way and so Jefferson engages him to be the architect of the capital here's another view of the Bank of Pennsylvania where you can see this eruption in the gabled rectilinear prism of the Bank of Pennsylvania of this lantern dome for the design of the capital Latrobe really had a lot of stuff to grapple with there there was a competition and no architects rose to the fore nobody seemed to have enough enough skill enough ambition the kinds of projects that were put forward were really like large houses even the project that eventually won a project put forward by William Thornton an amateur architect professional physician lacked certain programmatic spaces it completely lacked a house of representatives for example the trove is put forward in this project by mr. Jefferson after seven years of work on Thornton's project take place without really yielding anything significant or rather the only thing that Thornton's project yielded was a foundation that had to be respected so that all of the trove subsequent work somehow had to play against this scattering of elements here's the troves plan for the capital and it's a fairly ambitious plan it in many ways it kind of reminds us of the Bank of Philadelphia if you look at the plan of the Bank of Philadelphia you see a rectilinear volume with conspicuous portachy on either side with a big dome in the middle and shaped spaces flanking it on either side and that's the same strategy adapted here an ovalized space the house of representatives a semicircular space the senate this is the drawing for La Trobe's capital as as put forward in 1806 and all these La Trobe projects are doomed in some way the bank of pennsylvania was torn down and even La Trobe's capital was burnt by the british during the war of 1812 so that it had to be reconstructed let's look at the kinds of things La Trobe sought to do in his design for the capital one it had to be a building of a vast scale and two it had to somehow exemplify the values of the country so the dome soaring above the rotunda and the assignment of the central space of the building not to the government not to the officers holding power but to the people themselves in many ways represents this ambition exemplifying the democratic spirit of this new country it has been said that all great architecture arises from the work not simply of a great architect but from the collaboration of a great architect and a great client and this is certainly true in the case of La Trobe's design for the capital if jefferson had been able to hold office for the amount of time necessary for the execution of this project it might have been a very great thing indeed because here you see all kinds of different impulses that each of them are putting forward for example over the house of representatives jefferson wanted to have a glass vault and La Trobe swore that he was unable to execute it and jefferson said you're the architect make this thing happen imagine a great greenhouse roof the likes of which jefferson would have seen in the the greenhouses of paris when he visited them would have been over the house of representatives again acting symbolically government is transparent government is light filled rather than dark and obscure and it was constructed in this manner and it did leak however when during the war of 1812 the british burnt the capital this glass roof went down with it and was eventually rebuilt in a different form very few remnants of La Trobe's original vision survive even in the little details La Trobe was trying to figure out ways to make an architecture expressive of this new country and the things it stood for he looked at classical precedent and he looked at it closely as we can see from the strong greek revival sensibilities demonstrated in the bank of pennsylvania but he was also willing to transform it these are some of the orders that he introduced this is the tobacco order where curling tobacco leaves and tobacco blossoms are put into play in lieu of a campus leaves or even the more homespun corn cob capital these capitals during the summer session obtained more applause from members of congress than all the works of magnitude or difficulty that surround them and this is nice it's america putting itself on par putting its own bounty on par with antiquity inventing a history for itself if you will or reinscribing its own particularities into the larger sweep of western history here you can see the corn cob columns in a vestibule in the capital and here you see some of the tobacco columns and here's another column capital that he designed his magnolia order taking this particularly american flower and and finding a way to attach it to the classical language really the only work by letrobe that can be examined in a fairly unspoiled state is the vast cathedral of the assumption or the basilica of boltmore or the boltmore cathedral from 1804 to 1808 here too there was a great collaboration between a client and an architect and the client in this case was the first catholic bishop of the united states john carol and the ambition of this church was really quite extraordinary because in puritan new england in puritan america catholicism was at the margins catholicism was ostracized in favor of Protestantism and here in this new nation that held no prejudice toward religions which separated church and state and held all religions to be equal for the first time catholicism was able to express itself in a monumental architectural form in america think about this space particularly in the context of the united states in the early years of the united states most of the structures even the major structures even the churches that people would experience were limited in dimension by the span of timber or a timber trust but you couldn't really do anything bigger than that and here we have letrobe building a dome at the scale of the greatest domes of europe the dome of the boltmore cathedral spanned 65 feet in diameter and sprung from 78 feet above the floor roughly the height of a seven-story building the span of the dome was unlike anything seen in the united states really the second largest building in the united states second only to letrobe's own capital building compared to the greatest classical domes in europe such as the pantheon which spans 142 feet in diameter the dome of the boltmore cathedral is not that astonishing but it vastly outstripped anything else that could be seen in the united states fabulous and it's also quite severe you look at this thing and my god as it stripped down the flattened innervated language of the classicism of an atom it seems robust in comparison to this bar relief draftsmanly description of coffering that we have at the boltmore cathedral one of my favorite letrobe projects are the waterworks in philadelphia has anybody ever been to philadelphia if you drive in along the schoolkill river you see these little boat houses that are really charming little Greek temples the trobe did those we're really interested in are the major players in this birth of a new nation and nobody is more major in this operation than say thomas jefferson thomas jefferson was probably the smartest person ever to be president of the united states and probably also the best architect ever to be president of the united states because thomas jefferson was a polymath he was one of these people who tried to do everything and he was very interested in architecture probably his interest in architecture was augmented by the five years that he spent in france where he had a chance to come into direct contact with the most current developments in in architecture at the time he's in france in the 1780s when these wonderful chateaus under the patronage of louis were all constructed and the debate about architectur poland how architecture can construct meaning was was debated in all the salons which jefferson attended anyhow here's jefferson we saw how washington had himself portrayed as a roman senator and i think it's interesting how jefferson has himself portrayed here jefferson has papers here probably things like the declaration of independence but he also has this connection to the classical the collection connection to the antique the connection to the arts and this is what it says on his tombstone here was buried thomas jefferson author of the declaration of american independence of the statue of virginia for religious freedom and the father of the university of virginia so no slouch this is the declaration of independence before jefferson ever became president jefferson didn't become president until 1800 but before he ever became president he was a representative for the state of virginia and under his direction a large project was instituted it was the land ordinance of 1785 what is the land ordinance of 1785 you might ask and the answer is a surveying project to go out and look at this vast territory of the united states and measure it and measure it in a particular way a rational way why wouldn't it be rational the whole of the united states would be subdivided into a grid a grid is a good thing and the grid would be six miles by six miles and each of these six by six mile chunks of america would be called a township and within that chunk of america called a township you would subdivide it into one mile by one mile units and these could be further subdivided but this became a way to measure and commodify the wilderness and why is that a good idea well one good idea is you could certainly raise money through the sale of land but for jefferson i think it went deeper than that jefferson was an enlightenment man cut from the same cloth and jean jocque de saut and jefferson felt that one of the great things that america had going for it was this land you know europe was full there was no land that you could go to there was no wilderness but we had land and jefferson had this idea that america could be this great agrarian nation a nation of farmers people connected directly to the land would not become contaminated by all these citified ideas part of the land ordinance project made it possible for people to homestead for people to move out into this vast terrain of the united states and settle the land and jefferson believed a number of things one thing he thought was nobody should travel until they're 40 years old and why he thought if you travel and you go to places like paris and you start smelling perfume and drinking champagne you're just a goner you're never going to be a virtuous person again in your life by the time you're 40 you have enough experience under your belt that you can handle it and i think jefferson might have been 40 when he went to paris to represent america as a great ambassador and jefferson also believed that cities were corrupt and that what you wanted to do was get people out of the cities and get them into the land this became a project for that here's the state of ohio gridded gridded gridded the surveying project begins to cut in roughly through the middle of of ohio we have the western reserve land grants up here we have different i don't know what that one is called over here and then the grid the grid marches forward and the grid covers the united states once jefferson was president he continued these ideas about expanding and connecting to the wilderness and making it possible for as many people as as can be to be farming land to have their own land to be free from the cities so one thing that jefferson sponsored was the louisiana purchase which you're probably familiar with this vast chunk of territory purchased for the united states moving west moving toward the future a bit later jefferson sponsored an expedition louis and clark moving west moving toward the future this idea that the farther west you go the more virgin the land will be the pure of the experience this is what the united states looks like these are these one by one mile grids seen from an airplane and now this is i think is quite funny that if you look at it now you have these center pivot irrigation machines you put the the irrigation machine in the middle and it swings around so that you actually get these little vitruvian man diagrams all over like iowa and kansas just because that's how you cultivate the land cities that grew up in the aftermath of the jeffersonian grid take on a very different character than these enlightenment city plans that grew up at the beginning for example the city like salt lake grid these are squares grid and the grid slams into the mountain without making any kind of adjustment for the fact that this is a mountain you cannot put a grid up a mountain but there is an inflection in the salt lake city grid that's pretty interesting that some blocks run in this direction north south some blocks run in this direction east west and the effect of that is that you never look directly at your neighbor you look at the side of your neighbor's house there's a conservation of the privacy every man's house is his own kingdom even in this more tightly packed context of a city like salt lake city jefferson is an architect jefferson putters around and jefferson's first puttering around project is his own house monticello near charlottesville virginia these are some diagrams that jefferson made for his house these these are early diagrams and i find these diagrams to be really quite breathtaking and what's so breathtaking about these early diagrams is they look just like frank Lloyd Wright plans from from the early part of frank Lloyd Wright's career prairie style houses where Wright and jefferson are more or less acting upon the same project and that is how can you make an architecture appropriate to america and what jefferson is saying and what right also says is you want to get the house to spread out to take advantage of the air and the light and the view and so it becomes a kind of cruciform house in the case of jefferson and and further elaborated in the case of right here's a house by frank Lloyd Wright the ward willett's house from 1902 right is investigating an architecture of america particularly an architecture for the prairie this flat broadly expanding grass covered terrain you might know it as the greater chicago area and look what look what right is doing he's pulling out rooms on all sides here there's a little dense piece that's packed in with service functions it's exactly what's going on in these early diagrams by jefferson a little service bay wings in three directions and a portico even the idea of the hearth in the center as this hard core or vertical axis moondi that pins this pinwheel of a house to the ground is also reprised in these projects by jefferson for monticello as he continues to play around with this he keeps thinking i could i would like to have another room i would like to have another room and the house gets a little bit coagulated with with stuff it's not as elegant as this early diagram but it becomes an example that would fit very well in with the neo-polladian architecture in england that's being practiced at maybe a few decades earlier but still practiced at this time we see something that looks kind of tart and gritty we see something that looks like a portico when we see the house proper we'll notice immediately that there's a big difference between jefferson's language and the language in england and that is that he's using this homespun material brick none of this highfalutin stone material for mr jefferson none of this highfalutin stucco work for mr jefferson an honest simple american material and by the way here's jefferson on the nickel and on the back of the old nickel we had monticello jefferson is so important he doesn't simply get to be on the nickel but his building also gets to be on the back of perhaps the most popular piece of currency we have the two dollar bill jefferson does sketches sketches like lord burlington did of seeing how this house can be situated in a landscape and in the case of jefferson it's a landscape that's at once productive and picturesque we have these efforts on the part of the garden not to cut an axis through although everything about this house is saying i am axial i am polladian give me an axis but rather these irregular borders and these clumping of trees are deployed here jefferson's puttering around like crazy jefferson designs the state house for virginia which is amazing i mean just try to get george bush either of them to design a state house it's going to be tough i don't think bill clinton could design a state house and i'm i'm a total fan because of the saxophone playing i think if you can play a saxophone like that you're probably a good architect too how does jefferson go about doing this and the answer is well jefferson had been to france and when jefferson was in france he was looking around jefferson didn't simply stay in paris but he also went to the south of france to the town of neem neem is an old roman town and there he had an opportunity to look firsthand at some roman ruins including the meson carré the meson carré we looked at when we looked at roman stuff he had a french architect that he was collaborating with called clary so make him a model of a state house based on the meson carré and clary so is said to have reported about jefferson with whom he visited neem that jefferson would gaze at the meson carré as frenchmen would gaze upon their mistresses so jefferson loves the architecture and here it is it's it's funny because the meson carré is a typical roman temple without punched windows and several stories but the thing just gets scaled up enormously and it's an original conception by jefferson it's just this one big kind of classical revival temple it gets expanded upon over time with more little temples but it would have been this pure giant thing like this bank that we saw by by the trobe but now even bigger fabulous roman temple with a big portico in the front roman temple with a big portico in the front and off you go when we looked at jefferson's tombstone we saw that one of the things that jefferson was most proud about was being the father of the university of virginia and that is something to be proud about the idea of a university is an enlightenment project the notion that people could be educated educated without having to go to the city by being in the country by having this institution that allows them to connect to the land and stay virtuous but also to take advantage of learning and reading and studying and having discussions jefferson conceived of the idea the university for the state of virginia in 1779 and in 17 he proposed this idea to to the legislature and finally had a bill passed authorizing the construction of an academical village in 1816 and this is his original design which in the subsequent decades was transformed and modified as much in response to jefferson's changing idea about what the community was that could create the strongest academical village and in response to the play between architecture and landscape this is the terrain of the university of virginia we have high ground over here this is like a plateau more or less and it falls down very quickly you know down down down down with all these topo lines so on the high ground jefferson situates a rotunda like building and he flanks it on all sides with pavilions connected by a colonnade what do you suppose the rotunda like building is for an enlightenment guy like jefferson yes absolutely right it's the library you know in a different organization it might be the palace the palace of the king you think about things like their side or specifically you think about marley it would be the palace or if you're thinking about italy it might be the church this might be st peters this might be the cortile but here it's the library the library is the center of meaning the library is the container of knowledge and the entire institution reflects around that it's a fabulous plan and what makes the plan so fabulous is that it doesn't just march out one grid and say same same same same same instead there's a kind of acceleration toward the cliff toward toward the sweep of the terrain and there's a compression as you get closer to the library if you notice these pavilions closer together here farther apart here and a lot of that has to do with i think acknowledging something about the pole toward the wilderness this diagram hierarchically organizes all kinds of different pieces in program like who lives here and the answer is these low bars fronted by a colonnade onto the green sword are student rooms and these big pavilions are professor houses and the professor houses are where the professors live but also where the instruction takes place the campus becomes a kind of diagram of a community a community of scholars and a community of scholars situated in nature in a very particular way with this manicured lawn pulling out but also this unfolding of little kitchen gardens and little picturesque gardens here you have one range of the housing and the pavilions here you have another range of the housing and the pavilions unfolding toward nature you move from the green sword to the gardens and then eventually to the wilderness now the plan we see here unfortunately has this 20th century building by makim meat and white that was put at the end of the axis which i think is really unfortunate the green sword of university of virginia and its original conception terminates with this fruit sweep of the terrain as if to say as in the diagram of the plan of washington dc another idea jefferson had here is that taste could be cultivated at the university of virginia remember he doesn't want anybody to travel until they're 40 years old but he does want people to have the experience of the grand tour to cultivate their taste every pavilion is a different pavilion and many of the pavilions emulate architectural monuments of value we see in the rotunda the library building something pantheonic you could have an experience of the pantheon of course it is this neo paladin or say neoclassical revisitation of the of the pantheon not the gutsy roman language but this flat more delicately understood language you also have in the university of virginia some kind of parallel with models one model is the chateau of marley one of louis chateaus we looked at it briefly before where each of the buildings became an individual pavilion another model is the saltworks in show show gives you one idea about how to situate a building in nature but it's a closed system and the relationship to the landscape there's a relationship of consuming the forest burning the forest it's not it's not quite the same project that jefferson has here which really enforces the notion of the agrarian ideal and the and the purification of nature the library wasn't the only building at the university of virginia that jefferson designed to suggest famous examples in europe and thereby cultivate the taste of young homespun american farm boys for example each of the professor houses were different each professor house had its own order its own articulation its own rhythm and some like this house over here were distinctly drawn on contemporary european models such as ladu's hotel gmail in paris not peros the university of virginia really exemplified everything jefferson felt about america about its opportunities about its challenges about the relationship of the landscape and the land to the strength of the people it's a tour de force of ingenuity one example is this undulating brick wall only one why the brick thick the wall gains its rigidity through the geometry of the curve but also the idea that there could be an institution a public institution that would be a great social leveler allowing everyone in the country or let's say everyone in the state of virginia to have equal access to knowledge equal access to self-improvement and equal access to bettering their position in life and to thereby prepare themselves to take an active part in the administration and the planning of this new nation