MR JEFFERSON'S VILLAGE

‘A plain small house for the school & lodging of each professor is best. These connected by covered ways out of which the rooms of the students should open… In fact, an University should not be a house but a village.’ Thus wrote Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, in January 1805 about his idea for a new College for his native Virginia. He would have no religion in it; the colonnades bordering his Lawn led from an exactly half-scale replica of the Pantheon, but it was pointedly a library, not a church. Building started, from his own drawings and those of his draughtsman Neilson, in 1817, after elaborate Masonic stone-laying rituals; when Jefferson died in July 1826, aged 83, only the Rotunda was unfinished, the University of Virginia in its second year. Above: the lawn, with the whole west range of five Pavilions leading to the Rotunda library.

Each of the ten pavilions was conceived as a little model of fine architecture, as teaching aids and as markedly individual houses for each academic subject. Several of the designs came from architect Benjamin Latrobe, whom Jefferson had consulted, including my favourite, the sublime Pavilion IX, above, with its apsed entrance behind Ionic columns, a device borrowed from Ledoux’s 1772 Hôtel Guimard in Paris. Mlle Guimard was a famous dancer and mistress of the Prince de Soubise, a celebrity of the Ancien Regime: an odd inspiration for a republican academy. The plan of Jefferson’s village, moreover, is like Louis XIV’s Château de Marly, although the Sun King had 12, not 10, pavilions. The magic of Jefferson isn’t in any sense of irony, however; it’s in his earnest, determined, rational optimism. Below: a gate with a simple but faultless self-closing mechanism of chains and weight, a typical Jefferson idea; the clean, modern backs of the ranges; and the serpentine, crinkle-crankle garden walls, which can be very thin, being self-bracing through their curves.