The Little Mountain: Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

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Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Thomas Jefferson lived by those words as he continuously re-constructed himself through his architecture. His architecture serves as an examination of self, nature, and philosophy. In Charlottesville, Virginia (1769-1809) , Thomas Jefferson wrote an essay in brick and wood, which sought to reconcile nature and man; he dubbed his “essay in architecture” Monticello. Thus Jefferson’s experimental home, Monticello, was not just a piece of construction; it was his philosophy resolute.
Thomas Jefferson on the Self
To understand the architecture of Thomas Jefferson, one must first understand his philosophy towards developing the self. Contextualizing his philosophy will serve as a base to explain Thomas Jefferson’s architecture thoroughly.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Peter S. Onuf, in The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (particularly in the chapter Making Sense of Jefferson) the author helps to understand how Thomas Jefferson’s ideals and view of the past developed his–at times paradoxical–mental framework. Onuf’s piece offers a more humanistic (rather than the iconic) Thomas Jefferson that in effect separates the reality of his actions from the idol. Onuf, in The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, mentions that Jay Fliegelman holds, in Declaring Independence, that Jefferson was “a witness to, and conflicted participant in, a new affective understanding of the operations of language, one that reconceives all expression as a form of self-expression, as an opportunity as well as an imperative to externalize the self, to become self-evident.” Jefferson was adjusting to a world where language was becoming action; and in effect, anything that was expressible was an attemp...

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...ww.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/monticello-house-faq#when
Onuf, Peter S. The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 19, 2014).
Randolph, Sarah N. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson. Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning, 2001. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 19, 2014).
Spahn, Hannah. Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 20, 2014).
VIII. Notes on Heresy, 11 October–9 December 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0222-0009, ver. 2014-02-12). Source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 553–555.

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