Revisiting the South Lawn

You can say a tearless goodbye to New Cabell Hall, the numb brick box, the incredible miscarriage of design that the architects Eggers and Higgins attached to Cabell Hall on the South Lawn in 1950. Its days are numbered by the University’s decision last summer to build a 258,000-square-foot Arts & Sciences complex adjoining Cabell, Cocke and Rouss Halls and extending across Jefferson Park Avenue to the south. The University has commissioned the Polshek Partnership, of New York City, to design the $125 million complex to house classrooms, study spaces and faculty offices partly atop the footprint of New Cabell Hall, which will be demolished.

If there is one ghost cheering the decision to tear down New Cabell Hall from the hereafter, it is that of the architect Stanford White. You may recall that the notorious voluptuary White, of the celebrated New York architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White, made a rough exit from this world when he was murdered by the husband of his young former mistress Evelyn Nesbit on the rooftop of the old Madison Square Garden, which he designed, in 1906. Eight years earlier, he had realized the designs of Cabell, Cocke and Rouss Halls on the South Lawn. With those designs, to say nothing of the Rotunda he redesigned after the1895 fire, White helped to seal the future of the Central Grounds along solidly Jeffersonian lines, for he loved — and feared — the work of Thomas Jefferson, “one of the most many sided of geniuses,” as White wrote in 1898. “In whatever work with which he was connected, his powerful and controlling mind is evident.”

Just about anybody who ever set foot in the Commonwealth of Virginia knows the vast influence Jefferson continues to wield in the form of his Academical Village in Charlottesville. But far fewer people seem to recognize the enormous contributions White made near the turn of the 20th century on this same territory. On the exterior, the Rotunda as White rebuilt it was a magnificent copy, slightly modified, of Jefferson’s original, but it was just that — a copy, a given. (In 1976 the University removed White’s circular library design and restored Jefferson’s ideas to the interior.)

The South Lawn, by contrast, was a far more dangerous proposition, because it found White completing Jefferson’s sublime composition for posterity. Having seen Jefferson’s plans for the University, he told a colleague: “They’re wonderful and I’m scared to death. I only hope I can do it right.”

The need to develop the southern end of the Lawn arose as a direct result of the Rotunda fire, which destroyed the Mills Annex, a building attached to the Rotunda that held classrooms and a 1,200-seat auditorium. The Mills Annex did not wear well on people at the University, as it corrupted the formal purity of the Rotunda and deviated from Jefferson’s painstaking plan for dormitories and pavilions. But it served its purpose. The University needed to reclaim the volume lost, so the faculty asked White to submit his ideas.

He submitted two: The first placed the new halls to either side of the Lawn; the second formed a terminus to enclose the South Lawn. The latter plan seemed inevitable — and it was — but White lamented that it would block the Lawn’s “beautiful vista” toward the southwest. As it happened, that view also encompassed a collection of houses owned by African-Americans who worked in servile positions at the University. Once closed, the Lawn would become an idealized demimonde unto itself, unburdened by harsher realities outside.

Despite that delicate consequence, the closure of the South Lawn proved valuable to the University. It bestowed a sense of completeness on the Academical Village. White’s designs deferred to those of Jefferson in nearly every aspect — especially in the way White formed the massing of the three buildings. To preserve the eminence of the Rotunda and the solemnity of the Lawn, he formed a terrace 20 feet lower than the Rotunda’s lowest step and placed the buildings around a court that measured 300 by 200 feet. From the Rotunda, they would look like one-story buildings, though they actually rose two stories high. White copied Jefferson’s designs by sculpting each building as a central pavilion with smaller wings on either side. Materially, too, he responded in kind with red brick in a Flemish bond pattern with highlights of white colonnades, entablatures, pediments and window frames.

White saluted Jefferson in the design of Cabell Hall in particular, where he designed the auditorium to face the Rotunda rather than settling it into the slope of the hill. On the wall nearest the Rotunda, he hung a copy of Raphael’s “School of Athens,” as a previous copy had hung in the Mills Annex and was destroyed in the fire. The volume of Cabell Hall’s auditorium equals half that of the Rotunda’s sphere. “In form and iconography,” wrote Richard Guy Wilson, Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History at the University, for the 1995-96 “Arise and Build!” exhibition, “White’s design for Cabell Hall focused attention back to the original genius of Jefferson’s plan.”

Now the time has come for a new team to enter this sanctified terrain. The Polshek firm is well known for its success in making new architecture adapt to its context. In 2000, for example, the firm completed the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a 335,000-square-foot expansion of New York’s American Museum of Natural History that added an iconic glass-and-steel cube containing a planetarium to the museum, a 128-year-old stone landmark. That thrilling structure, however, wins applause in large part for its stark contrasts to the original building. It is safe to say that Polshek and the University will impose nothing so strikingly different on the Academical Village. As the unlovable design for New Cabell Hall suggests, the South Lawn calls for subtlety.

“This project, in my 40 years of practice, comes closest to brain surgery,” said James Stewart Polshek, founder of the Polshek Partnership. “We’ve added to many landmarks, but, like White said, this makes us very nervous.”

Nervousness can only engender diligence in the hands of a firm like Polshek’s, which has completed several projects in and around McKim, Mead and White buildings of the same vintage at Columbia University. The architect reported that his design team is spending an extraordinary amount of time researching Jefferson’s intentions for the University’s growth and analyzing how those may be expressed in contemporary terms. “We’re exploring everything” before putting plans in ink, Polshek said. “As for the larger philosophical question of working in the Jeffersonian precedent: We are and we’re not. That’s what’s interesting to me personally — that’s the interpretive challenge.”

Jefferson, as Polshek quickly reminds, was an omnivorous seeker of architectural influences, a person who always tried to balance beauty and usefulness. Thus, the design will have to mediate between Jefferson’s dream of having people enter the Lawn from the south end and the practical need to make a cohesive scheme on either side of Jefferson Park Avenue that will instantly identify itself as the heart of the University’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

To that end, Polshek’s firm is developing what he calls a “sketchbook” to study specific building design guidelines for the complex. “We must look at how the buildings sit on the ground, how they come out of the ground, how they’re supported. And we will have to address details, shapes and shadows.”

Parallel to those inquiries, the firm must develop the functional aspects of the building — that is, what goes where in ways that make sense to the students and faculty. Polshek is working closely with Samuel “Pete” Anderson, architect for the University (who noted that New Cabell Hall opened halfway through his first year as a student at the University). All design proposals must meet the approval of the University’s Board of Visitors, particularly its Buildings and Grounds Committee. “That group is very clear about its preference for ‘Jeffersonian’ design inspired by the Academical Village, and, more broadly, anything done here prior to 1960 with red brick, white trim and classical facades,” said Anderson. “Whether it’s true that if Jefferson were alive today he would still be doing that style of architecture — that’s not a question asked by the Board of Visitors.”

Stanford White may have been terrified by the prospect of following Jefferson’s imagination, Anderson suggested, but he was smart enough to challenge the founder’s Roman reveries by going somewhat more Greek with his building profiles and flatter pediments and with the way he arranged the buildings somewhat out of view as you look toward the South Lawn. “What Stanford White did was very important in talking about the sensibility of the late 19th century,” Anderson observed, “and what we do now needs to be in many ways a rethinking of the Lawn in the 21st century. Each bit of work we do here should be, to some degree, a product of the times.”