Architecture: Greek Revival

The American Greek Revival was not so Greek as Roman. The Greeks used stubbier columns than the Romans and that their buildings were therefore squatter. Greeks did not use domes, nor did they build houses in what we call "temple form." Even in imperial Athens, the portico was reserved for public structures and the Parthenon shape for places of diffidence to the gods. The Romans used domes, but not domestically. Only after several centuries in which domed temple forms were limited to use as temples, they deified their emperors and gave them temples, too. Neither the Greeks nor Romans used steeples,

though for military purposes and to get high enough for a view, both used towers. Steepled churches with porticoes are baroque, not Greek Revival.

Below the surface there is, however, among all these forms, a purpose: a proclamation and an imposition. They are all "classical"—a word coming from an Indo-European root, "khales," becoming Greek in the noun "klhsis" for "a calling" and in the verb "kalein," "to call." Calling to what? The Romans give us the answer, for the "classicus" was a summoning instrument rather like an alpenhorn, used to gather the militia into the parade ground—the Campus Martius—to be classified into their ranks, orders, and companies, first class, second, and third. And why were they so ordered? So that they could bring order. Their job was to diminish chaos. Not necessarily to keep the peace, as Rome's neighbors learned, and the neighbors of the new American Republic learned as well. Yet the classical principal was associated with orderliness in a myth that over a half millennium cloaked Roman aggression as always unpremeditated and always a reluctant response to other people's aggressions. The classified citizenry would go forth to restore tranquility to the countryside—often a countryside previously kept orderly by somebody else.

classical hieroglyphs

The classically trained republican founders of the United States were well aware of these connotations to a Roman Revival, and the bullying truculence of Rome appealed to few of them. The columnar American Greek Revival did not get underway in earnest until after 1825. It was not the architecture of George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not adapt the double-height columns of the Roman temple-form to domestic architecture until the nineteenth century was well underway. The full imperial boldness of the form awaited Andrew Jackson and the Polks, including President James K. Polk and his politically and architecturally ambitious kinship. In the eighteenth century, the English baroque produced a few columned and steepled churches in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York; a library in Newport; a columned banqueting hall—Whitehall—in Maryland; a few porticoes added to earlier houses; and a classically pilastered governor's house in St. Augustine, like the mission church at Santa Barbara a hieroglyph of the temple form. The only true temple form building was Prince William's Chapel in South Carolina, derived from a design of the British baroque architect James Gibbs (1682–1754). It has not survived, and it its proportions were not Greek.

The Parthenon shape, with columns all around, was not seen in the United States until a replica of that building was created in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1890s. So far as is known, the first building in North America to have columns all around was William Dunbar's plantation house "The Forest" (1819), in Natchez, Mississippi, but it was not in rectilinear temple form. The first Greek-proportioned portico was laid upon a traditional English house form for Arlington House (1802–1820, portico in 1817), overlooking Washington, D.C., created by George Washington's stepson as a sort of Federalist billboard to remind the Jefferson and Madison administrations of their delinquencies after 1800. Jefferson was a Franco-Roman-Palladian in taste, and thanks largely to him, the White House was Irish Palladian: that is to say, that many Italian and British and Irish adaptations had intervened between it and any temple form, either Greek or Roman. It did not bear any resemblance to any Greek or Roman domestic building or to either the Parthenonic or Pantheonic temple form. Until the 1820s, New York was dominated by architects trained in French classicism who eschewed both Greek and Roman Revival styles. The English architects Benjamin Henry Latrobe and George Hadfield, brought over to finish sloppier earlier work on the White House and Capitol, were also disinclined to the Greek. Hadfield produced Arlington House for George Washington Parke Custis, as if inviting the floodlights that now play upon it, but no others. After displaying his erudition for two little dependencies of a British country house in the Greek manner, Latrobe worked only in the English neoclassical mode.

Latrobian-Jeffersonian classicism can best be seen in the pavilions around The Lawn (1826) at the University of Virginia, templates for plantation architecture across the South. Jefferson wrote that he intended them to be exemplary; one can think of them as being like a paper chain to be snipped to make keepsakes by young planters headed for Tennessee. The university needed no architecture school to have the greatest influence of any institution upon the architecture of the plantation South. The northern Greek Revival was Roman as well, but more modest and conscious of a cold climate, often drawing the portico back onto the face of the house as pilasters. It too awaited Andrew Jackson's restoration of the nation's flagging confidence at the Battle of New Orleans (1815) and his westering imperial progress. In 1831 Jackson put a columned facade upon the cluster of previous structures at his Hermitage (1821) in Tennessee and went on to make Jefferson's templates the architecture of Manifest Destiny.

the politics of classicism

The Greek Revival in its Roman-Jeffersonian-Jacksonian form swept all the way to Oregon as a folk architecture. There was no matching Greek Revival in Canada, in part because it was recognized as an American imperial form. It was not, however, an imposed regimen, as was the Russian Greek Revival born eastward across Siberia by order of the tsars. In the United States we have neoclassical outhouses, offices, banks, canal houses, and especially, residences, thousands of them. And the pleasure of their company is to remind us of a time when every citizen was fit for an emperor's kind of house.

Was Hollywood right? Was the Greek Revival so ubiquitous that Scarlett O'Hara's "Tara" was likely to look like David O. Selznick's temple-fronted version in Gone with the Wind (1939)? Not likely. The neoclassical temple form was very rare in the countryside of the Deep South. For that matter, so were plantation houses of any magnitude. Big southern houses tended instead to be in compounds. Outside the watershed of Chesapeake Bay dominated by the Virginian predilection for dispersed plantations, the antebellum South was not a scene of rural white-columned mansions. A contrary, compound-building Carolina tradition dominated the rest of plantation country. Those plantation owners and other whites who could make the choice manifested aversion to living in the countryside, whether guarded by a barrier of columns or not. They chose Charleston or Georgetown, Augusta, Rome, Sparta, Athens, New Orleans, or Natchez. That is where Greek Revival buildings are found, not in the southern countryside. There are a few dozen raised cottages, with columns all around, or nearly all around, along the River Road in Louisiana, but only one house in that state (Madewood) has a temple form where a classicist would have put it, in the center of a tri-part composition, and its columns appear only in the front of the house. In the South, the countryside was for slaves and overseers, not for owners.

The Finger Lakes Region of New York is the heartland of the American Greek Revival, extending westward along the band of Yankee emigration all the way to the St. Croix Valley between Minnesota and Wisconsin. No one has done a complete inventory, but it is a fair guess that the ratio between northern Greek Revival and southern Greek Revival would probably run toward ten to one.

See alsoArchitectural Styles .

bibliography

Kennedy, Roger G. Architecture, Men, Women, and Money. New York: Random House, 1985.

——. Greek Revival America. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1989.

——. Orders from France: The Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World, 1780–1820. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Kimball, Fiske. Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. New York: Scribners, 1922. Reprint, New York: Dover, 2001.

Major, Howard. The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic, The Greek Revival. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1926.

Pierson, William H. American Buildings and Their Architects. Vol. 1: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1976.

Roger G. Kennedy