Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Related to the Romantic Classicism of Washington is certain Virginia
work. Arlington House, as remodelled by the English-born and
English-trained Hadfield, rises just across the Potomac River on a high
hill-crest; by its tremendously overscaled Paestum-like temple portico,
added in 1826 to give grandeur to a modest earlier mansion, this
provides a more monumental note in the Washington scene than anything of
this period inside the city except Mills’s obelisk and his Treasury.
Just outside Charlottesville, Jefferson, after his retirement from the
Presidency, devoted himself architecturally as well as educationally
from 1817 until his death to the organization of the University of
Virginia and the construction of its buildings. The layout, with
pavilions for the various professors’ use linked by porticoed galleries
behind which the students’ rooms are placed, culminated at the upper end
in the Library and was originally open[88] to the view at the bottom
(Figure 12). Although most of the pavilions reflect earlier stages of
Romantic Classicism—if not usually the Anglo-Palladian with which
Jefferson’s architectural career had begun half a century earlier—this
is a more remarkable entity than his Virginia Capitol. Perhaps it has a
lesser general historical importance, yet it is certainly not without
special significance for America. This is most notably true of one of
the pavilions whose design was suggested to Jefferson by Latrobe in
1819. Here for the first time a modern American dwelling, and one of
quite modest size—for these pavilions were used as houses for the
professors as well as providing classrooms on the ground storey—was
encased within the shell of a prostyle Greek temple. Moreover, Jefferson
accomplished this rather more successfully than Beaumont in France in
the late eighteenth century at the Temple de Silence, or Wilkins in
England at Grange Park in 1809.
Not the least successful among the innumerable imitations of the Roman
Pantheon, the building which originally served as the Library of the
University, built in 1822-6, dominated the two ranges of
colonnade-linked pavilions (Plate 38B). Here more drastically than by
Wilkins at Downing College or Ramée at Union, the earlier Anglo-Saxon
patterns of educational architecture were reconstituted in Romantic
Classical guise, yet the University of Virginia did not have a very
considerable influence, then or later. The central group at Amherst
College in Massachusetts—two dormitories of 1821 and 1822 and a chapel
between of 1827—offers a modest group of quite different but equally
notable quality on a splendid hill-crest site (Plate 45). At other
colleges only individual structures usually survive from this period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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