Machado Silvetti Reimagines Historic Preservation at Menokin
Smithsonian - Architectural History & Historic Preservation (AHHP)

Feature
News

Published
Summer, 2026

Tags
The Menokin, Cultural, Master Plans

The Smithsonian’s AHHP has published a feature on Menokin, exploring the Jenrette Foundation’s work and the project’s innovative approach to preservation.

Preservation Futures: A Weekend with the Jenrette Foundation at Menokin


Proposed design of the Menokin “Glass House”, 2016. Image courtesy of Machado Silvetti. Image courtesy of Nico Ching

The Menokin Foundation was incorporated in 1994 and formally received the property the following year. Since then, the Foundation has worked to stabilize and preserve the Menokin ruin, protect its surrounding landscape, and make the site an educational resource. Its programming brings students, interns, craftspeople, scholars, descendants, and members of the public into the continuing work of understanding the property.

On Saturday, we traveled to Menokin to tour the grounds and learn how the Foundation is giving new life to one of Virginia’s most remarkable architectural ruins. Construction of the house began around 1769 following the marriage of Rebecca Tayloe and Francis Lightfoot Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Its Georgian design, strongly influenced by Palladian principles, is especially distinctive for its exterior walls of locally quarried sandstone, which is a comparatively unusual material among the predominantly brick houses of the eighteenth-century Tidewater region of Virginia.

Students and professionals gather outside the Menokin house ruins.

Tim Winther of Dominion Traditional Building Group explains the stabilization and restoration process of Menokin’s foundation.

Menokin's condition as a ruin gives the Foundation an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider how a ruin can be preserved and interpreted. Rather than reconstructing its missing portions as conjectural replicas, the Glass House Project will use glass to complete the building’s silhouette while keeping the surviving fabric visible. Initially conceived by preservation architects Charles Phillips and John Lee and later developed through a design led by the architecture firm Machado Silvetti, the intervention restores Menokin’s silhouette while remaining distinguishable from the historic masonry and colonial timber framing.

The project exemplifies what Menokin calls “dynamic preservation.” Instead of concealing the building’s fragmentation, it interprets the house as a continuing narrative of construction, deterioration, stabilization, and renewal.

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  • The Menokin project stabilizes and preserves the historic 1769 Georgian mansion while using glass to reinterpret its collapsed portions. The design distinguishes old from new while allowing visitors to understand the original structure and its history.

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