Visitor centers are proliferating at our nation’s most cherished landmarks to change the tourist experience. Since 2006, such multipurpose buildings have opened at the U.S. Capitol, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Madison’s Montpelier and Abraham Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home.
Others are planned for the National Mall’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, where the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was penned.
These additions are meant to control public access to fragile structures, but often end up overshadowing the main event. Even those buried underground at the Capitol and Mount Vernon, are so big, glitzy and intrusive that it is hard to appreciate their interpretative purpose.
So it’s refreshing to find a more modest welcome mat being rolled out this week at Monticello (Italian for “little mountain”) in Charlottesville. The Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center and Smith Education Center, officially opening to the public on Wednesday, is a hospitable, well-sited building that avoids many pitfalls of the visitor centers at other historic properties.
Designed by Ayers/Saint/Gross Architects + Planners of Baltimore, the 42,000-square-foot complex is terraced into the southern slope of Jefferson’s estate to create a low profile. It consolidates outdated facilities scattered around Monticello: a small ticket booth formerly located on the site of the new visitor center, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired museum at the base of the mountain and a gift shop just to the south of Jefferson’s home.
The new building is really five pavilions, all grouped around a planted courtyard with plenty of benches and a fountain. They serve the varied functions typical of visitor centers, including ticketing space, an introductory film, exhibits, classrooms, a store, a garden shop, a restaurant and, of course, restrooms.
One of the benefits of this segmented organization is that it allows a choice of where to go. After buying a ticket, visitors can view the film, browse the exhibits, shop for Monticello reproductions, dine on an outdoor deck — or bypass it all by walking around the courtyard, climbing a staircase and boarding a shuttle bus to tour Jefferson’s house.
Some of the center is underground, but its interweaving of indoor and outdoor spaces avoids the hermetic atmosphere of the subterranean buildings at the Capitol and Mount Vernon. Compared to those ambitious structures, the Monticello visitor center is humble — $43 million versus $621 million spent at the Capitol and $110 million at Mount Vernon — and almost rustic in its architecture of wood and fieldstone.
Jefferson’s example
The site-hugging, three-level design would have appealed to our third president, an amateur architect who designed Monticello and the University of Virginia to embrace the landscape.
Some architects would have been tempted to copy those Jeffersonian precedents, but Ayers/Saint/Gross deliberately stayed away from obvious references.
“The house is so important, and we didn’t want to upstage that,” said architect Adam Gross on a recent building tour. “We wanted the visitor center to be a threshold to the house, not the main attraction.”
The terraced building, which incorporates environmentally sensitive features such as green roofs, is clean-lined and contemporary, but not so daring as to clash with Jefferson’s stunning neoclassical architecture.
Clad in cedar and fieldstone rather than red brick, its gabled sheds recall the barns and outbuildings around the plantation - an appropriate image given the center’s subservient role to Monticello’s old house. Clapboard and louvered panels on the exteriors create the feeling of large-scale cabinetry and the kind of timber architecture common to the Pacific Northwest.
While the new building doesn’t look like Jefferson’s Palladian mansion, it pays homage to the old home in graceful proportions and practical details.
“After studying Jefferson’s architecture to better understand the principles he used, we strove to create a building that would provide a worthy introduction to these architectural lessons without imitating Monticello itself,” said project architect Sandra Parsons Vicchio.
Inspiration for the gabled wings of the visitor center came from Monticello’s south pavilion, where Jefferson lived while building his first design. Colonnades framing his “dependencies” — work areas sunk into the hillsides around the main house — led to the covered walkways around the new courtyard.
Jefferson’s inventive zigzag roofs, designed to drain rainwater from passageways, served as the model for the copper peaks atop the new building’s front and back porches. The neat rows of plantings in his vegetable garden are emulated in the courtyard, designed by Alexandria landscape architect Michael Vergason.
For those interested in learning more about the architecture of Monticello, an excellent exhibition in the two-level Smith Gallery traces the evolution of the house. Jefferson built and rebuilt his masterpiece over four decades based on pattern books and the neoclassical buildings he saw in Paris while minister to France.
Jeffersonian ideals
Billed as “the 21st-century gateway” to Monticello, the visitor center offers an impressive array of touch screens and monitors presenting Jefferson’s writings as well as more conventional displays of artifacts. The exhibits amplify the president’s ideas on liberty and other themes presented in the 15-minute introductory film, “Thomas Jefferson’s World,” shown in a space across the courtyard.
Instead of designing a theater for screening the movie, the architects created a multipurpose room with movable chairs so it can be used for conferences and various events.
The film and exhibits don’t shy away from acknowledging the significant contributions of slaves to the 5,000-acre plantation. The visitor center literally connects to this history with a path leading to a slave graveyard, sadly now surrounded by parking lots.
Education is a large part of the visitor center’s mission and three classrooms strung along the lowest part of the sloped site accommodate the approximately 85,000 schoolchildren who visit the property each year. The hands-on Griffin Discovery Room, filled with replicas of Jefferson’s walled-in bed, revolving bookstand and other inventions, allows kids to experience the designs on view in the house.
The Smith Woodland Pavilion — in the woods to the east of the main visitors complex — will open later this spring. This contemporary cottage will be used for Monticello’s summertime day camp as well as for workshops, meetings and cooking demonstrations in its fireplace.
Having your picture taken with our third president is yet another part of the experience. A life-size bronze of Jefferson, sculpted by New York-based StudioEIS (the firm responsible for presidential statues at Mount Vernon and Lincoln’s cottage), greets tourists as they board the shuttle bus to see his house.
It’s one of those gimmicks now routine at visitor centers, even one as respectful as this addition to Monticello.
WHAT: Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center and Smith Education Center
WHERE: 931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway
WHEN: Open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., March through October; and 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., November through February
ADMISSION: $20 adults ($15 from November through February); $8 ages 6 to 11
PHONE: 434/984-9822
WEB SITE: www.monticello.org
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