Portrait of Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), ca. 1925 Philadelphia Museum of Art [only thumbnail size available]

A small group of architects directed the University’s building projects and codified the Colonial Revival as the style of its architecture in the years between the wars. Fiske Kimball, the head of the University’s new architecture program from 1919 to 1923, was the first to lead the efforts to ensure the persistence of the classical idiom established by Stanford White’s work. A trained architect and an architectural historian, Kimball was one of the first to prominently situate Thomas Jefferson in the narrative of American architecture. The practicing architects he selected--including Edmund S. Campbell, who led the University’s architecture program from 1927 until 1950, and Fayerweather Hall architect John Kevan Peebles--were also heavily invested in the history of American architecture. The group became formalized as the Architectural Commission in the University expansion of the 1920s–1930s.

Fiske Kimball had published a monograph on Jefferson’s architecture just three years after Lambeth and Manning’s Thomas Jefferson as an Architect and a Designer of Landscapes. Based on architectural drawings deposited at the Massachusetts Historical Society by Jefferson’s great-grandson, Kimball’s essay claims: “The estimate of Jefferson as architect cannot now be doubtful. Though not a professional, he was nevertheless an architect in the true modern sense.” Kimball divided Jefferson’s career into periods and identified his influences, establishing a prominent place for Jefferson in the canon of American architecture.

IV-24

Thomas Jefferson, Architect, 1916

Fiske Kimball, author

Boston: Riverside Press

(E332 .J48 1916)