THE CLASSICAL TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE AND PAGAN STATUARY OF WASHINGTON, DC

Research and Writing by James Veverka




In 1792, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Johnson placed of an advertisement announcing a Capitol architectural contest in a Philadelphia newspaper. The ad contained rules and requirements for the sizes and numbers of rooms and such. The judges of the competition were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Commissioners of the District of Colombia. The philosopher Jefferson, a classically educated man like most of the founders, saw in temple designs like the Temple of the Sun, the Parthenon and the Roman Pantheon a symbolism of democracy science, and philosophy resurrected. Jefferson, Washington and the committee thought that the new capitol building should symbolize a Temple of Liberty in a secular sense. Entries were mostly Renaissance Palladian, a classical revival style of the that period. But the truly classical entrees from classical antiquity were the most liked by all. The committee took the symbolic nature of the Capitol seriously. For them, the design must symbolize the functions and themes of the capitol.

Модернизмот не го признава јазикот на минатото

Roger Scruton, “After Modernism”, in: City Journal, 2000

Architectural modernism rejected the principles that had guided those who built the great cities of Europe. It rejected all attempts to adapt the language of the past, whether Greek, Roman, or Gothic: it rejected the classical orders, columns, architraves, and moldings; it rejected the street as the primary public space and the facade as the public aspect of a building. Modernism rejected all this not because it had any well-thought-out alternative but because it was intent on overthrowing the social order that these things represented—the order of the bourgeois city as a place of commerce, domesticity, ambition, and the common pursuit of style.

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Roger Scruton, “After Modernism”, in: City Journal, 2000.