Word: designate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There lay the nub. One learns to design by looking at real buildings, not pattern books, and in America models were rare. You could not bring a building across the Atlantic -- or not yet; that was within Hearst's power, not Jefferson's -- and great paintings generally did not cross because the American market for them in the 1780s was so small. But fine furniture and silverware could be imported and were, so that the work of early republican and federal craftsmen in America tends to be more sophisticated than most architecture of the day. Most of it was English...
Above all, the English prototypes were there to study, so that in the 18th century American furniture makers and metalworkers could achieve the freedom and finesse of detail, the robustness of design that come only from full historical awareness tempered by regional shop practice and local material. Thus they invented forms peculiar to America, like the deeply carved blockfront desk with shell motifs made by Townsend and Goddard in Newport, R.I. But American neoclassical "constitutional" furniture radiates a sense of lightness and straightforwardness; it rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic...
...appeal to a precolonial past, that of the fresh Roman Republic, untainted as yet by Caesarism. Its model, said Jefferson, was the "best morsel of ancient architecture now remaining. It has obtained the approbation of fifteen or sixteen centuries, and is, therefore, preferable to any design which might be newly contrived...
...academical village" (the University of Virginia), declares the value of reason and persuades us that humane analysis, not blind faith, is the true measure of a decent society. We sentimentalize Jefferson and his colleagues if we suppose they were not elitists. His buildings, like other major expressions of design in the new Republic, insist that elites matter and are valuable. They imply that the democratic task is not to level but to create space for the exceptional while protecting general access to it with doctrines of equal rights...
...that the Constitution qualifies, human minds having been teased for centuries with the possibility of making a government that would allow that mind to realize itself. The document shows other literary attributes as well: a grounding in the ideas of its time, economy of language, orderliness, symmetrical design, a strong, arresting lead sentence. Then, there's all that shapely ambiguity. Even those who have never read the document, enduring wars, debts, threats to health, privacy, equality, down to questions raised by AIDS and aid to the contras, are convinced that the / Constitution's words foresaw all that...