[PeterParker]

Looks like we are not the only University with growing pains and building woes...our brethren and archtiectural inspiration to the north have similar pains...

PRESERVING WHILE FORGETTING:
The Loss of Jeffersonian Principles at UVA

By Daniel Bluestone

Architecturally the University of Virginia occupies an amazing and now increasingly flawed campus. At its core stand Jefferson-designed buildings that brilliantly fostered a palpable sense of place and institutional purpose. Amidst lawns and gardens the historic buildings interwove students and faculty with the essential spaces for both their intellectual and domestic life—pavilions for classrooms and faculty residences, the Rotunda for a library, Lawn and Range rooms for student dormitories, the hotels for dining, the gardens for cultivation. The buildings created the requisite density for the unfolding of university life. All of this complexity was created in a remarkably clear and elegant design—the basis of the recognition of UVA as a UNESCO World Heritage site. That site, that world heritage, now stands in silent rebuff to much of the building at the broader University, building that misappropriates the shallowest lessons of Jefferson and applies them in a profoundly un-Jeffersonian manner. Many at UVA pride themselves on their stewardship of a UNESCO World Heritage site even as they flaunt the most basic principles of the original design and its subsequent preservation.

Rather than being inspired by the Jefferson core to seek architectural excellence, the university has systematically devalued Jefferson’s legacy with feeble designs and unsustainable planning that tears asunder the fabric of both memory and community. UVA aspires to be the number one public university; it has spent over $200 million dollars on a new basketball arena and additions to the football stadium with aspirations to be in the top ten or fifteen sports programs in country. Architecturally, we consistently settle for buildings that fail to register any national or international claim for architectural excellence. If there were a ranking for recent campus building UVA would not likely make it into the top 500 schools.

The University’s concern and respect for the Jeffersonian core has a long and often vexed history. Immediately after World War II members of the Board of Visitors objected to the “crowding up” of central grounds. Rather than imagining how the old buildings that had accommodated only 218 students could co-exist with new buildings for a university that now approaches 20,000 they charted the course towards a sprawling suburban campus that ignored Jefferson’s vision of an integrated dense community of students, faculty, and essential buildings and spaces. Major units of the university were not settled on the closest available sites—instead they were dumped on distant borders. The close-in sites were reserved for the Lady Astor tennis courts, the artificial turf field for the new marching band, and above all for automobile parking. The law and business schools were exiled to north grounds over a mile and a half from central grounds. Sports left the Lambeth colonnade for a zoned and detached sportsplex. The exciting political programs of the Miller Center surfaced on the Faulkner estate along Old Ivy Road, accessible primarily by private automobile.

Those who have interpreted the growing dissatisfaction over campus design as simply a skirmish in a war over architecture, stylistically considered, between modern and traditional form, frequently invoke Williams & Tsien’s 1992 modern design of UVA’s Hereford Residential College. Having lived at Hereford for five years, while directing UVA’s program in historic preservation, I found a lot to appreciate in Hereford’s exquisitely crafted details and its palette of materials that ranged from local Buckingham County slate, to extruded aluminum light fixtures, to milled aggregates in concrete block, to folded metal balconies. The buildings were composed to echo Observatory Hill’s topography while corner lounge windows and the exposed circulation cores literally framed distant views of the surrounding hills in a way that resonated with aspects of Jefferson’s own appreciation of landscape and site.

Over the years Hereford’s residents have been much less engaged in the debates over modern versus traditional style than in the need to cope with the administrative decision to place 500 students on the far edge of Observatory Hill on a frustratingly distant site, totally disconnected from to the rest of the University. All the creative residential college programming in the world has barely overcome the deficit dealt to the project by an essentially suburban and un-Jeffersonian vision. Such matters were compounded when the university foolishly demolished six faculty residences on the site, including an extraordinary stone house designed in 1909 by Eugene Bradbury. It replaced these residences with three units of faculty housing at Hereford. With a net gain of 500 students there was a net loss of three faculty residences. Compared to the vitality of Jefferson’s vision of faculty and students sharing space, Hereford’s physical plan gave the rhetoric of residential college ideals a rather hollow ring. Finally, administration planners, as opposed to the architects, dedicated the best and highest part of the site to a surface parking lot with 165 spaces rather than to the dining hall as originally planned. The Hereford dining hall opened with no dramatic views while the parking lot had extraordinary views to Monticello, Carter’s Mountain, and the Southwest and Ragged Mountains,. This amounted to a failure to comprehend the more profound aspect of Jefferson’s vision of buildings integrated with their sites; this proved to be an issue of much greater consequence than any perceived departure from Jefferson’s fondness for red brick, white trim, and the classical orders.

The bungling of the Hereford location gains additional significance when we consider what has ended up on the more central sites that were available for the Hereford residential college project. A faculty committee recommended a site at Ivy Road and Emmet Street. It would have provided Hereford residents with easy access to classrooms, libraries, faculty offices, and the convivial establishments on the corner. Today, instead of accommodating 500 students, the land at Ivy and Emmet has a new 1250-space parking garage. Then there was the site where the bookstore garage now stands with its 400 parking spaces. If Hereford had been built there it would have stood immediately adjacent to central grounds while potentially being able to appropriate Memorial Gym as part of a centrally located new student housing community. These parking spaces on premium sites are among the 15,250 spaces for automobiles provided at the university. It is as if Jefferson designed his famed lawn with the Rotunda overlooking a continuous line of horse stables rather than classrooms, student rooms, and faculty residences. The vista adjacent to the core of the campus is nothing short of breathtaking in its uncritical accommodation of the supposed essentials of modern private automobile transportation. That is contemporary form and contemporary planning well worth debating. It underscores the failure of many to comprehend the essentials of Jefferson’s vision for density at the center or the efforts among the teaching faculty to promote more sustainable organization in our communities.

Jefferson was always vitally concerned about the natural and financial resources needed to support the university. Our modern university of today is often shockingly profligate when it comes to its building resources. This summer the University completed the construction of its new $22 million dollar dining hall on Observatory Hill. The design could easily become the poster child for the banal, uninspired, mediocrity of our recent building projects at the university. It is largely devoid of aspiration towards excellence; it couples a dreary exterior with an interior design that could comfortably take the place of the international food court of any American shopping mall. But more appalling than its style or the clumsy inelegance of the way it sits on its site, is the fact that the project involved the unnecessary demolition of over 12,000 square feet of space in the old Observatory Hill dining hall and in the adjacent Tree House. Both of these buildings were not even close to being done with their useful life. At current construction prices they represented millions of dollars of building. Even if for some reason the new dining hall could not have been integrated with the existing buildings, which is hard to imagine, one wonders why we didn’t hold onto the buildings so that they could be incorporated into the future addition of new dormitories on the site. It has taken the Architecture School, where all faculty members share offices, over two decades to raise money to build an addition on Campbell Hall with only slightly more square feet than were demolished in a few short weeks this past summer on Observatory Hill.

The earlier Observatory Hill dining hall, now demolished, was rebuilt in 1984 by Robert A. M. Stern who is often held out as a worthy exemplar among those advocating traditional or classical architecture at UVA. Architectural critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in 1986 that the building added “a neat grace note to the campus.” Forgey published his article under the headline, “The Pride of UVa, Architect Finally Respects Mr. Jefferson” and pointed out that the Jefferson campus “demand excellence” but often “has received the opposite.” But Stern’s contextual architectural strategy and adept design for Observatory Hill did nothing to hold off the wrecking ball. More telling than the stylistic agenda is the sheer wastefulness of demolishing what is arguably Stern’s finest building at the University.

Higher up Observatory Hill at Alden House and spread all over the UVA Foundation’s historic Blue Ridge Sanatorium site, just east of Charlottesville, are buildings that are being subjected by University officials to demolition by neglect. At the Blue Ridge site the University has presided over the abandonment and pushed for the demolition of nearly 240,000 square feet of buildings. This makes a mockery of any claim of interest in sustainability on the part of the University. At Blue Ridge the 1870s Lyman mansion presents the most vivid case of university involvement in demolition by neglect. Here the inattentiveness to the most basic strategies for maintenance and preservation encouraged the outright theft of the extraordinary Second Empire interior woodwork from the Lyman mansion. It is shameful when the stewards of a world heritage site fail to protect other aspects of local architectural heritage and literally leave the door open to heritage thieves.

As troubling as UVA’s recent demolition practices have been, they are actually trumped by recent “preservation” projects. Last spring some members of the university community stood in awe at seeing the technical accomplishment of lifting Varsity Hall off of its 150 year old foundation and rolling it to its new site, in the middle of hospital drive. This move alone cost 2.5 million dollars. People advocating the preservation of this building by moving it were seemingly untroubled by the fact that the move violated one of UNESCO’s most fundamental tenets of the worldwide preservation movement, outlined in UNESCO’s1964 Venice Charter. Article 7 of the Charter insists that “A monument is inseparable from the history to which it bears witness and from the setting in which it occurs. The moving of all or part of a monument cannot be allowed except where the safeguarding of that monument demands it or where it is justified by national or international interest of paramount importance.” In the case of Varsity Hall the interest of “paramount importance” came down to the demand of the McIntire School of Commerce for a clear site and a clean slate for its massive new building project—Jefferson on Steroids—an “addition” to Rouss Hall that is many times the size of the original structure. The building would have taken on a much more interesting form if it had appropriated Varsity Hall and the actual history of its site rather than settling for shallow quotations of Jefferson, stylistically understood. Jefferson’s ethic about natural resources and sites would more likely have led him to find a way to work with the building and the history on the site rather than to divert resources from pressing university needs to the dubious and unorthodox project of relocating a historic building.

Varsity Hall’s original site and surrounding space were incredibly important because they represented a fundamentally different design approach to university building—a picturesque sensibility that stood in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s original and more formal conception. Varsity Hall, on its own site, captured the nineteenth-century tension between picturesque and classical design aesthetics. The new building project could have engaged this rich history in any number of ways. Instead Varsity Hall was pushed aside. This wasteful exercise was planned and executed with little or no consultation with the members of the UVA faculty most familiar with preservation practice and possibilities. The ecologically sound green roof system that will top the new Commerce School building can hardly hide the fundamentally inappropriate and unsustainable approach taken to the site, its heritage, and to precious university resources. Varsity Hall would have been better left in place; failing that we should have simply recorded the building and then demolished it—death with dignity.

For people who feel passionately about excellence in architectural design, about preserving world heritage, and about more sustainable approaches to community planning, it is difficult to see shallow engagements with Jefferson’s style distract us from the realities of a place increasingly alienated from the deeper imperatives of the founder’s vision. When will we be able to unite as a community in seeking a better place, a place that again links the highest ideals in design with the noblest endeavors in academic, social, and political life? When will we build more densely, more sustainably, more beautifully, and give up the delusion that clownish references to Jefferson’s architecture mean that we are all doing just fine?


Daniel Bluestone, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Director of the Historic Preservation Program. He has directed numerous historic preservation and community history projects in Chicago, New York, and Charlottesville. Last year he and his students worked on a yearlong project charting the architectural history of student housing at the University of Virginia. An exhibit based on the work “Boarding Houses: Living Off Jefferson’s Lawn” is now on view at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society.

http://www.uva-architecture-forum.org/t ... stone.html