At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Such decorative gusto was actually out of fashion by this time and marks Mr. Marsham out as something of a rustic, but we may be grateful to him now, for the classical styles he selected take us in a straight line to the most influential architect in history—himself a rustic, as it happens—and onward to two of the most interesting houses ever built, both in America, both the work of rustics there. So this is really a chapter about architectural style in a domestic setting and some rustics who changed the world. It touches in passing on books, too—not inappropriately, I hope, for a chapter coming from a room that may or may not once have been a library.

  For the story of how the plum room’s stylistic features, and a great deal else in the built world beyond, got to look the way they do, we need to leave Norfolk and England, and take ourselves to the sunny plains of northern Italy and the pleasant and ancient city of Vicenza, halfway between Verona and Venice in the region known as the Veneto. At first glance, Vicenza seems much like any other northern Italian city of its size, but almost all visitors are soon overtaken by an odd sense of familiarity. Again and again, you turn corners to find yourself standing before buildings that you feel, in an almost uncanny way, you have seen before.

  In a sense you have. For these buildings were the templates from which other important buildings all over the Western world were derived: the Louvre, the White House, Buckingham Palace, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and uncountable numbers of banks, police stations, courthouses, churches, museums, hospitals, schools, stately homes, and unassuming houses. The Palazzo Barbarano and Villa Piovene clearly share architectural DNA with the New York Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Berlin Reichstag, among many others. The Villa Capra, on a hillside on the edge of town, brings to mind a hundred domed structures, from Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Villa Chiericati, with its striking portico of triangular pediment and four severe columns, isn’t just rather like the White House, it is the White House, but weirdly transferred to what is still a working farm a little beyond the city’s eastern edge.

  The person responsible for all this architectural prescience was a stonemason named Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza from his native Padua. There he befriended an influential aristocrat, Giangiorgio Trissino. Had it not been for this lucky acquaintanceship, the young man would very probably have passed his life as a dusty hewer of stone, his genius unplumbed, and the world today would be a very different-looking place. Happily for posterity, Trissino perceived some talent worth nurturing within the boy. He brought him into his home, had him schooled in mathematics and geometry, took him to Rome to see the great buildings of antiquity, and put before him every other possible advantage that would allow him to become the greatest, most confident, most improbably influential architect of his age. In the course of things, Trissino also bestowed upon him the name by which we all know him now: Palladio, after Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece. (Their relationship, I feel oddly bound to note, seems to have been entirely platonic. Trissino was a well-known ladies’ man, and his young mason was happily married and en route to becoming the father of five children. Trissino just liked Palladio a good deal. It seems that most people in Palladio’s life did.)

  And so under the older man’s tutelage Palladio became an architect—an unusual step for someone of his background, for architects at that time normally began their careers as artists, not artisans. Palladio didn’t paint or sculpt or draw; he just designed buildings. But his practical training as a mason gave him one invaluable advantage: it permitted him an intimate understanding of structures, and allowed him, in the phrase of Witold Rybczynski, to understand the how of a building as much as the what.

  Palladio’s was a classic case of right talents, right place, right time. Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage to India a quarter of a century earlier had broken Venice’s monopoly over the European end of the spice trade, undermining its commercial dominance, and now the wealth of the region was migrating inland. Suddenly there was a new breed of gentleman-farmers who had both wealth and architectural ambitions, and Palladio knew exactly how to take the one to satisfy the other. He began to dot Vicenza and the surrounding district with the most perfect and agreeable houses ever built. His particular genius lay in the ability to design buildings faithful to the classical ideals yet more beguiling and inviting, more endowed with comfort and élan, than the more severe ancient forms from which they derived. It was a reinvigoration of classical ideals, and the world would come to love it.

  Palladio didn’t design many structures—a few palazzos, four churches, a convent, a basilica, two bridges, and thirty villas, of which only seventeen still stand today. Of the missing thirteen villas, four were never finished, seven were destroyed, one was never built, and one is missing and unaccounted for. Called the Villa Ragona, if it was ever built, it has never been found.

  Palladio’s methods were based on rigorous adherence to rules and modeled on the precepts of Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century BC. Vitruvius wasn’t a particularly distinguished architect; he was really more of a military engineer. What made him valuable to history was the accidental fact that some of his writings survived—the only architectural text from classical antiquity to do so. A lone copy of Vitruvius’s work on architecture was found on a shelf at a monastery in Switzerland in 1415.

  Vitruvius laid down exceedingly specific rules regarding proportions, orders, shapes, materials, and anything else that could be quantified. Formulas ruled everything in his world. The amount of spacing between columns in a row, say, could never be left to instinct or feeling, but was dictated by strict formulas designed to confer an automatic and reliable harmony. This could be dizzyingly particular. For instance:

  The height of all oblong rooms should be calculated by adding together their measured length and width, taking one half of this total, and using the result for the height. But in the case of exedrae or square oeci, let the height be brought up to one and a half times the width.… The height of the tablinum at the lintel should be one eighth more than its width. Its ceiling should exceed this height by one third of the width. The fauces in the case of smaller atriums should be two thirds, and in the case of larger one half, the width of the tablinum.… Let the busts of ancestors with their ornaments be set up at a height corresponding to the width of the alae. The proportionate width and height of doors may be settled, if they are Doric, in the Doric manner, and if Ionic, in the Ionic manner, according to the rules of symmetry which have been given about portals in the Fourth Book.

  Palladio, following Vitruvius, believed that all rooms should be one of seven elementary shapes—one circular, one square, five rectangular—and that particular rooms needed always to be built in particular proportions. Dining rooms, for example, had to be twice as long as they were wide. These shapes alone made for pleasing spaces, though why they did exactly he didn’t say. (Neither, come to that, did Vitruvius.) In fact, however, Palladio followed his own precepts only about half the time. Some of the rules Palladio decreed are doubtful, in any case. The idea of a hierarchy among column types—Corinthian always above Ionic, and Ionic always above Doric—appears to be the invention of Sebastiano Serlio, a contemporary of Palladio’s. The rule isn’t mentioned by Vitruvius at all. Palladio also made one very fundamental error. He put a portico with columns on every villa he built, unaware that these were found only on Roman temples and never on homes. This is probably his most copied device and yet it is, from the perspective of fidelity, completely wrong. But it may also be the happiest error in architectural history.

  Had he merely built a scattering of fine homes around Vicenza, Palladio’s name would never have become an adjective. What made him famous was a book published in 1570, toward the end of his life. Called I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), it was partly a book of floor plans
and elevations, partly a declaration of principles, and partly a collection of practical advice. It was full of rules and particulars—“Of the height of the rooms,” “Of the dimensions of the doors and windows”—but also useful tips. (For example: don’t place windows too near corners, for they weaken the overall structure.) It was the perfect book for gentlemen amateurs.

  Palladio’s first and greatest champion in the English-speaking world was Inigo Jones, the theatrical designer and self-taught architect who discovered Palladio’s work on a visit to Italy twenty years after Palladio’s death and was smitten to the point of obsessiveness. He bought every Palladio drawing he could lay his hands on—some two hundred in all—learned to speak Italian, and even modeled his signature on Palladio’s. On his return to England, he began putting up Palladian buildings at every opportunity. The first was the Queen’s House in Greenwich, built in 1616. To modern eyes, it is a rather dull square block that brings to mind the central police station in a small midwestern city, but it was stunningly crisp and modern in Stuart England. Every building in the country suddenly seemed to belong to another, fussier age.

  Palladianism became particularly associated with—and largely indistinguishable from—the Georgian period. This era of architectural orderliness began in 1714 with the accession of George I and lasted through the reigns of three more Georges and the son of a George, William IV, whose death in 1837 brought in Queen Victoria and a new dynastic era. In practice, of course, things were not that precise. Architectural style doesn’t change just because a monarch dies. Nor does it stay still during the course of a long dynasty.

  Because the Georgian period went on so long, various architectural refinements and elaborations arose and either fell away or prospered independently, so that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish meaningfully between Neoclassical, Regency, Italianate Revival, Greek Revival, and other terms intended to denote a particular style, aesthetic, or block of time. In America, Georgian became an unappealing label after independence (it wasn’t actually much liked before), so there Colonial was coined for buildings predating independence, and Federal for those built after.

  What all these styles had in common was an attachment to classical ideals, which is to say to strict rules, and that wasn’t always a terribly good thing. Rules meant that architects sometimes scarcely had to think at all. Mereworth, a stately home in Kent designed by Colen Campbell, is really just a copy of Palladio’s Villa Capra—only the dome is somewhat altered—and many others are not a great deal more original. “Fidelity to the canon was what mattered,” as Alain de Botton noted in The Architecture of Happiness. Though some splendid Palladian buildings were built—Chiswick House, Lord Burlington’s outsized folly in West London, springs shiningly to mind—the effect over time was repetitious and just a little numbing. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner has observed that “it is not easy to keep apart in one’s mind the various villas and country houses built during the period.”

  Palladio’s Villa Capra (“La Rotonda”) (top); and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (bottom) (photo credit 13.1)

  So there is a certain satisfaction in the thought that perhaps the two most interesting and original Palladian houses of the age were built not in Europe by trained architects, but in a distant land by amateurs. But what amateurs they were.

  II

  In the autumn of 1769, on a hilltop in the piedmont of Virginia, on what was then the very edge of the civilized world, a young man began building his dream home. It would consume more than fifty years of his life and nearly all his resources, and he would never see it finished. His name was Thomas Jefferson. The house was Monticello.

  There had never been a house like it. This was, almost literally, the last house in the world. Before it lay an unexplored continent. Behind it was all the known world. Perhaps nothing says more about Jefferson and his house than that it faces away from that old world and into the unknown emptiness of the new.

  What was really distinctive about Monticello was that it was built on a hilltop. People didn’t do that in the eighteenth century, and for good practical reasons. Jefferson created many disadvantages for himself by building where he did. For one thing, he had to run a road to the top, then clear and level acres of rocky summit—both huge jobs. He also had constantly to deal with the problem of water supplies. Water is always a problem on hilltops since it is in the nature of water to run downhill, so wells had to be dug unusually deep. Even then they ran dry on average about one year in five and water had to be carted up. Lightning was a chronic worry, too, as his house was the highest point for miles.

  Monticello is Palladio’s Villa Capra, but reinterpreted, built of different materials, standing in another continent—gloriously original, but faithful to the original, too. The Age of Enlightenment was the perfect time for Palladian ideals. It was an intensely scientific period in which it was believed that everything, including beauty and its appreciation, could be reduced to scientific principles. That Palladio’s book of plans was also a suitable primer for amateur architects made him practically, as well as spiritually, indispensable to a man like Jefferson. About 450 handbooks of architecture were produced in the half century or so before Jefferson began work on Monticello, so he had plenty to choose from, but it was Palladio to whom he was devoted. “Palladio is the Bible,” he wrote simply.

  Jefferson, at the time he began Monticello, had never been anywhere larger than Williamsburg, the colonial capital, where he had attended the College of William and Mary, and Williamsburg, with some two thousand people, was hardly a metropolis. Although he later traveled to Italy, he never saw the Villa Capra and would almost certainly have been astounded by it because the Villa Capra is enormous compared with Monticello. Though they look very similar in illustrations, Palladio’s version is built on a scale that makes Monticello seem almost cottagelike. Partly this is because Monticello’s service areas—the dependencies, as they were known—are built into the slope of the hill and are invisible from the house and garden. A lot of Monticello is essentially underground.

  The Monticello visitors see today is a house Jefferson never saw but only dreamed of. It was never finished in his lifetime, or even in really good shape. For fifty-four years Jefferson inhabited a building site. “Putting up and pulling down is one of my favorite amusements,” he remarked cheerfully, and it was just as well, for he never stopped tinkering and messing. Because the work was so protracted, some parts of Monticello were actively deteriorating while others were still abuilding.

  Many aspects of Jefferson’s designs were tricky. The roof was a builder’s nightmare because it involved unnecessarily complicated joining of hips to slopes. “It was one place where he was definitely more amateur than professional,” Bob Self, architectural conservator of Monticello, told me while showing me around. “The design was perfectly sound, but just a lot more complicated than it needed to be.”

  As an architect, Jefferson was fastidious to the point of weirdness. Some of his plans specified measurements to seven decimal points. Self showed me one measuring a strangely precise 1.8991666 inches. “Nobody, even now, could measure anything to that degree of accuracy,” he said. “You are talking millionths of an inch. I suspect it was just a kind of intellectual exercise. There isn’t anything else it could be really.”

  The oddest feature of the house was the two staircases. Jefferson thought staircases a waste of space, so he made them only two feet wide and very steep—“a little ladder of a staircase,” as one visitor put it. The stairs were so narrow and twisting that almost everything that needed to go up them, including all but the smallest pieces of visitors’ luggage, had to be winched up and hauled in through a window. Buried so deep in the house that no natural light reached them, the stairs were forbiddingly dark as well as steep. Negotiating them, particularly in descent, is an unnerving experience even now. Because of the danger, visitors are not allowed up to the second or third floors, so much of Monticello is, of unhappy necessity, off limits.
(The space is mostly used for offices.) This means that visitors cannot see the most agreeable room in the house—the sky room, as Jefferson called it, occupying the space within the dome. With its yellow walls and green floor, its cool breezes and expansive views, this would make a perfect study or studio or retreat of any kind. But it has always been difficult to get to, and in Jefferson’s day it was unusable for about a third of the year because there was no effective way to heat it. In consequence, it became an attic room used for storage.

  In other ways, the house was a marvel. The dome, Monticello’s defining feature, had to be built in an odd way to fit onto existing load-bearing walls at the back. “So although it looks completely regular,” Self said, “it isn’t. The whole thing was a huge exercise in calculus. The ribs that support it are all of different lengths, but they had to span the same radius, so its design was all about sines and cosines. Not many people could have got that dome up there.” Other flourishes were generations ahead of their time. For one thing, Jefferson put thirteen skylights into the house, so it is unusually bright and airy.

  Outside on the terrace Self pointed out to me a very beautiful spherical sundial in the garden that Jefferson had made himself. “It’s not just that it is a terrific piece of craftsmanship,” he said, “but it’s also that it couldn’t be built without a thorough understanding of astronomy. It is quite amazing what he had the time and capacity to fit into his brain.”