Design wise

James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann have the combined weight of Thomas Jefferson and Stanford White behind them — and upon them. As the Polshek Partnership of New York City prepares its plans for the South Lawn Project, the design partners know these two things: they must respect the architectural precedent that Jefferson set (and that White advanced nearly a century later), but they must also deviate from it to identify the building as a modern work rather than a faint-willed throwback. In Polshek, the University has hired a firm known for its sympathy to historic contexts but also, significantly, its architectural honesty.

Construction of the 258,000-square-foot complex will begin with an ensemble of buildings now planned to become an “International Commons” across Jefferson Park Avenue from Cabell Hall. After those buildings are complete, New Cabell will be demolished and replaced with buildings that create a “Human Science Commons.”

As the firm prepares what Polshek calls “sketchbooks” (see “Revisiting the South Lawn,” Arts & Sciences magazine, July 2002) to promulgate basic design guidelines for buildings which will adjoin Cabell, Cocke and Rouss Halls and extend across JPA, questions of architectural vocabulary arise. The Buildings and Grounds Committee of the University’s Board of Visitors, which is overseeing the design process with representatives of the College Foundation, has made clear its preference for Jeffersonian elements such as red brick walls with white trim and classical profiles on new buildings in this precinct.

The challenge for the Schliemann-led design team, as Polshek describes it, is to satisfy these criteria yet transcend them, too. “We want to get something that evokes memory and has a coherence with the mythic image of the University of Virginia that is held by many of its graduates,” said Polshek. “And at the same time we want to create what will be a new heart and soul of Arts & Sciences and give it an unambiguous identity.”

Polshek’s initial studies for the planned complex are not yet available for public review, and the firm did not put forth any specific schemes before the University commissioned the project. But for those who see themselves as stakeholders in this endeavor (not only members of the University community but every armchair Jeffersonian the world over) it is instructive to see how Polshek’s firm has executed designs in similarly sensitive territory.

Previous comparable design solutions by Polshek range from nearly identical historic campus conditions to interventions in far denser urban settings. The firm has been up to this sort of work for two decades. In 1986, Polshek completed the Washington Court Apartments in New York’s Greenwich Village Historic District, deploying an exterior fabric of brick, limestone and terra cotta detailing, as well as its typical window heights and rhythms, into a classic neighborhood arrangement. Yet the building’s interior courtyard, clad in stucco and steel, is frankly modern. The design serves two ends, the need to be compatible yet contemporary, in a masterstroke of urban design that endures to this day.

Polshek’s campus commissions illustrate especially well how the firm might address the Academical Village. One, in fact, is a high rise. At Columbia University’s Barnard College in New York (a milieu that is also, significantly, the work of White’s firm, McKim, Mead & White), Polshek completed Sulzberger Hall, a 20-story residential tower with two eight-story wings, in 1988. “There are clear relationships between the Columbia design and this one,” Polshek said of the U.Va. project. In accordance with the firm’s own master plan for the urban campus, the building elegantly transforms an irregular open space into a new quadrangle, cloistered from the noisy city. Where the building meets the ground, its materials — brick and metal — resonate with those of the buildings around it, yet it has a distinctively modern profile at sky level.

Perhaps the most recognizable corollary in Polshek’s portfolio to the South Lawn Project is the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, a 110,000-square-foot museum at Stanford University. The firm tied together a 19th-century building done in Stanford’s classical stucco and terra cotta-tile idiom with its new addition, which maintains the scale and proportions of the historic building but departs from its hard symmetry with multiple geometries, including a rotunda at the edge of the complex.

Polshek’s designs in these situations are never simply about the buildings — the Cantor Center contemplates traditional patterns of movement through the campus while endowing this area of the campus with a new dynamic of uses and relationships. His firm faces an even greater challenge at the University, as the design is slated to join the two sides of Jefferson Park Avenue. It’s too early to tell exactly how that will happen. “All I can say is that there are three ways to cross the avenue,” Polshek said. “You cross it by making a perfectly beautiful place on either side, so there is coherence. Or you go under it. Or you go over it. We’re exploring everything. We do a lot of research and analysis before we shoot forth with any solutions.”