Jackson’s embrace of the grand architectural style known as Greek Revival wasn’t as strange as it may seem. In an emerging American Republic whose early citizens had to define the national character from scratch, the stately building style, borrowed from the ancients, became a perfect mode of expression. By the 1830s, most public buildings in the U.S. were being designed as Greek temples serving some other function: temples of commerce, temples of law, temples of learning. You can still see the Greek style’s imprint in the North and in the South, in cities and in rural areas, on modest shopfronts and in grand monuments. When the cost of building the mint doubled, it was Jackson who assured that Congressional appropriations were adequate to execute the design. Gradually, though, he came around to the idea of a grander mint, and became personally involved in many aspects of the building’s design, from its placement in a prime location, backed up to one corner of Centre Square, at the literal center of Philadelphia, to the rich materials used in its construction. Brick became marble, a copper roof was substituted for the original tin. A populist who famously railed against the elites, he had initially wanted to construct a simple building for minting money quickly, because there was a severe shortage of specie-coins-in the country at the time. Jackson was not a man known for his appreciation of cultural and artistic pursuits. Tiny timeline: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in a global context, 2nd–1st millennia B.C.E.President Andrew Jackson took a keen interest in the construction of the federal mint in Philadelphia, a grand, columned edifice, inspired by the temples of ancient Greece, that opened in 1833.
#Greek architecture series
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