Are You a Classicist, Mr. President?
With recent discoveries in physics that indicate time has three dimensions, Common Edge has connected a living architectural historian in Washington, D.C., with the designer of the Virginia State Capitol, Monticello, and the University of Virginia, in order to discuss the misguided efforts of the current president to promote “classical” building for federal projects. Our interlocutor is Efraim Thomas Hewitt, a young architectural historian working for the U.S. National Park Service, in charge of assessing the merits of projects in Washington prior to approval by the Secretary of the Interior.
ETH: Efraim Thomas Hewitt
TJ: Thomas Jefferson
Mr. President, are you there? Can you hear me?
Loud and clear, Efraim. Glad we can speak about my work. I take it you are now looking after buildings in the nation’s capital that I brought into being, keeping our monuments safe and available to all the people.
I try to do that every day, Mr. President. But I am afraid there are threats to our most cherished buildings by the current occupant of the President’s House, as you called it.
Do you mean the White House, the very building which I helped to plan during Washington’s administration? And which was saved after the British burned the city?
Indeed, the very same, now rebuilt by a president in the 1950s according to its plan revised by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, our first professional architect, under your supervision.
The James Hoban design was too small and a poor excuse for a classical mansion, so I had Latrobe fix the problems. It seems to have lasted and performed well over the decades.
Well, at least until the present occupant, a man with outsize appetites for nearly everything. He believes that a ballroom is necessary in order to entertain in the style of Louis XIV. I don’t know what to think. I am so confused.
I dined at Versailles and found it an insufferable bore—all that gold leaf, and so many mirrors. No American architect would ever design with such opulence. Only an emperor would demand such overbearing pomp. You need to oppose this.
Some, alas, are calling our leader just that, or a king. Though there are fine reception rooms at the State Department designed by some of our best classical architects, our leader has deemed them too small to accommodate the hundreds he invites to his lavish dinners and parties. He has hired a local classical designer to create a near copy of the White House at a larger scale, like a xeroxed cardboard replica.
What is that word, xeroxed? Is it like cloning? Tell them to cease and desist.
Mr. President, how have you followed the discoveries in biology into the present century? I know that you loved science, but that is extraordinary. Are you really opposed to any additions to the president’s house?
I watch things very closely from my vantage point in the multiverse. Make them stop. This is preposterous.
Jean-Antoine Houdon, Thomas Jefferson, marble bust, 1789. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, George Nixon Black Fund.
In that case I guess you know about the edict from the president that all federal buildings from this day forward be “classical, traditional, or vernacular,” and that no other styles may be considered appropriate.
Yes. A ridiculous and misguided pronouncement. John Adams made a similar mistake with the Alien and Seditions Acts in 1798. Restricting our constitutional freedoms, including freedom of expression, is not what we intended when we wrote the Constitution. And what kind of classical architecture is being proposed?
An adviser and his “Civic Art” society presumes to know what you, President Jefferson, intended when you gave us the shining examples for houses, universities, and state capitols from your own hand. He thinks that the current president should justify his actions by bringing your name into the discussion. He often name-drops to claim credit for something he didn’t do or say.
How sophomoric. I stood in the shoes of Ictinus, Hadrian, and Palladio as I created my designs for Monticello, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia State Capitol. How are these people to understand the depth of the classical tradition if they have not spent their lives studying it? Edward Vason Jones, John Blatteau, and Allan Greenberg were worthy successors, extending the tradition into the 20th century. They didn’t copy me, or George Washington, or William Buckland; they simply used earlier work as inspiration for new interpretations of a language that has endured for centuries. There is no neoclassical architecture in Washington, just well- or poorly designed buildings that continue a living tradition. Exactly what I wanted when I provided the first examples. And, prior to 1940, we got worthy classical and modern government buildings, worthy of the city L’Enfant designed.
Donald Trump built an awful mirror-glass modernist tower in Manhattan, and then a black-glass hotel near Grand Central Station, never considering a classical building until the National Civic Art Society pressed him. He has no understanding of architecture, of any style. Only glitter, costume jewelry, and ersatz gilding.
Sorry to hear that, Efraim. Bad taste can’t be explained. So he is simply trying to distract the public from noticing how he dismantles the democratic institutions we created? Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini also pretended to embrace classical art and architecture for their regimes, but no true classicist would mistake them for what my contemporaries used as models: Houdon, Thorvaldsen, Copley, Benjamin Rush, Gilbert Stuart, and so many other great artists were inspired by Greece and Rome.
Elevation study, Treaty Room, U.S. State Department, Allan Greenberg Architect.
You mean that the current administration is trying to sully your name and the classical tradition in furthering their authoritarian agenda? Then we are at an impasse. I am sick with anger and worry. One of our essential traditions is being trivialized.
You should be upset, Efraim. But don’t despair. You need to understand the historical facts behind what is happening. By disrupting the natural evolution of architectural styles and idioms, especially those appropriate to specific places and regions, modernist ideology destroyed many cities, landscapes, and monuments that stood for values we kept sacred. The previous federal guidelines for preservation and new buildings were colored by that ideology.
Do you mean the Secretary of Interior’s Standards and the General Service Administration Design Guidelines that existed from the 1960s until the early 2000s? I was tasked with upholding those laws and guidelines.
Yes, and don’t blame yourself. They were well considered, on the whole, but ultimately confusing and misguided. Critics of the preservation standards finally struck the phrase “of our time” from the document, removing an oxymoronic and illogical requirement that a historic building be marked with “contemporary” construction that clearly looks jarring compared to the original: out of scale, abstract, and often clumsy. If we value place over transient fashion, we must continue to build in the style of the original building.
As you did when you expanded the first Monticello, using Palladio as your guide in both campaigns? And the same brick, stone, and wood?
Absolutely. Nicholas Hawksmoor did the same when he expanded the west front of Westminster Abbey, though Baroque classicism was in vogue at the time. He used Gothic, following the original master masons’ templates.
And you think that many of the lauded, contemporary designs for courthouses, jails, office buildings, and post offices from 1960 until 2010 were unsuccessful with the public and with their users? I always thought our guardians of taste were infallible. Jackie Kennedy restored the White House interiors with antiques. Trump is pasting plastic ornaments on the walls of the East Room. The San Francisco Federal Building by Morphosis is a disaster.
Just poll the people who lived with them every day, as the government did recently. They were often horrendous, ugly, and unhealthy, making their occupants sick with outgassing from toxic materials.
So there is something to be said for reconsidering the language used in our guidelines, to open the design vocabularies to regional, traditional idioms, including classical ones?
Of course, we never intended to foreclose freedom of artistic expression when we built the first state capitols, federal buildings, and the fabric of the nation’s capital. This is not about style, but about quality. The Smithsonian Institution is a High Victorian masterpiece, different from anything on the National Mall. John Russell Pope’s National Gallery is abstract, restrained, and very modern, though it uses a few classical elements.
I am grateful for your words, Mr. President. Keep watching our progress, or lack thereof, from your alternate universe. Maybe we’ll meet there in the future … or is there a future?
Featured image: Thomas Jefferson, Second Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, begun 1794. Photo by author.