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.
The temple house, initiated by Jefferson and Latrobe, had a tremendous success with builders in the thirties and forties, particularly in the new territories west of the Alleghenies. But the finest and most paradigmatic came rather earlier and were architect-designed. Ithiel Town (1784-1844), for example, built the Bowers House in Northampton, Mass., in 1825-6 with an Ionic portico on the main block and fronted the lower side wings with antae. The big Corinthian Russell house, a pure temple with no side wings—the present wing was added later—rose in Middletown, Conn., to the design of his partner, A. J. Davis (1803-92), in 1828.
From such a ‘Parthenon’ as Berry Hill in Virginia, built by its owner James Coles Bruce in 1835-40, which is flanked by two lodges also of temple form, to innumerable more modest houses in the older towns of Ohio and Michigan, the roster of such edifices is infinitely extensive. It is also surprisingly varied in scale and in the materials used—most, but not all, are of white-painted wood—as also in the handling of the dominating columnar porticoes. In the South, for example, the characteristic plantation houses of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are peripteral but unpedimented, with external galleries splitting the height of the giant columns. Natchez in Mississippi has several fine examples; in Louisiana, Greenwood near St Francisville of about 1830 may be specifically mentioned, and also Oak Alley of 1836 at Vacherie near New Orleans.
The most ambitious Grecian houses of the Deep South are often very late in date, and architects were rarely employed to design them. Moreover, Greek detail was adopted in the South only very slowly and rarely used with the correctness of the Northern builders, who leaned so heavily on the plates of the orders in the books of Benjamin and others. Belle Meade, near Nashville, of 1853, being by the distinguished Philadelphia architect Strickland, is something of an exception in several ways; it had, for example, a fine portico of square antae executed in white marble that was almost Schinkelesque. Vast Belle Grove at White Castle, Louisiana, built by Henry Howard in 1857, was probably more effective in the romantically ruinous state in which it existed for many years before its final destruction than in its pristine condition, so confusedly eclectic was the general composition, with Italianate as well as Classical elements quite casually mixed.
Unpedimented porticoes are not unknown in the North, both east and west of the Alleghenies, as in the Levi Lincoln house of 1836 (once in Worcester, Mass., now moved to nearby Sturbridge) by Elias Carter (1781-1864) with its convex-fluted Doric order. Such original touches, which many carpenters introduced out of plain ignorance and more sophisticated architects developed out of a conscious desire to nationalize and personalize even such absolute paradigms as those of the Greek orders, often lend variety and piquancy to the mode. The finest Grecian houses, such as Elmhyrst at One Mile Corner, Newport, R.I., built probably by Russell Warren (1783-1860) about 1833, certainly owe their originality to the studied intentions of architects. This house, in particular, has a façade composed in overlapping planes that is not unworthy of Cockerell (Plate [42B]). On the other hand, the Hermitage near Savannah, Georgia, designed by Charles B. Cluskey c. 1830, could almost be by Schinkel, so simple and pure is its design.
Trained architects, on the whole, were too rationalistic or too adventurous to follow closely the plain temple model in domestic or institutional work. Walter presumably surrounded Andalusia, the home of the philhellene banker Nicholas Biddle outside Philadelphia, with a Doric temple-shell in 1833 only against his own better judgement. In 1833-47 he also built for Girard College in Philadelphia, of which Biddle was the trustee who called the tune, an enormous Corinthian temple. Inside this he incorporated a variety of educational functions only with considerable difficulty, but he vaulted all the interiors in the manner of Latrobe and Mills in order to provide a completely fireproof structure.[[89]] Curiously enough, this was one of the first American buildings to be published abroad,[[90]] thus rivalling Haviland’s prison, but it attracted no emulators in Europe. By the thirties, of course, these buildings by Walter were no novelties in Philadelphia.
Figure 12. Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va., University of Virginia, 1817-26, plan.
Philadelphia, the former colonial metropolis and briefly the national capital, was much more than Washington the cultural centre of the country in the early decades of the century. Here Latrobe had had his start, significantly with a bank in the form of an Ionic temple. Now in 1818 Strickland,[[91]] a native-born American and quite untravelled, won in competition the commission for building the Branch Bank of the United States with a much more archaeologically correct temple. Like various European and British public monuments of the period, but unlike any bank abroad, this is a marble Parthenon. But the various needs of the banking business were skilfully provided for inside, and the principal barrel-vaulted interior is very fine indeed. Built in 1819-24, this bank (later a Custom House) rivals the Bavarian Walhalla and the Scottish National Monument, though lacking their splendid hill-top sites. It was just the thing to establish Strickland’s national reputation. But his Merchants’ Exchange in Philadelphia of 1832-4, with a rounded end and a trabeated ground storey, provides more interesting and impressive evidence of his talent, perhaps the greatest of the generation following Latrobe in America (Plate [40]).