In one of the great ironies of American history, when Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, it was 50 years to the day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the immortal political document that he mostly wrote. Yet before his passing, his authorship of the Declaration and his two terms as President of the United States below the accomplishment in his life he was proudest of: Architect of the University of Virginia.
It was one of the last projects Jefferson worked on in his life. The university was chartered in 1819, less than seven years before his death, on a 28-acre plot of land in Charlottesville, not far from his estate at Monticello. What Jefferson produced was an “academical village” consisting of a southward facing u-shaped cluster of buildings with a 740-foot-long, 192-foot-wide great lawn between the arms of the u.
At the northernmost point of the configuration, Jefferson placed a rotunda that was patterned on Rome’s Pantheon, but at 50% scale. (The Washington, DC memorial designed by John Russell Pope and dedicated to Jefferson in 1943 strongly evokes both Jefferson’s rotunda and the Pantheon.)
The lawn sloped gently southward, terraced at three points and dropping a total of 18 feet along its length. It was flanked on each side by five pavilions, which combined classrooms and faculty residences, and were joined by a loggia of Tuscan order pillars. Each of the pavilions was designed slightly differently, for instance with different architectural elements, such as Corinthian vs. Ionic orders, as a means to demonstrating them to students on a concrete, daily basis.
For years afterward, Jefferson’s ensemble of classical buildings was the American university’s ideal look, a combination of architecture rooted in the wisdom of the ancient world but applied to education on a new continent that had already revolutionized mankind’s concept of human rights and government.
In 1987, UNESCO declared Jefferson’s “academical village” at University of Virginia a World Heritage Site.
