LawCulture: MacJefferson at Uva

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The American college campus is often a place of exquisite beauty, especially at this time of the year—a crafted open space of a type not much found in the U.S. outside of the great old urban parks. Frederick Law Olmstead, after designing New York’s Central Park, went on to draw the plans for many a college, including Cornell University (in a setting chosen by Ezra Cornell to inspire lofty thoughts in students) and Berkeley and Mount Holyoke and a host of others. My favorite may be Smith College, with its botanical gardens stretching down to Paradise Pond.

But nothing of course quite matches Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village” at the University of Virginia, where architecture, landscape, and intellectual vision intersect in a truly moving statement. It reminds me of Denis Diderot’s “Plan for a University,” a utopian scheme he wrote for Catherine the Great—but Diderot’s vision never was translated into brick.

Since I am about to leave Uva, I can be elegiac about Jefferson’s work—and also lament what happened to Uva architecture after he was gone. The University’s trustees (the “Board of Visitors”) has just approved the “South Lawn” project, the biggest construction project in over a century, costing $105 million—and it is in my opinion a total mediocrity.

There’s a history to this mediocrity, of course. The example of the Lawn—as Jefferson’s original core of the campus is called—mainly has killed architectural innovation at Uva. There are three buildings at the foot of the lawn (closing off the view toward the mountains that Jefferson wanted to preserve) done by Stanford White, of the great New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White, in 1898, which have great dignity, of a somewhat conventional sort. After that, the rest is largely dismally “Jeffersonian”: red brick with white columns, either in a totally imitative “colonial” style or else with some modernist or post-modernist touches, as in the Michael Graves-designed Bryan Hall, where I have my office—a building compromised more or less out of existence.

The South Lawn project was originally entrusted to James Polshek, but his proposals were rejected by the Board of Visitors as too non-traditional. Polshek eventually quit in frustration, and the final plan was done by the California firm Moore Ruble Yudell, one of the biggest designers of campus buildings in the country; it didn’t hurt that John Ruble is a Uva alumnus. A detailed account of this history can be found in a good piece by Adam Goodheart in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. But Goodheart pulls his punches a bit on the South Lawn buildings designed by Ruble—they are pure MacJefferson. They almost make you long for 1970s brutalism, so self-effacing, consumerist, and generally nauseating are they.

One can’t expect the leadership of American universities to be quite Jeffersonian—but such timidity and compromise is disheartening.
Peter Brooks