The University of Virginia is the most celebrated project among the numerous ones that Thomas Jefferson developed during his long and intense life (Fig. 1).Footnote 1

It is a complex project, which had a long gestation and saw the collaboration of several figures. It can be considered the quintessence of his ideals, and one of his most important and significant works, as the words inscripted on his tomb recall:

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the law for religious freedom in Virginia, and father of the University of Virginia.Footnote 2

The project for the Charlottesville campus was developed in approximately two decades and can be regarded as Jefferson’s last great work. He devoted much time to architecture, both in the private and public sphere, as shown by the extensive and documented catalog of his projects (some of which were executed, while others remained on paper). From his residence in Monticello to the competition for the President’s House, from the Capitol of Richmond to the Capital on the Potomac and the University of Charlottesville,Footnote 3 Jefferson tends to all aspects, from the furnishings to the entire plan of the city and the territory.

Fig. 1
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Charlottesville, University of Virginia, bird-eye view

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The University of Virginia is not just an architectural work. It is the concretization of a larger project on education, and its design is emblematic of his multiple interests and of Jefferson’s deep commitment to educating the young nation.

In 1778, he presented “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” to the House of Delegates:

… And whereas it is generally true that people will be happiest whose laws are best, and are best administered, and that laws will be wisely formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those person, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance ….Footnote 4

The proposal was not approved. It was submitted another time in 1780 and again by James Madison when Jefferson was in France, and it was finally approved in an amended version as “Act to Establish Public Schools” in 1796.Footnote 5

The intent to provide culture and education for all is based on the same Enlightenment ideals that inspired the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the inalienable right to happiness, achievable only by a population free from tyranny. Education is the essential foundation of this principle, and the University of Virginia represents the culmination of such great a project.Footnote 6

This confluence of thoughts and ideals emphasizes how it is impossible to think of Jefferson’s individual architectural project as unrelated to his work as a politician and a man of the law.

Along with the ideal of the spreading culture came a concrete plan, too. In the projects dedicated to the organization of the West territories—the Land Ordinance of 1784 and its revision of 1785—Jefferson designed buildings dedicated to public instruction for each “township”.Footnote 7

The University of Virginia satisfies both symbolic representative and practical needs. It celebrates and makes use of universal ancient models, while also keeping the local tradition alive, especially in terms of the materials used and the scale of the buildings.

1 State-of-the-Art

The project is known and very well documented. Countless studies have been dedicated to it by American and international scholars and more research are in progress.Footnote 8 The large amount of documentation made it possible to trace the history of the university. Today, these documents have been in large part transferred in electronic format: original documents, writings, letters, projects, and, of course, a large number of drawings have been allowed to trace and deepen the understanding of the history of the University and the creative process that brought it to completion (Figs. 2 and 3). It should be emphasized, however, that the general guiding principles of the project—the formal organization of the campus, the language adopted, the distribution of the functions—have always been well recognizable since the very beginning of these studies. They emerged clearly already in the pioneering studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and have remained substantially unchanged.

Fig. 2
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Thornton, May 9, 1817. N300. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 3
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(Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

Letter from Benjamin Latrobe to Thomas Jefferson, July 24, 1817. N304, K213. Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. Massachusetts Historical Society

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2 The “Academical Village”

As is well known, the core principle guiding the realization of the university is the “academical village”. This idea constitutes the springboard for the entire project. Jefferson himself explained it in a famous letter to Littleton Waller Tazewell, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who had manifested his approval for Jefferson’s ideas regarding the new university:

Large houses are always ugly, inconvenient, exposed to the accident of fire, and bad cases of infection. A plain small house for the school and lodging of each professor is best… In fact, a University should not be a house but a village.Footnote 9

The same letter already states all the guiding principles of Jefferson’s project, from the financial and administrative aspects to the study programs and the architectural project. The idea of the academic village had already been formulated in the “Rockfish Gap Report” of 1818:

… They [commissioners] are of opinion that it should consist of distinct houses or pavilions, arranged at proper distances on each side of a lawn of a proper breadth, and of indefinite extent, in one direction, at least; in each of which should be a lecturing room, with two to four apartments, for the accommodation of a professor and his family; that these pavilions should be united by a range of dormitories, sufficient each for the accommodation of two students only, this provision being deemed advantageous to morals, to order, and to uninterrupted study; and that a passage of some kind, under cover from the weather, should give a communication along the whole range … It is supposed probable, that a building of somewhat more size in the middle of the grounds may be called for in time, in which may be rooms for religious worship, under such impartial regulations as the Visitors shall prescribe, for public examinations, for a library, for the schools of music, drawing, and other associated purposes.Footnote 10

Pavilions for classes and professors’ residencies, dormitories for the students, all surrounding the lawn, and a larger building to host the library and other public purposes: this text de facto describes all the core elements which would then appear in the final project.

What are the implications of this innovative concept, unprecedented in schools both in the colonies and in England, and destined to become the model of a new architectural typology for universities?

The campus designed by Thomas Jefferson symbolizes a series of strong, innovative and “revolutionary” ideas in both education and architecture.

It symbolizes an important and innovative pedagogical principle: to establish a new relationship between student and teacher, based on mutual respect, a relationship inter pares to be experienced in a space both solemn and human-sized. The focus of this ideal space is the lawn. The role Jefferson gives to this space, at the center of the entire complex, is unequivocally connected to the ideal of a rural, uncontaminated America. This principle was present in all Jefferson’s projects. In the Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.Footnote 11

Jefferson developed a utopian, anti-urban idea for the young rural nation based on physiocratic principles. His vision was pro-agrarian and anti-urban. He intended to contain the inevitable acceleration of American financial and industrial capitalism, and exemplified these ideas in his project for the new capital.Footnote 12 Jefferson’s naturalistic ideology had strong political connotations. In this context architecture, “the most useful of all arts”Footnote 13 became a tool to communicate the values of independence and freedom of the young nation. All these ideas found expression in his first projects for the University.

Once he laid the groundwork to create better conditions for learning, Jefferson incorporated exempla of Antiquity into the project. Not only did he use different elements of the classical orders in the pavilions’ facades (almost like an architectural treatise in bricks and painted woodFootnote 14) but he placed a temple-shaped building in a privileged position. His “americanized”—in size, material, organization of the interior spaces—Pantheon became the Library (Figs. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8). This “temple of knowledge” stood at the center of shorter side of the lawnFootnote 15 (Fig. 9).

Fig. 4
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Thomas Jefferson, The Rotunda, Façade. N328, K8. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 5
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Thomas Jefferson, The Rotunda, Section N329, K9. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 6
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Thomas Jefferson, The Rotunda, Plan, ground floor N330, K10. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 7
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Thomas Jefferson, The Rotunda, Plan, Library Room N331, K11. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 8
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(Courtesy of the University of Virginia Library)

Thomas Jefferson, The Rotunda, notes N331 verso, K11 verso. MSS 171, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

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Fig. 9
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(Courtesy of the Library of Virginia)

Charlottesville, University of Virginia. Study for 1822 Maverick Engraving Library of Virginia

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Despite the abundance of studies on the history of Thomas Jefferson’s project for the University of Virginia, there are still uncertainties regarding the specific role he actually played in defining the final project. As it is well known, several different people were involved in the entire design process. Among them were two important architects: William Thornton and Benjamin Latrobe.

The exact role played by Jefferson and his main collaborators in the final design is still object of study and debate. The research aims to re-analyze the network of relationships and possible influences that converged in the project, focusing especially on the years Jefferson spent in France as Ambassador, when he came in contact with artists, politicians, pedagogists and philosophers. It also analyzes his role in the foundation of the West Point Military Academy in 1802. In that instance, he was not involved in the architectural project, but his participation speaks to the importance that military education had for Jefferson, which is then reflected in the hierarchical layout of the University project. In addition, it is worth mentioning that in the same year while the project for the campus in Charlottesville was taking shape, other schools and military complexes were under construction, both in Europe and in North America. Those too may have influenced him.

Jefferson conceived such a project, thanks to the convergence of multiple ideas, people and influences. Together, not only did they shape the design for a new space devoted to learning, but they effectively gave birth to a new architectural typology of the American campus, an innovative model for the decades to come.