building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

assessments made with measurements and sketches, his general control of the
project guaranteed by continual shifts of scale, from the garden to the surrounding
territory [Figures 8‐9], including his thoughts on the perspective views and on the
definition of the natural skyline.
We are confronted with a very modern phenomenon, which, according to tradition,
dates back to the history of architecture at the end of the eighteenth century, and
which anticipates the contemporary approach to landscape design.
However, the varied landscapes of Monticello also tell us something more, and they
may also sound like a warning today, however anachronistic the landscape of
slavery which underpins Jefferson’s seductive organization of the estate may seem.
Jefferson had condemned slavery many times, but for each vegetable garden, each
field in Monticello there were a proportionate number of simple cabins, shelters
built for forced labour, which seemed to mock the words expressed in the Notes on
the State of Virginia (1785), according to which the “Cultivators of the earth are the
most virtuous and independent citizens” 26 .
Even today, the effort of building a common ground based on the idea of freedom,
on the right to pursue happiness, clashes against a similarly sad and complex reality.
To evoke a divine or earthly justice is not enough to satisfy the hunger for food,
water and energy.
Today’s fashionable topics concerning sustainability, recycling and the ecocompatibility
of projects to transform the territory, too often appear on the pages
of glossy magazines and in the classrooms of the Faculty of Architecture to be
merely useful, scientific tools to maintain a contradictory system, in which the
slaves are no longer recognizable by their chains, since they have been replaced by
less visible constrictions.
Nowadays, the problem raised by Jefferson has much wider geographical
boundaries than the Monticello estate, because it affects the whole planet.
Escaping to nature is of no use, we have to nourish those landscapes which creep
into our towns to the same extent as those in the geographical and social outskirts
of our world.
26 PETERSON, Merrill, (ed.) Thomas Jefferson Writings, New York, Library of America, 1984, p. 301
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