ARCHITECTURAL RHETORIC

The cool detached architecture of the virtual archive reflects the site's pretense to a disinterested posture.  By using architecture designed by Thomas Jefferson, a figure from a different historical period, the authors of the project add to the atmosphere of detachment from the passion and drama of the civil war.   On the whole, the site is seemingly governed by a rhetoric of neutrality.   The archive does not choose sides, or present a particular viewpoint.

The drama of life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is presented within the neutral rhetoric of the site, that is, in the apparently disinterested architecture of the archive.  The user is able to experience an oscillation between the disinterested form in which the material is presented and the moral dimensions of its substance. There is thus an element of the Valley that approaches Lanham's "strong defense" of rhetoric.