Presidents’ Day

As we pause our design work for Presidents’ Day next Monday, that day off is a chance for us to reflect on the U.S. presidents that shaped American architecture, directly or indirectly. George Washington (born February 22) and Thomas Jefferson (born April 13) immediately come to mind, as the principal planners of those iconic Virginia homesteads of theirs that influenced domestic design for years to come, Mount Vernon and Monticello. Abraham Lincoln (born February 12) didn’t practice architecture, but his lowly log-cabin origins and his renown as “architect” of the reunified nation and post-Civil War Reconstruction had its share of architectural impact, if posthumously.

The scientific military strategy that helped Washington evacuate British forces from Boston, cross the Delaware to fight the Hessians in the Battle of Trenton, and force Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown to secure our independence came in handy for the planning of his home, as the regimental rectitude of its structure suggests. A phased expansion of the 1735 house built by his father, Augustine Washington, Mount Vernon flaunts much of the much-imitated iconography familiar throughout Americana from homes to hotels to HoJos: colorful hipped roof, weathervane-topped cupola, two-level verandah, rusticated woodwork, breezeway colonnades, and the 18^th-century forerunner of the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU).

What’s missing from this playbook of patterns is the classical symmetry that was a sine qua non in Colonial and Federal architecture. The main-entrance west front, the pediment, and the cupola are noticeably off-axis from the rest of the compound, as vestiges of expansions Washington made according to his living-space, fenestration and attic-ventilation requirements (and probably his budget) rather than any desire for architectural precision. (After all, as he expressed to the U.S. Capitol’s first architect William Thornton, his concepts for his home “proceed from a person who avows his ignorance of Architectural principles, and who has no other guide but his eye to direct his choice.”)

Besides, the perfectly symmetrical verandah was Mount Vernon’s main attraction, fronted along the Potomac River as a lookout point for birdwatching, boat-spotting and plantation-overseeing and an open, friendly invitation for neighbors and guests to come and be entertained. It is also an architectural gesture of welcome to all to participate in their Founding Father’s democracy, as well as an expression of Washington’s southern gentility and hubris as “master of all I survey.” Creating a cour d’honneur of symmetry to balance the west front’s lopsidedness are the breezeway arcade connectors to the gabled one-story structures that housed the servants’ hall and the kitchen but exemplified how suburban tract homes today can be extended into ADUs, as a partial panacea to the housing crisis.

Monticello (1768-1809), meaning “little mountain” in Italian, a familiar image from the Jefferson nickel, was the brainchild of someone more learned in architectural principles and aesthetics than Washington. Jefferson read Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570), Scottish architect James Gibbs’ Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732), and James Leoni’s The Architecture of A. Palladio (1715-1720) and studied many examples of French classical architecture during his overseas visits as American minister to France and later as Secretary of State under President Washington. As principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson naturally loathed all things English, especially the design of Virginia’s then-capital, Williamsburg: “The College and Hospital are rude, mis-shapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns. There are no other public buildings but churches and court-houses, in which no attempts are made at elegance.”

With that he looked to French architects such as Roland Frèart de Chambray and Antoine Desgodetz, as well as Palladio, for elegant inspiration for Monticello, a three-dimensional pattern-book of neoclassical design: Tuscan-columned pedimented porches, circular and half-moon windows, library-like symmetrical wings, a roof balustrade, a widow’s walk, two levels of windows masquerading as one tall window, and the unifying element of a squat octagonal central tower with a saucer dome based on a drawing of the Temple of Vesta in Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. This composition, primarily influenced by the Hôtel de Salm (1782-1787) in Paris and Chiswick House (1729) in London, gives off the trompe-l’oeil impression of a one-story home, when it actually has three stories.

The composition was as practical as it was aesthetic. The dome’s lookout windows allowed Jefferson keener observation of his plantation and assured better light and air distribution.

Jefferson even planned his home’s furniture after the French, including space-saving alcove beds unifying two rooms. His inventive technologies include a ceiling dial supplying a wind-direction reading from the roof’s weathervane, a dining-room fireplace concealing a dumbwaiter to the wine cellar, a double French door with a figure-eight pulley system that automatically opens one door when the other is opened, and skylights and large windows for better spatial illumination from natural light. Other sustainable passive design elements at Monticello included natural insulation from thick brick walls, sourced from local Virginia clay, and cross-ventilation from multi-angled large windows evenly distributed around the house’s octagonal form. Following another scheme by Palladio, Jefferson separated his laboring quarters from his residential quarters – yet another ADU precursor.

Using the principles of classical art to advance democratic ideals Greco-Roman style, Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol (1785-1789) based on the ancient Roman temple at the Maison Carrée (16 B.C.E.) in Nîmes, France. The Roman Pantheon (125 C.E.) inspired the Rotunda (1817-1826) at Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus. He reapplied the octagon, the Tuscan pedimented porch, the roof balustrade, and the widow’s walk to his smaller second estate, Poplar Forest (1806-1826), a forerunner of today’s “downsizing” trends.

A similar classical prominence was given to the Lincoln Memorial (1914-1922), familiar from the Lincoln penny and five-dollar bill. Despite its namesake’s log-cabin genesis, architect Henry Bacon believed a Greek temple of 36 Doric columns (representing the number of states upon Lincoln’s death in 1865) and 48 stone festoons (for the then-current 48 states) was a more fitting tribute to a preserver and protector of Athenian democratic ideals and national unity than the simple log-cabin shrine many preferred.

But nor did the memorial copy the Parthenon in Athens, which had a gabled roof and a short-side entrance. The flat, two-level roof illuminates the interior through translucent skylights. The main entrance, guarded invitingly by Daniel Chester French’s iconic Lincoln statue, is on a long side. Like Mount Vernon’s verandah, this broad entrance invites all to come in and participate equally in the nation, as Lincoln envisioned it in his Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” The airy free plan of the interior and the solidity of the columns symbolize the liberty and the steadfastness of Lincoln’s nation: “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s humble beginnings weren’t forgotten as Frank Lloyd Wright’s second son, John Lloyd Wright, invented a creative tribute to them in 1916: Lincoln Logs, an interlocking assembly toy inspired in part by the Froebel block-construction system that had nurtured his father’s architectural impulses as a young lad.

So where can these presidential principles of architecture be found in TGAS design? For one, the open, welcome transparency of Mount Vernon’s verandah and the Lincoln Memorial can be sensed in the Education Portal and the Ceramics Studio we designed for Harvard University, as well as the broader, wider doors of the apparatus bays of all our fire stations. Washington and Jefferson’s commitment to classical refinement is echoed in our restorations of the cupola-crowned Cambridge Fire Station Headquarters, the Georgian Revival Belmont Police Headquarters, and the classically inspired Belmont Town Hall. Jefferson’s technological ingenuity and early passive sustainable design principles are being carried forward in our own LEED-eligible sustainable design techniques and the state-of-the-art response technology in our public safety facilities. The skylight brightening and unifying the Lincoln Memorial interior is working similar magic in our Mahoney’s Garden Center greenhouse and the Yankee Line motorcoach maintenance facility due for completion at the end of this year.

Happy birthday, George, Tom and Abe, and thank you for the inspiration!

Sources:

“Alcove Beds,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Monticello.org, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/alcove-beds/#:~:text=Thomas%20Jefferson%20introduced%20the%20alcove,he%20began%20in%20the%201790s.

Goldberger, Paul, “Architecture as Object,” Why Architecture Matters, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 71-74.

Goldberger, Paul, “Why Washington Slept Here,” Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, New York: The Monacelli Press, a division of Random House, Inc., 2009, pp. 182-187.

“Hidden Architecture: Monticello,” Massachusetts Historical Society, 2020, https://hiddenarchitecture.net/monticello/

Leepson, Marc, “Monticello,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Jefferson/Slavery-and-racism

“Lincoln Logs,” Wikipedia, last edited February 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Logs

“Lincoln Memorial,” Wikipedia, last edited February 7, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Memorial

“Monticello,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, 2020, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/monticello/

“Monticello,” Wikipedia, last edited December 23, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello

“Monticello by Thomas Jefferson: Shaping the Foundations of Early American Architecture,” ArchEyes / Timeless Architecture, October 30, 2024, https://archeyes.com/monticello-by-thomas-jefferson-shaping-the-foundations-of-early-american-architecture/

“Mount Vernon,” Wikipedia, last edited January 16, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vernon

“Poplar Forest,” Wikipedia, last edited January 25, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Forest

Zygmont, Dr. Brian, “Thomas Jefferson, Monticello,” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/enlightenment-revolution/a/jefferson-monticello, and Smart History, https://smarthistory.org/jefferson-monticello/