building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Jefferson, who considered himself a professional farmer 57 , insisted in favour of
agricultural economy and local autonomy, understood as productive self‐reliance on
the land, and with his dislike of the development of industry was the first American
to openly express a kind of repulsion for the city 58 . According to Manfredo Tafuri,
Jefferson represented the "ambiguous conscience of the American intellectuals" 59 ,
due to his fear of accepting the passage from an old to a new social order: for this
reason his is a utopia, “even though not an avant‐garde one, but as a rear‐guard
one […]. The utopia of Jefferson the architect becomes the
of his Classicism” 60 .
The agricultural development in the North of the country was a different case. The
expansion of the plantations did not celebrate the aristocratic agricultural
democracy by using the classical shapes of Jefferson's architecture. In fact, it
became evident after the Civil War that the plantations in the North and in the Mid‐
West, which had been explored in the first decades of the nineteenth century, were
an indirect achievement of an entrepreneurial and commercial spirit, which relied
on the resources of the rising American cities.
Since the initial attempts to set up settlements, the first agricultural villages in the
North were idealized as refuges of religious tolerance without, however, having
utopian connotations. Those who settled there did not want to experiment a new
model of social behaviour, they did so simply to stay there. This attitude also
explains their agricultural experiments and the diffusion of horticulture, all of which
57 In 1809 Jefferson draws a particular model of a plow called improved moldboard of least resistance.
This project will receive a medal from the French Society of Agriculture.
58 See WHITE, Morton Gabriel, WHITE, Lucia, The intellectual versus the city: from Thomas Jefferson
to Lloyd Wright, Cambridge, Harvard University press, 1962; FITCH, James Marston, Architecture and
aesthetics of plenty, London, Columbia University press, 1966; SCULLY, Vincent J., American
architecture and urbanism, London, Thames & Hudson, 1969 (Italian translation Architettura e
disegno urbano in America: un dialogo fra generazioni, introduzione di Mario Manieri Elia, Roma,
Officina, 1971)
59 TAFURI, Manfredo, Progetto e utopia, architettura e sviluppo capitalistico, Roma‐Bari, Laterza 2007
(prima ed. 1973) p. 28, (English translation by Barbara Luigia La Penta, Architecture and Utopia.
Design and Capitalistic Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, The MIT
Press, 1976, p.28)
60 Ibid. p. 28‐29
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