Over nearly two centuries, many notable architects have built on Thomas Jefferson’s groundbreaking concept for his University. — By Sarah Lindenfeld Hall
Any architectural history of UVA starts with Thomas Jefferson, of course. His concept for the Academical Village, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was crafted across decades, nurtured through his passion, his knowledge of architecture, his world travels and his ideas about education.
Jefferson’s vision was revolutionary, says noted architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, UVA professor emeritus. During that period, most universities were simply one large block of a building, Wilson said.
But Jefferson believed that learning should extend beyond lecture halls, Wilson says. “His idea was that education wasn’t just simply the professor blabbering away in a classroom, but is the environment that surrounds you, both going in the classroom and coming out.”
Today, the Academical Village remains central to UVA’s identity and mission. But since the Rotunda opened nearly 200 years ago, Grounds has hardly remained static, and its shape has sometimes responded to the trends of the day as leading architects brought their own mark to the campus.
In the 1850s, for example, buildings and grounds director William A. Pratt began to veer from Jefferson’s neoclassical approach to more trendy styles, according to UVA’s Historic Preservation Framework Plan, a history of UVA’s post-Jefferson buildings and landscapes. That move away later resulted in an “Eclectic Period,” featuring Brooks Hall with its mansard roof and animal carvings, and the University Chapel with its flying buttresses.
The City Beautiful and associated University Beautiful movements, which hit their stride in the 1880s and 1890s, represented a shift back to the classical and early governmental architecture in the United States, Wilson says. On Grounds, it came in the form of McKim, Mead & White’s redesign of the Rotunda and the original South Lawn buildings.
By the early 1900s, UVA was growing. Amid this need for expansion, President Edwin Alderman created an Architectural Commission in 1921, filling it with notable architects of the time, to bring some “harmony to the architecture,” Wilson said. Commission members jointly designed buildings such as Scott Stadium, Memorial Gymnasium, Thornton Hall, Clark Hall and Brown College.
By the middle of the 1900s, the Architectural Commission had disbanded, but more construction—along with a more modern take on architecture, in some cases—arrived.
At each of these points and across UVA’s history, notable architects left their marks at UVA. Here are some of the luminaries whose work graces Grounds, as well as where you will find their work out in the rest of the world.