JUNE 2007 » book review

Father Figures

Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture
By Hugh Howard
Bloomsbury USA, New York, NY; 2006
320 pp; hardcover; $25.95
ISBN 1-58234-455-8

Reviewed by Will Holloway

In April 1914, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan named Fiske Kimball sat in a reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society surrounded by piles of water-damaged drawings. Kimball had come to Boston following a hunch; in researching what would become A History of Architecture (1918), he had begun to theorize that Thomas Jefferson's impact on American architecture was not fully understood. His recognition of Jefferson's hand in those hundreds of drawings would lead to the publication of Thomas Jefferson, Architect (1916), which established the third president's reputation as a designer. As a result of Kimball's scholarship, as Hugh Howard asserts in his new book, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson, "…it is now regarded as received wisdom that Jefferson, as Kimball asserted, 'may truly be called the father of our national architecture.'"

Thomas Jefferson, Architect, was published precisely nine decades after Jefferson's death. With Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson, Howard presents Kimball as the father of architectural history precisely nine decades after Kimball presented Jefferson as the father of American architecture. "Kimball transformed himself into America's first true restoration architect and his research initiated a new academic discipline," Howard writes. "The formal study of architectural history didn't exist in the United States until he came along and began to shape it."

Indeed, without Kimball, it is conceivable that Jefferson's influence would still not be fully accounted for. As Howard states, Kimball's instinct ran counter to the prevailing attitude toward Jefferson in the early-20th century. "Since Jefferson's death in 1826," he writes, "his architectural accomplishments had grown more obscure by the year. As early as 1834, the plan and overall appearance of Monticello had been attributed to another designer by America's pioneer art historian, William Dunlap, in his two-volume History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States."

In fact, Jefferson's thinking of Monticello was directly influenced by a building that took shape before his eyes in Paris, where, in his capacity as Minister to France (1784-89) he was exposed to the latest European building trends. "Construction at the Hôtel de Salm had been well under way when Jefferson arrived in Paris in 1784, and the building was completed during his tenure as minister," Howard writes. "He watched it progress from a terrace overlooking the Seine….When he began the renovation [of Monticello] in 1796, he ordered that all walls above the ground story be demolished, in order to mimic the one-story appearance of the Hôtel de Salm."

As Howard puts it, before Jefferson, there were builders; after Jefferson, there were architects. Jefferson himself, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), wrote:

The private buildings are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greater portion being of scantling and boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable .… A workman could scarcely be found here capable of drawings an order …. The first principles of the art are unknown, and there exists scarcely a model among us sufficiently chaste to give us an idea of them.

Howard points to Jefferson's years in France – and his travels in England, Germany and Italy – as crucial to the shift in America from builders to architects. "Before his sojourn in Paris, American builders rarely if ever worked from detailed plans," he writes. "Instead, masons and carpenters, typically having agreed on the basis of a single sheet, just went ahead and built. But Jefferson's Paris years proved a fulcrum in American architectural practices as he helped initiate a major transformation – the plans he sent home for the Virginia Capitol in a tin box may well have been the first complete set of working plans ever prepared for an American building."

But Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson is not just the story of Kimball's research, Jefferson's architectural pursuits, Monticello, the Virginia Capitol and the University of Virginia. It is also the story of birth, infancy and maturation of American architecture, from the early builders and European-born architects who influenced Jefferson to the later architects who were in turn influenced by him. Yet it is not a dry history lesson – it reads almost as a dramatic account, with a list of players that includes William Buckland, the English carver/joiner who came to America in 1755 and later designed the Hammond House, which Jefferson discovered and was profoundly influenced by when he traveled to Annapolis, MD, in 1783 for a session of the Continental Congress; Charles-Louis Clérisseau, the Parisian artist who collaborated with Jefferson on the design of the Virginia Capitol; and Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Charles Bulfinch, James Hoban, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Robert Mills, who "with Jefferson, Hoban, Bulfinch, and Latrobe as his tutors, would lay claim to 'the honor of being the first native American who directed his studies to architecture as a profession.'"

Through its 263 pages, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson's alternating acts tie together the events of disparate times and places that, when cobbled together, create a fascinating account of the roots of uniquely American architecture. The book is divided into seven chapters – from Buckland's arrival in America to Jefferson's time in France, the design of Washington, DC, Latrobe's arrival in America, the ongoing construction of Monticello and Bulfinch's designs in Boston – each interspersed with accounts of Kimball's research in the 20th century. The appendices include a glossary of architectural terms and biographical notes that provide helpful additional information on many of the characters.

And those drawings that got it all started? They had been kept in the attic of Edgehill, the Charlottesville, VA, estate of Thomas Jefferson Randolph – Jefferson's grandson – for decades and were taken to Boston in 1911 by T. Jefferson Coolidge, Jefferson's great-great grandson. When Coolidge died suddenly the next year, his widow donated the drawings to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson is replete with many such enlightening gems that, in the spirit of Kimball, help to illuminate Jefferson's standing as the father of American architecture. Maybe the quotation that opens Chapter Two, spoken by Francois Jean de Beauvoir, the future Marquis de Chastellux, in 1782, says it best: "Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather." Thanks to Kimball, that first American architect was discovered. Thanks to Howard, the story of that discovery has been expertly told. TB

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