When Architects Were on TV: Media, Myth, and the Case for Jeffersonian Architecture
Lauren A. McQuistion
Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA
ABSTRACT: The series Pride of Place: Building the American Dream aired on PBS in the spring of 1986. The show, hosted by architect and historian Robert A.M. Stern, constructed a narrative supporting the importance of America’s architectural history and its origins during an era in which disciplinary history took an increasingly important role in architectural education and practice under the aegis of postmodernism. The show consciously marshalled a media format intended for a popular audience toward the creation of American architectural celebrities in the form of both contemporary and historic sites and their designers. Thematic episode chronicled Stern’s travels across the United States to sites of architectural significance, ranging from individual buildings and monuments to exemplars of American urban and suburban typologies. Frequently joined by prominent architectural figures of the day including practitioners Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenman, and critic Paul Goldberger, Stern’s guests lent expertise to the formation of a narrative of American architectural history and its implications on contemporary American life.
Among the historical figures and sites celebrated as the progenitors of American architectural heritage was Thomas Jefferson and his designs for Monticello and the Academical Village of the University of Virginia which were prominently featured in the first two episodes of the series, “The Search for a Usable Past” and “The Campus, A Place Apart”. This paper will critically re-examine the emergence of architecture as a subject of popular media including TV, reevaluating how Stern’s Pride of Place intersected with a significant preservation campaign to recognize Jefferson’s architectural contributions as UNESCO World Heritage sites in the mid-1980s. Analysis will include a discussion of the lasting implications of the heroic narrative of Jeffersonian architectural ideals which emerged from the media narrative that supported these preservation efforts and that have complicated the contemporary reframing of these projects as sites of enslavement.
KEYWORDS: architectural media, post-modernism, architectural preservation, American architectural heritage
INTRODUCTION
Pride of Place: Building the American Dream, premiered on PBS in the spring of 1986. The 8-part documentary series, sponsored by Exxon Mobile and later summarized in a companion book, followed Robert A.M. Stern as he traveled across the U.S. to sites of architectural significance, including both historic and contemporary buildings, monuments, and typical American urban and suburban spaces (Grigor and Marks 1986; Stern, Mellins, and Gastil 1986). In the first episode of the series, entitled “The Search for the Usable Past”, the viewer is introduced to Thomas Jefferson’s vision for American architecture from the dining room of his home, Monticello. Stern is joined by Jaquelin Robertson, then Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. The two men marvel over the dumbwaiter which promptly delivers a bottle of wine and sit down together to toast Jefferson’s architectural ingenuity (Figure 1)
As founding Director of Columbia University’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Stern was well credentialed as a historian and practitioner known to be invested in both the historical concerns and contemporary trajectory of American architectural practice. Robertson, who had arrived at UVA in 1981, was known as an urban planner and architect with historicist leanings and a vested interest in advocating for the ongoing importance of Jefferson’s contributions to the architectural field (Knight III 1985) 1 Together the two men continue their tour of Monticello, pointing out the architectural features of Jefferson’s home that had been borrowed and “radically” transformed from Palladian and French architectural influences. As they move through the ballroom, peer out of the lunette window of the Dome room, and walk along the cryptoporticus of the northern dependency, they describe Monticello as simultaneously a complex portrait of Jefferson as a Founding Father of the nation and also as “a model of an ideal world”, an experimental “Arcadian city”, and a modern extension of the tradition of “Western humanism” in the newly formed democracy Jefferson himself helped shape (Grigor director 1986b, 16:10-16:50) (Figure 2).
EMERGING CHALLENGES
technological, environmental, social
Following this introduction to Jeffersonian architecture, the designs for the Central Grounds of the University of Virginia, also known as the Academical Village, were prominently featured in the series’ second episode dedicated to academic campus design in the American context. Stern opines over what he describes as the uniquely American vision projected in Jefferson’s combination of “classical architecture and American do-it-yourself amateurism”(Grigor director 1986a, 3:35-4:20). He expands on the architectural lessons embedded in the designs of the Rotunda, pavilions, Lawn, and gardens as a didactic composition of Classical Greek and Roman elements in dialog with then contemporary reinterpretations, intended to inform the architectural language of ongoing western expansion (Grigor director 1986a, 8:20-9:09) (Figure 3).
To present the architectural importance of Monticello and UVA for broadcast television was inherently different than the narrative presented to an architecturally knowledgeable audience. Typical of media representations of architecture in the 1970s and 80s, the grandiose description paired with the visually dynamic and sweeping, cinematic views of Monticello and the Academical Village (Figures 4 and 5) included in Pride of Place foregrounded an interpretation of the sites based on their visual character rather than social, economic, or political factors. Instead, Jefferson, like the other designers included in the series, was portrayed in the mold of the "starchitect," a term emerging alongside architecture's growing presence as a subject of popular cultural knowledge as evidenced by its increased presence on TV in the 1980s. Jefferson’s image in the public imagination had long been informed by the emphasis on his intellectual and creative genius, translated to and embodied by his architectural work. Defined as a versatile figure whose influence extended beyond architecture to other areas of cultural production, such as urban planning, landscape design, interiors, industrial design, fashion, and art, Jefferson and his architectural propositions for Monticello and UVA were presented in the series as not only embodying this wide-ranging cultural expertise but as exemplars of the highest order, a narrative that neatly aligned with the superlative driven rubric of national landmark preservation developed by the National Park Service for the National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic Places programs in the decades prior (Stipe 1987). This interpretation of Jefferson’s architectural works bolstered the case for what was then considered the under-studied field of American architectural history by minimizing the contradictions between Jefferson’s stance on democratic freedoms and his position on slavery in favor of understanding the “universal” significance of his architecture as primarily formal and aesthetic.
1.0 PRESERVATION HISTORY OF MONTICELLO AND UVA
Driven by patriotism and reverence for the nation’s founding figures, interest in historic preservation in the United States had begun in the 19th century. Among the earliest sites vaunted as symbols of national pride, Monticello and UVA’s Central Grounds had been the focus of concerted preservation efforts for decades prior to their feature in Pride of Place. Lobbying to purchase Monticello from Jefferson Monroe Levy, a prominent New York banker and member of Congress whose family had occupied the property since 1830, began as early as 1912 (West 1999, 99). The renewed interest in the nation’s colonial past which emerged in the 1910s and 20s prompted by decades of immigration, intense industrialization, and anxiety over authoritarianism in Europe at the turn of the 20th century resulted in an intense backlash among the American cultural and political elite who sought to project stability and cultural superiority through a sense of pride in America’s origins. While UVA’s Academical Village continues to be used as the functional and symbolic heart of a public university, historian Patricia West has studied the process undertaken a Monticello to transform Jefferson’s private home into public monument. Her work ties this effort to the larger emergence of house museums in the first decades of the 20th century, a trend she characterizes as politically motivated acts, reflective of the hyper-nationalist interests of the post-World War I era (West 1999, 99–106)
EMERGING CHALLENGES
technological, environmental, social Interest in Jefferson’s home slowly gained social and political backing that ultimately resulted in the creation of The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization that purchased Monticello in 1923 with the goal of preserving the property and touting the nation’s founding ideals and achievements with Jefferson’s home serving as an idealized model made accessible to the public (The Jefferson Memorial Foundation 1925, 1–2). Like much of the proto-preservation work of the late 19th and early 20th century intended to validate American cultural and political heritage, the Foundation’s work prioritized what they called “patriotic education” (Brown Morton III 1987, 150). The organization hosted events and producing publications that not only increased awareness of the restoration of Monticello and supported ongoing scholarship but also explicitly tied Jefferson’s architectural vision for his home, as well as the University of Virginia, to narratives of democratic values and national pride (The Jefferson Memorial Foundation 1925, 4–5)
Architect and historian Fiske Kimball produced early academic assessments of Jefferson’s architecture, publishing research on the drawings of Monticello in 1914 (Kimball 1914). Later, working for The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation as Chairman of the Restoration Committee between 1924 and 1955, Kimball went on to oversee a major restoration of the exterior and interior of Jefferson’s home. Projects included the restoration of the icehouse, north and south pavilions, dependencies, interior structural elements, the dome, and the roof. Kimball also established the Foundation’s collection policies, curating the Jeffersonian objects on display throughout Monticello (Koester 1998) Together, these efforts embedded the patriotic and politically entangled mythmaking mission of the Foundation into all aspects of the property, significantly influencing the interpretation of Jefferson’s architecture in scholarly research and tours of Monticello for decades. It was this narrative generated by the Foundation, supported by Kimball’s scholarship, and spatialized within the restoration and presentation of Monticello in the 1920s experienced directly by the visiting public, that laid the foundation for the coordinated effort to recognize Monticello and UVA’s Academical Village as state and national landmarks shortly after the passage of the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966.
2.0 ARCHITECTURAL MYTH MAKING, MEDIA, AND THE ROLE OF TV
A similar return in interest to America’s architectural origins repeated in the 1980s, a subject addressed in the introductory monologue to Pride of Place, where Stern defined architecture via an extended critique of modernism. He described “the art of building” embodying “more than functional utility” and material systems, asserting that architecture was considered at its greatest when understood as a reflection of the invention and reinvention of a collective or shared sense of cultural history. As heroic images of American architectural landmarks including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the Rotunda at UVA scrolled across the screen, Stern attributed the syncretic character of American architecture to its unique spatial and historical context of immigration, frontier idealism, and a comparatively recent formation of national identity. Stern concludes by inviting the viewer to join him crisscrossing the country to reveal America as it creates its own collective myth, as it explores old forms and new techniques to create its own history and reflect a pride of place (Grigor director 1986b)
These statements and their paired imagery set the stage for the series and its implications, notably operating on two levels of embedded meaning.2 Stern translates the private language of the discipline to terms meaningful to a broadbased audience interested in architecture on TV. The monologue also provided a guiding manifesto consciously tethering the American architectural past to contemporary architectural practice, relying on the post-modernist linguistic concept of myth to do so. The series subtitle, “Building the American Dream” seems to refer to this mythic structure undergirding the show. Each episode mined canonical and contemporary works of architecture for spatial formations and stylistic characteristics to consciously construct a narrative to define recognizably “American” Architecture. Although this was not the first time that Jefferson and his architecture had been valorized for a popular audience, the depictions of Monticello and UVA’s Academical Village seen in Pride of Place extend our understanding of how Jefferson’s architectural legacy had long been constructed and portrayed within a larger cultural framework of national heritage and the increased use of television to educate the public.
Increased interest in American cultural mythmaking had reached a peak with the celebratory activities of the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. Staged in the shadow of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, the commemoration of the nation’s two hundredth birthday was a media spectacle conceived within the context of social and political instability. The contentious tone of the era, influenced by the still unfolding repercussions of the Civil Rights Movement, increased support for the Gay Rights Movement, and political campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, led some sectors of the American cultural elite to seek stability in the re-establishment of a narrative of American exceptionalism organized around “themes of renewal and rebirth”, “traditional values, [and a] nostalgic… reading of the American past” (Ryan 2012, 26) The Bicentennial took advantage of television’s influence on the changing media landscape, circulating images and messages celebrating “traditional” values of American civic identity and pride widely. Demonstrating how popular culture and journalism had been greatly impacted by the rising influence of television as a medium of communication, “aestheticized images replace[d] narrative as the dominant form of communication”(Compton 2004, 4). Educational television took a particularly prominent role, with fanfare staged in cities across the country including reenactments, documentary series, firework displays, parades, and other grand civic gestures that were staged for national broadcast on television between 1974 and 1976 (Ford 1975) 3
Figure 6: The July 4, 1976 issue of Time featuring a portrait of Thomas Jefferson Source: (Time 1976.)
Jefferson was a critical figure among Bicentennial celebrations. Beyond his role as author of the Declaration of Independence and Founding Father, his cultural contributions as a designer and inventor, including designs for Monticello and UVA, were prominently featured and supported a narrative of American cultural ingenuity that was both politically and culturally advantageous at the time (Figure 6) Coincident with these efforts, historian Dumas Malone’s definitive biography of Jefferson, published as a six-part series between 1948 and 1981, contributed to the revival of interest in Jefferson and his contributions to the American architectural origin story. An exceedingly positive contemporary re-evaluation of the Academical Village by critic Ada Louise Huxtable was featured in The New York Times in 1975, followed a year later by the exhibition Palladio in America, celebrating the influence of Palladio on American architectural culture via Jefferson (Huxtable 1975; Nichols 1976).4 The exhibition’s opening in UVA’s Rotunda on April 13, 1976, connected the university’s annual celebrations of its founder’s birthday to the national stage of the Bicentennial, and marked the dedication to the newly reopened Rotunda which had undergone a multi-year, multimillion dollar interior and exterior restoration. The show had previously travelled to venues throughout Europe and was subsequently exhibited in cultural institutions across the US during the Spring and Summer of 1976, including the Corcoran Gallery in DC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and later the University Art Museum at Berkeley, making visceral the architectural connection across time between Palladio and Jefferson through models and drawings (Nichols 1976; Fremantle 1978)
While these more traditional modes of media had long served important purposes in the circulation of opinions and interpretations of architecture for a broader public, the increased prominence of “infotainment” in the US in the 1970s and 80s, at least partially attributed to the establishment of the Public Broadcast Service (PBS) in 1970, resulted in architecture becoming a popular subject for television consumption. Abroad, the longer running British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) developed arts and culture series like Kenneth Clark’s Civilization (1969), John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the titular Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972), and Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980), which exposed viewers to the historical and contemporary significance of arts, urbanism, and culture (Gill 1969; Berger 1972; Cooper 1972; Crowder 2009). Also in Britain, the Open University’s A305 History of Architecture and Design, broadcast between 1975 and 1982, challenged traditional architectural education by offering college credits via TV and radio (Moreno 2018)
Although “design” had entered the American cultural consciousness more broadly with the rise of consumer culture in the 1950s and 60s, architecture remained a niche arts and culture topic which ultimately benefitted from the visual impact of television to communicate its importance. In the U.S., historian and preservation advocate Barbara Lee Diamonstein hosted multiple culturally focused TV series carried on the Arts & Entertainment Network between 1970 and 1985, including American Architecture Now, which rebroadcast the New School’s public lecture series featuring interviews with contemporary architects, many of whom, including Robert Stern, were also involved with Pride of Place (Diamonstein 1980; 1985) (Figure 7). Additionally, between 1976 and 1984 Charles Moore and his design partnership, later known as Centerbrook Architects, broadcast live design charettes to local audiences in cities in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York where they had been hired to conduct master planning efforts (“Designing on TV: Charles Moore and Chad Floyd Prove It Can Be Done” 1979; Dodd 2015). These “design-a-thons” extended participatory planning practices to a wider community of concerned citizens, allowing viewer interaction to be communicated and reflected in drawing and model making in real time on live on TV. Though far from exhaustive, these examples of architecture on TV demonstrate the expansion of television as a universalizing, albeit visually centric,
EMERGING CHALLENGES
technological, environmental, social communication medium that dominated information exchange in America by the 1980s and precipitated dynamic shifts in the content and method by which architectural knowledge and culture was communicated to a wider public. This shift in media consumption, coincident with a surge of interest in national cultural history, positioned Pride of Place to leverage television as a powerful tool to engage audiences and influence public understanding of architecture, including Jefferson’s legacy.
Figure 7: Still image from American Architecture Now series featuring Barbaralee Diamonstein as host, architect Peter Eisenman, and Dean of the UVA School of Architecture Jaquelin Robertson as guests. Source: (“Peter Eisenman / Jaquelin Robertson” 1980.)
3.0 UNESCO NOMINATION
In line with ongoing restoration and preservation efforts and further bolstered by major cultural and political events like the Bicentennial's, Monticello and the Jeffersonian Precinct of the University of Virginia were grouped together in a thematic World Heritage nomination submitted to UNESCO by the Federal Government of the United States for consideration in December of 1986 (The United States of America 1986; International Council on Monuments and Sites 1986; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 1987) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a cultural branch of the political body, was established following the cultural losses of World War II and set global preservation standards for significant cultural and natural sites considered to be of outstanding value to humanity with the designation of the first dozen World Heritage sites in 1978 (Gfeller and Eisenberg 2016, 280, 286). As the culminating effort of decades of preservation work and the careful construction of a narrative vaunting Jefferson’s architectural contributions, Monticello and the Jeffersonian Precinct’s nomination was constructed on a central argument addressing three primary UNESCO criteria. The documentation demonstrated Monticello and UVA’s Central Grounds first as unique artistic achievement[s] and masterpiece[s] of creative genius in the eyes of scholars and observers, second, as sites representing unique and outstanding examples of an international artistic movement, an achievement tied to the inventions of an American architectural aesthetic adapted from Palladian and other European enlightenment influences, and finally, as architecture directly and tangibly associated with ideas, beliefs, and events of outstanding universal significance, cited in the context of the nomination as “the universal, democratic values of the new republic of the United States, and those of the rest of the humanity who aspire to freedom and self-determination (The United States of America 1986, 31)
The package included very little visual evidence beyond a survey outlining the boundaries of the sites but was instead primarily comprised of an exegesis of Jefferson’s biography and architectural description of the sites, largely based on scholarship produced in the first decades of the 20th century, including documentation of much of Fiske Kimball’s own research, preservation, and curatorial efforts (The United States of America 1986, 33–37; International Council on Monuments and Sites 1986) Most importantly, the narrative appealed to the public importance of Jeffersonian architecture as global heritage by pointing to the ubiquity of general knowledge of Jefferson’s importance as a statesman, scholar, inventor, author of the Declaration of Independence and Father to the University of Virginia, a popular narrative sustained across time and media. This tactic supported the assertion that both sites, despite Monticello’s original purpose as a private home, were integral to the invention of a new American architectural aesthetic demonstrative of the democratic ideals Jefferson had crafted for the new nation.
Monticello and the Jeffersonian Precinct of UVA were approved as UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1987. And while this designation ensures the continued preservation of these sites as shared cultural heritage, the narrative which supported their nomination has also had lasting ramifications. In emphasizing the architectural ingenuity of Jefferson’s design intent, other histories have been suppressed. This notably includes the exclusion of any mention of either the Levy family’s nearly hundred years as stewards of Monticello or the reconstruction of the Rotunda and elaboration on the architectural composition of Central Grounds by McKim Mead and White in 1896 following a major fire. Even more importantly, this narrative neglects the non-dominant history of inhabitation, use, and reuse of these sites as places of everyday life in the south in the 19th century.
EMERGING CHALLENGES
technological, environmental, social
In the histories of Jefferson’s architecture produced in the 1910s and 20s, slavery was either referred to euphemistically as "servitude" or "farm work," or completely omitted from the narrative (The Jefferson Memorial Foundation 1925, 3) Although efforts were already underway in the late 1970s to recover the history of enslavement in the context of Jefferson’s architecture, including archaeological studies of the history of black life along Monticello’s Mulberry Row funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an earlier era of scholarship, inflected with the nationalistic pride of 1920’s American’s cultural values, served as the basis for the UNESCO nomination authored in the 1980s (National Endowment for the Humanities 1980). Enslavement was not only written out of the descriptive narrative of the UNESCO nomination as the essential labor behind the construction and maintenance of Jefferson’s architecture, but the physical spaces occupied by those enslaved at Monticello and UVA’s Central Grounds were entirely omitted from the documentation of either property. The emphasis on aesthetic criteria has ultimately determined the highest priorities of Monticello and UVA’s continued preservation, and only recently have efforts begun to actively correct these neglected histories, leading to a more accurate interpretation of these sites and their spatialized past.
CONCLUSION
The portrayal of Monticello and UVA’s Central Grounds in both academic venues and popular media, including Pride of Place, emphasized a long-established narrative of Jefferson’s architectural genius and recapitulated preservation criteria including UNESCO’s. The construction of this narrative defining Jefferson’s architectural legacy focused largely on aesthetic values and supported the evaluation of Monticello and UVA’s Academical Village as universally, culturally significant, while perpetuating omissions regarding the documented history of enslavement and its critical ideological and material role in Jefferson’s architectural achievements.
As “infotainment” bridging the genres of historical documentary series and contemporary interview format, Pride of Place is a particularly potent example of media generated from the confluence of increased interest in architecture as a subject of popular culture, the growing reach of arts based educational content on TV, and a preoccupation with a nationalistic mythos that situated American cultural production, including architecture, as a valuable, consumable product in the late 1970s and early 1980s.5
Pride of Place and its treatment of Jefferson’s architecture also demonstrated the utility of American architectural history to the profession in the early 1980s. Despite a critical stance on Modernism’s social failings, the heroic portrayal of Monticello and UVA freed of its social and ethical shortcomings, instead presented Jefferson’s architecture as a typological and stylistic model upon which contemporary, postmodern architecture could elaborate. To present Jefferson alongside contemporary architectural practitioners featured in the series ultimately demonstrated how the historical transformation of culture under postmodernity reflected the discipline’s quest to not only reevaluate but instrumentalize a conveniently interpreted “usable past” through which contemporary American architecture practice could be informed and proceed into the future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the UVA Special Collections Library for access to documentation related to the Jeffersonian Precinct UNESCO nomination and to everyone who provided feedback on earlier interations of this research including Ben Ross and those who participated in the 2024 SESAH Annual Conference.
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Koester, Anna G. 1998. “Fiske Kimball.” In Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Archives: Collection Guide and Catalog, 14–16. Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. Moreno, Joaquim. 2018. The University Is Now On Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture. Edited by Claire Lubell. Montréal: Canadian Center for Architecture.
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ENDNOTES
1 To Robertson, Jefferson’s architecture was not only critical to UVA’s essential academic mission but “an asset” of national and international importance, and as such, he actively sought opportunities to raise the profile of the legacy of the school in the architectural press and other popular media venues like the Pride of Place series. While Dean, Robertson used his academic position and professional clout to advocate for the establishment of the Jeffersonian Restoration Advisory Board and an endowment to fund the ongoing restoration and preservation of the Jeffersonian Grounds. Robertson also hosted a high-profile conference of contemporary architects that met in UVA’s Rotunda and toured Monticello, placing Jefferson’s architectural ethos in dialog with contemporary practice. The event and its debates came to be known through the publication of its transcripts, The Charlottesville Tapes.
2 The postmodern concept of the double coded meaning of architecture was first introduced by theorist and historian Charles Jencks in 1977 in the text What Is Post-Modernism?
3 For example, Bicentennial Minutes was a popular series of short features on American history which aired on CBS between 1974 and 1976. This is just one of many series and prime time television specials used to disseminate entertaining and educational content via television during the lead up to and celebration of the US Bicentennial in 1976
4 Huxtable’s writing was later used by Jaque Robertson as a fundraising and organizing tool when leading efforts toward the restoration of the original Jeffersonian Precinct at UVA upon his arrival in 1981 and which extended well into the early 1990s.
5 Lydia Mattice Brandt has written extensively about the phenomenon of translating historically significant architecture associated with a founding father into a consumable product. Her book, First in the Homes of His Countrymen: George Washington's Mount Vernon in the American Imagination, interprets the architectural and social history of Mount Vernon and the replicability of the home’s image in the public imagination.