Thomas Jefferson, South Elevation of the Rotunda, ink and pencil drawing, from University Archives, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library

A CLASSICAL RETURN?: South Lawn Project at UVa Requires Traditional Architecture

BY D. CATESBY LEIGH

First printed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on October 2, 2005

Washington. More than half a century ago, a new modernist elite decreed that it was no longer permissible for traditional architecture to continue to adapt to new building technologies and social needs, as it had been doing for thousands of years. That elite forced a complete break with the past, and our world is a good deal uglier as a result.

Fortunately, a resurgence of classical architecture is underway, and thanks mainly to its new Darden School of Business campus, the University of Virginia has already played a conspicuous role. UVa's board of visitors is now in the process of selecting the architect of a $160 million complex adjacent to Thomas Jefferson's iconic Lawn for the College of Arts and Sciences. Last spring a prominent modernist, James Stewart Polshek, reached a dead end with the university on the design of this complex, dubbed the South Lawn, and resigned. A classical South Lawn is now a distinct possibility.

This makes UVa's monolithically modernist architecture school nervous. More than half its faculty attempted to head the board off at the pass recently by formally denouncing traditional patronage as a matter of "branding" the UVa campus as "a theme park of nostalgia." In a screed published in The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper, the 24 architecture profs accused the board and the university administration of plotting to transform UVa into a Jeffersonian Disneyland.

BUT MOST people would celebrate classical architecture's return to the university after comparing the Darden campus with a new student residential complex, Hereford College. Designed by a fashionable New York office, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Hereford consists of tiers of low-rise buildings ascending a slope on the southern outskirts of the campus. These stark brick structures are eerily reminiscent of Urban Renewal-style, inner-city housing blocks -- except for the fact that their boxy geometries and their arrangement on the site are weirdly skewed. This merely intensifies the buildings' disorienting, alienating effect.

Think of Hereford, then, as a bucolic housing project on drugs. Its dining hall is distinguished by a bizarre entrance colonnade of steel uprights with slits in the middle, with the uprights' flanges bolted into a stone podium. The bolts are already rusting, a reminder of the shoddy building practices that plague modernist architecture. Hereford is notoriously unpopular within the UVa community, and for good reason. Its iconoclastic and experimental design relegates students to the status of guinea pigs. But Williams and Ms. Tsien are very popular with UVa's architecture faculty, thanks to which the two designers received the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture for 2003.

THE DARDEN CAMPUS is a very different story. Yale architecture dean Robert A.M. Stern, who is on UVa's short list for the South Lawn project, has skillfully adapted Jefferson's classical vocabulary. Though one can pick out faults in his design, and though Darden offers less in the way of exquisite detail than you find on the Lawn, it possesses elegance and institutional dignity. It's plain to see that, with the passing of an architectural dark age, UVa is capable of setting a high standard of traditional patronage once again. And because of the university's distinguished architectural heritage, this patronage is a cultural matter of national significance.

The reasoning behind the architecture profs' Cavalier Daily manifesto is hard to fathom. They take architecture, which for millennia has involved building places that make us feel, at a very instinctive level, at home in the world, and they turn it into an arcane science that is intensely ideological and pathologically theoretical. They talk about architecture as a matter of "exploration of the essence of the building," as if that "essence" hadn't been figured out quite a while ago. They question the university's tradition in classical architecture because it was "inaugurated at a time when racial, gender, economic, and social diversity were less welcome." The profs thus see political issues that are irrelevant to the art of architecture as trumping any shared human experience of architectural beauty -- exactly the opposite of reality. Maybe that's because they don't think about beauty very much.

LET'S REMEMBER, too, that poor people mainly black people -- got the guinea-pig treatment in the modernist housing projects of the Urban Renewal era, with catastrophic social consequences. Around the country, some of those projects have been replaced with government-subsidized traditional neighborhood developments whose architectural styles were likewise "inaugurated at a time when racial, gender, economic, and social diversity were less welcome." These developments have been quite successful. Two lessons here: (1) The architecture profs are dealing in red herrings, and (2) modernists are in no position to serve as moral arbiters on architectural matters.

Indeed, the profs talk a great game when it comes to diversity, but one reason they've lost their bearings is that the UVa architecture school is so obviously lacking in diversity -- the intellectual diversity that is a university's lifeblood. Here's hoping UVa's leaders will do what they can to remedy that situation, while ignoring the elitist rant about Disneyland, theme parks, branding, and so on. The fact is that the architecture of a great educational establishment should embody the wisdom of the ages. Such architecture serves as a spiritual anchor in a rapidly changing world. For these reasons, enlightened patronage of traditional architecture can only enhance the long-term cultural value of a national treasure such as the UVa campus.

Catesby Leigh, an art and architecture critic in Washington, D.C., is at work on a book, 'Monumental America.'

 

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