University is the jewel in the impressive legacy of Jefferson

It can’t have been easy, running the United States from 1801 to 1809. But the task Thomas Jefferson began five years after leaving the presidency wound up taking longer, revealing more of his artistic talent and leaving a more tangible legacy: bricks and mortar, in fact. That job was the creation, design and construction of the University of Virginia.

No, not many Californians will build their next holiday around the university campus conceived and designed by Jefferson. But if you’re around Charlottesville, you could do worse than to drop in at Monticello, where Jefferson made his home, and the nearby university, where red bricks, white columns, a grand rotunda and a broad lawn are arrayed in profound near-symmetry.

Jefferson died in 1826, before the complex was done but about a year after teaching began (with five professors imported from Europe). Now, many generations later, the site stands as a testament to his versatility and his vision of the United States as a place where traditional wisdom and new thinking might come together. In this volume, Wills dwells lovingly on the president-architect’s “academical village” design, which echoes classical architecture but resists traditional hierarchies.

When the American Institute of Architects asked architects and critics to pick “the proudest achievement in American architecture,” Wills notes early on, they chose this university, followed by New York’s Rockefeller Center (the combined work of several leading architects of the 1930s), Dulles International Airport (by Eero Saarinen and also in Virginia) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house (in Pennsylvania).

Wills, a historian whose previous books include a volume on Jefferson’s work on the Declaration of Independence, had already made many pilgrimages to the campus before agreeing to produce this book for National Geographic’s Directions travelogue series. His command of the subject is formidable, and he can’t resist giving us close accounts of Jefferson bullying and skirmishing with his friends for years to extract more money for the project from a cash-strapped state government.

The author also lingers long -- too long -- on building dimensions and questions of design (including the architect’s deliberations in choosing a site for the room where medical students would perform autopsies).

The text gains momentum every time Wills gives us a hint of the campus as a living, enduring organism: for instance, the student resistance to Jefferson’s imposition of a schedule with no summer vacation; or the campus violence among musket-bearing plantation heirs, including the fatal shooting of a professor who interrupted a student dispute; the gambling debts that got a student named Edgar Allan Poe thrown out in the 1820s; and the policies that kept African American students out of the coveted “lawn” residences until the 1960s and kept women out until the 1970s, when a lawn resident named Katie Couric emerged as a campus leader.

In fact, though Wills the sober historian resists this comparison, it’s tempting to imagine the campus as a metaphor for the country’s founding documents: It has been rethought and rebuilt, neglected, expanded and, in some cases, restored to something closer to his original design. It carries many amendments yet remains globally recognized as a singular achievement. In telling us its tale, I only wish Wills had loosened up.

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A look beyond a Mexican resort

In the travel business, Huatulco is not a word that often provokes thoughts of native sovereignty or historic culture. It’s best known as the Pacific Coast resort in the state of Oaxaca that for years Mexico’s government tourism pooh-bahs have been trying, with only modest success, to turn into another Cancun.

Now comes this book to outline folkways and recent tribulations of the region’s native population. In detailed, reverent prose, Gonzalez recounts her conversations with wizened locals and explains how communities here have long sustained a network of encantos -- physical spaces that are thought to lead into an unknown metaphysical world.

With the text come Ysais’ images, often presented with antiquing effects such as sepia tones and postcard formats from long ago. The images are striking and suggest close observation and sustained attention to this rich culture -- but in a book aimed at capturing embattled folkways, it’s disconcerting to find visual effects that deliberately obscure chronology.

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A positive step for Nicaragua

HERE’S progress. After spending the 1980s in a civil war much complicated by U.S. involvement, then suffering mightily under Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Nicaragua has settled down enough to win its own title from Moon, one of the leading U.S. guidebook publishers. This is a positive step for any poor country seeking tourism revenue. (Lonely Planet hasn’t taken the plunge with Nicaragua yet, instead incorporating the country into its Central America guidebook.)

As the authors note, it’s a territory (“the largest and lowest Central American country”) that features about 600 miles of coastline (Atlantic and Pacific, with surfing), jungle wildlife, volcanoes, two big lakes in the south (one of which, Managua, is deadened by pollution) and about 5 million residents, who could use a few respectful visitors.

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Christopher Reynolds’ book column runs twice a month.