Monday, March 16, 2020

Monticellos Dome essays

Monticellos Dome essays Thomas Jefferson began the long, tedious job of building his dream house in 1770 at the age of twenty-five. Along with being a congressman, and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was also the architect of Monticello. The original Monticello was built to take on conventional Palladian features. However, as Jeffersons public career kept him away from Monticello for long periods of time, including five years spent as the nations representative to France, Monticellos design began to change. In this report I will concentrate on the dome, one of the major additions. I will quickly tell you a little background information of Monticello. Monticello is located near Charlottesville, Virginia on a hill that stands 867 feet above sea level. When standing on top if the mountain, if one looks eat from the house over the Rivanna River to the gentle hills of Albemarle County. Facing the west one can spend hours watching the shifting light patterns on the Blue Ridge Mountains. And if one stands on the north terrace, one can see the University of Virginia (Urofsky 21). Following Peter Jeffersons (Thomas Jeffersons father) death, Thomas Jefferson was given a large amount of land, including several in Albemarle County. Here is where he pick his ideal location for his house, and he named it little mountain or in Old Italian, Monticello. After living in Paris and visiting its great public buildings as well as the city and county houses of the nobility, Monticello seemed small and provincial to Jefferson. He declared himself violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm in Paris, now the Museum of the Legion of Honor across the Seine from the Louvre. He went to look at it often from the Tuileries, and this one - story town house with a dome certainly influenced him as he sat out to remodel Monticello(Urofsky 93). Jefferson remodeled other parts of Montice...