Campus Spaces

Welcome to the April 2019 edition of our newsletter about buildings, grounds, and more.

Last spring my colleague Julia Schmalz and I visited the University of Virginia to interview Cory Paradis, a fourth-year student who uses a wheelchair (you can watch Julia’s video here). We heard then that a project to make the university’s famous Lawn accessible was in the offing. A few weeks ago I went back to Charlottesville, had lunch with Cory (he’s is now a design project coordinator for the university’s facilities management office), and visited the Lawn and the people responsible for the accessibility project. They had quite a story to tell.

Also this month:

• Dissatisfied with LEED, Duke adopts its own building-performance standards.
• St. Michael’s College gives up on Founders Hall.
• An oasis for graduate students opens at Stanford.
• We preview our special May print edition of Campus Spaces.

There Was ‘Vehement’ Opposition. What Would Jefferson Think?

Charlottesville, Va. — It was a project that cost less than $800,000 to build, a project small enough that it didn’t need Board of Visitors approval. But adding two brick ramps between the terraces of the University of Virginia’s famous Lawn stirred up an awful lot of opposition.

“We had people call it a desecration,” says Alice J. Raucher, architect for the university. “Someone said to me, Well, you didn’t go here, so you don’t understand.”

Adds Brian E. Hogg, the university’s senior historic-preservation planner and a 15-year employee and alumnus: “This was a level of vehement opposition that I haven’t ever seen before.”

University officials had been considering the project for years. Before the ramps were added, the only way to get from one terrace to another in a wheelchair was by going out one alleyway to McCormick Road and coming back in another alleyway. Or that was the only safe way. “It was very scary seeing someone in a motorized wheelchair going backwards down the slopes on the grass” or being carried up a slope by friends, says Hogg.

But wheelchair users wouldn’t be the only beneficiaries of a ramp project. Besides being home to numerous students and faculty members, the Lawn is a major tourist attraction and the site of graduation. The ramps would serve “families with babies in strollers, the elderly, even students who went skiing on winter break and blew out a knee and are traveling on crutches,” Hogg says.

“Our intent is that the Lawn should be welcoming to everyone — everyone should have the same experience,” adds James D. Zehmer, historic-preservation project manager at the university. Splitting some students or visitors away from their friends or families to take a far longer route from one level to the next did not seem welcoming at all.

The university had undertaken plenty of accessibility projects before. A stand-alone elevator was added behind the home of the principal of Brown College to make it accessible from the college’s residence hall, for instance. And the university chapel’s front door had been made accessible by raising the stone plaza in front of it by a few inches. Still, Thomas Jefferson himself laid out the Lawn terraces and supervised their construction, and that upped the ante for any modifications. Raucher says she’s sure that “people would lie down in front of heavy equipment before they would let anything happen to the Lawn.”

But a couple of years ago M. Wynne Stuart, associate provost for academic support and classroom management, took up the cause again — and offered to help pay for it with funds from the Barrier-Free Access Committee, which she chairs. Raucher brought on the landscape-architecture firm Rhodeside & Harwell, and after nine months of work, everyone agreed on a plan that would tuck ramps into the slopes between terraces on the west side of the lawn. By zig-zagging the ramps — one has two rises, the other three — the planners made sure the ramps would not reach farther into the Lawn than an existing tree line, keeping the main expanse of grass free for photos and Frisbee tossing.

Every detail was debated: “the selection of the brick, the height of the curb, the size of the joints, the color — everything,” Raucher says. The design had to be approved by the university’s historic-preservation advisory committee, the state historic-preservation office, the state’s art and architecture review board, and even the National Park Service, which looks after U.S. places on the Unesco World Heritage Sites list. Raucher also took the plans to the Board of Visitors, as a courtesy, and they supported it.

Alumni and some others did not, however. “There was a great deal of controversy” when the plans were made public, Raucher says — so much controversy, in fact, that the Board of Visitors wanted to revisit the issue. “We did a lot of making presentations again, studying again, and showing options again,” she says. “To be fair, the opposition came because people care so passionately about the place.”

“We tried to use the argument that Jefferson was an innovator whenever it comes to architectural language,” says Raucher — after all, what Jefferson called his “academical village” was a kind of composition never seen before. “We have to use our judgment to bring a historic place that is in constant use up to modern-day needs.”

“Finally everyone felt that we had done our due diligence, and we started construction,” Raucher says. The university’s own masons and electricians did much of the work themselves, under the guidance of Wayne R. Mays, assistant director for trades, a master mason who had helped with a four-year quest for bricks to match those laid in Jefferson’s time. “But still, people visiting the Lawn would take a picture of the stacks of bricks and send me email and tell me how they didn’t match in color or size,” says Raucher.

Indeed, matching the original brickwork was a curious kind of challenge. “Not every wall that was built under Jefferson’s supervision is great masonry work,” Hogg says. Mays and his crew may have laid their bricks a little too straight to match what people were used to in the academical village.

Plus the ramps looked, well — new. “We did employ some tricks to age the appearance,” says Zehmer. “We got both pine and hardwood mulch and rubbed the walls so that a little bit of that dirt got into the folds of the brick. It toned them down.”

“After couple of years out in rain,” says Hogg, “these walls will have some mold and some moss on them and they’ll start to look much more like they belong. I’m trying to counsel patience. Settle down, take a deep breath, and let them age into their location, and they’ll seem as if they’ve always been there.”

On Campus and Beyond

After determining that LEED requirements are “not well suited to our unique campus-wide, long-term perspective on building development and carbon emissions reduction,” Duke has developed its own High Performance Building Framework. Read more. The university has also backed out of a long-planned effort to build a light-rail line connecting Durham and Chapel Hill, citing “significant and unacceptable risks.” Read more.

The U. of Maine at Orono is considering a $165-million deal with Honeywell International to replace fossil fuel with solar power and a new biomass-fueled plant. The university hopes to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. Read more.

Libraries at Barnard College and Colorado College are among winners of the 2019 AIA/ALA Library Building Awards. Read more.

Food-delivery robots have been scooting around the George Mason U. campus since January, and data show they’re delivering a lot of breakfasts. The robots carry meals from Sodexo facilities to dorms or other campus locations for a $1.99 delivery fee. Read more.

Good read: A long-ago plan to turn land owned by the U. of British Columbia into a steady income stream succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Robert Lee, the architect whose idea it was. Read more.

“If we don’t get out of it, we’re going to have to start putting a lot of money just to keep it as is”: St. Michael’s College, in Vermont, will demolish its 1904 Founders Hall because its brickwork has become a maintenance problem. Read more.

Chimney swifts are getting a new home at Shepherd U. — a 30-foot tower that replaces a chimney popular with the birds before it was torn down in 2017. Swifts cannot perch, instead clinging to surfaces of structures like chimneys and building nests on them. Read more.

New Buildings and Recent Renovations

Stanford has opened an 18,000-square-foot gathering place for a graduate students amid a dense stand of California oaks beside Lake Lagunita. It houses a dining room, lounges, a classroom, and conference and office space. Ennead Architects did the design work. Read more.

Washington U. in St. Louis will open two buildings this fall, both by KieranTimberlake. A new art building will house studios, classrooms, and a digital-fabrication space (above), while an expanded art museum will have half again as much exhibit space. Read more.

At a celebration of the new Utah State U. Life Sciences Building, it was called “a tremendous teaching space” and a great place to hang out. The 103,000-square-foot, $45-million building, by VCBO Architecture, has a lecture hall, labs, and more. Read more.

C.W. Driver, the construction company, sent a handsome photo of the new fine-arts building at San Diego Mesa College. The $16-million, 26,500-square-foot building was designed by Hanna Gabriel Wells to house photography, graphics, painting, ceramics, and more. Read more.

The new Gatton Student Center at the U. of Kentucky has been named 2019’s best facility by the Association of College Unions International. The 378,000-square-foot, $201-million building is by Perkins+Will. Read more.

Virginia Commonwealth U. has opened a new College of Health Professions building designed by EYP. The $87.3-million, 154,000-square-foot structure will house the entire college and allow enrollment to increase by 10 percent. Read more.

Coming Next Month in Print!

Our annual Campus Spaces special section will arrive with the May 10 print issue of The Chronicle. We’ll look at:

• Colleges that are adapting their campuses and their plans to prepare for climate change.
• How difficult it is (or isn’t) for an institution to become carbon-neutral.
• Microcampuses! (Which our colleague Goldie Blumenstyk will explain for you.)
• Whether colleges have an obligation to protect high-profile buildings by current and recent architects, such as Charles Moore or Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.