Category — The Legacy

Walnut Hills High School
A public six-year college-preparatory high school

Cincinnati, Ohio

The school opened in 1895 as a four-year school and the third district public high school established in the city of Cincinnati. In 1919 Walnut Hills became a classical high school, college-preparatory school; was expanded to grades 7-12; and students were drawn from the entire city, rather than from a defined district. Subsequently, a new building, built on 14 acres, was occupied in 1931 and remains in use today.

The building’s front was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. Modeled after the Rotunda an iconic, domed library at the century of the structure.

Sources consulted

• Walnut Hills High School, “Walnut Hills High School History”: http://www.walnuthillseagles.com/AboutUs/History.htm
• Wikipdia, “Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio)”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Hills_High_School_(Cincinnati,_Ohio)

Early Visions
Spring 2009 Academical Village Hands-on Projects

 

Each spring, the Museum’s Early Visions program offers a six-week course, which pairs University student docents in mentoring relationships with Boys & Girls Club members. This year docents have planned creative activities that help the students explore aspects of the upcoming special exhibition, Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece. Examples of these hands-on projects by the children appear below:

The Legacy
An Introduction

by Karol Lawson

Recognized from its conception as a revolutionary plan for an institution of higher learning, the University has inspired countless campus architects to emulate its sequestered central space surrounded by residential and teaching functions and surmounted by a symbolic central building.

The site’s influence derives from the originality of its design, both the overall concept and the multitude of structural and decorative details, as well as from its sheer aesthetic impact. The University of Virginia manifested an innovative—distinctly American—new form in the history of campus planning. Radical, too, was Jefferson’s placement of a large library at the focal point of his site rather than the traditional chapel.

	Palace Green, Williamsburg, Virginia

Famously wide-ranging in his sources of inspiration, Jefferson drew upon a number of architectural forms as his concept of the ideal school architecture evolved over several decades. Influenced by European buildings such as hospitals and prisons, he may also have looked to the model of ancient Greek academies, the chateau and gardens of the French monarch’s Marly-le-Roi, and public spaces such as the Palace Green in Williamsburg. Jefferson might also have been influenced in his general concept by progressive plans for American schools such as the unified living and teaching quarters described in Samuel Knox’s 1799 proposal for a National University; the mall-centered plan initially seen circa 1801-1805 at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina, Columbia); Charles Bulfinch’s 1812 proposal for Harvard based on the famous crescent at Bath; and Joseph-Jacques Ramée’s arcaded 1813 plan for Union College in Schenectady, New York.

	J. Serz, Engraver Published by C. Bohn Engraving of the Rotunda and Lawn from the south, 1856 RG-30/1/8.801

Instead of the traditional memorization and recitation of a few standard texts, Jefferson sought to create a community that would promote a dialogue between students and professors. The Rotunda’s physical and symbolic dominance of the Lawn speaks to Jefferson’s recognition of the central significance of a well-supplied library at the heart of a school. Concerned, too, with the discipline of often unruly young men, Jefferson hoped that the proximity of faculty families would have a salutary effect. The health of students was a worry as well and Jefferson knew a school had to address issues such as sanitation, ventilation, and fire. Finally, he realized that planning and constructing a school comprising smaller individual parts rather than a single large building might prove more practical given the frontier nature of much of the nation and the modest resources available for education.

The central innovation of Jefferson’s plan was his conception of the school as, quite literally, a wholesome rural village. Writing to L.W. Tazewell, a member of the Virginia legislature and an early proponent of establishing a state university, on 5 January 1805 just near the close of his first term as president of the United States, Jefferson noted:

"a small plain house for the school & lodging of each professor is best. These connected by covered ways out of which the rooms of the students should open would be best. These may then be built only as they shall be wanting. in [sic] fact an [sic] University should not be a house but a village."

In a letter from Monticello, dated 6 May 1810, to trustees planning a college in Tennessee, Jefferson explored his idea in more detail:

"it is infinitely better to erect a small and separate lodge for each separate professorship…joining these lodges by barracks for a certain portion of the students, opening into a covered way to give a dry communication between all the schools the whole of these arranged around an open square of grass and trees, would make it, what it should be in fact, an academical village….It would afford that quiet retirement so friendly to study, and lessen the dangers of fire, infection & tumult….much observation & reflection on these institutions has [sic] long convinced me that the large and crowded buildings in which youths are pent up, are equally unfriendly to health, to study, to manners, morals & order: [I believe] the plan I suggest to be more promotive of these & peculiarly adapted to the slender beginnings & progressive growth of our institutions…."

Though Jefferson’s imitators may not always have fully appreciated the ideological underpinnings of his university or the comprehensive elegance of his architectural design, his general plan integrating study, instruction, and residential areas within an articulated landscape has had a far-reaching impact. The earliest copy of Jefferson’s distinctive university plan was perhaps the original campus of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, designed by William Nichols in 1828. (It is no longer extant, having been burned to the ground by Union troops in 1865.) More recent replicas exist as well—for example a high-tech research office park at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, described by the school as “an academical village with a 21st century twist”—and echoes can be seen as far away as Tsinghua University in Beijing, which boasts a 1917-1920 auditorium strikingly similar to the Rotunda.

Sources consulted

• Bruce, Philip Alexander. History of the University of Virginia 1818-1919, vol. 1. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920.
• Cocola, Jim. "The Ideological Spaces of the Academical Village: A Reading of the Central Grounds at the University of Virginia," electronically published essay, 2004. http://faculty.virginia.edu/villagespaces/essay
• Edwards, Brian. University Architecture. London and New York: Spon Press, 2000.
• Turner, Paul Venable. Campus: An American Planning Tradition. New York and Cambridge: The Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1984.
• Wilson, Richard Guy, with Patricia Sherwood, Joseph Michael Lasala, and James Murray Howard. Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece. Charlottesville: Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia, and the University Press of Virginia, 1993.
• Woods, Mary N. "Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia: Planning the Academic Village," The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 44, no. 3 (October 1985), pp. 266-83.

Vanderbilt University
Peabody College of Education and Human Development

Nashville, Tennessee

The campus of what was originally an independent school, the George Peabody College for Teachers, was designed circa 1911-1914 by the prominent New York firm of William Orr Ludlow and Charles Samuel Peabody. Guided largely by the vision of the college’s new president, Bruce Ryburn Payne (1874-1937), the plan they developed, with buildings flanking a leafy open space, deliberately echoed Jefferson’s Lawn. While the architecture of the buildings themselves, a mixture of Beaux Arts classicism and an indistinct style described at the time as “Southern colonial,” does not evoke the University of Virginia, the tree-lined quadrangle does. Payne, who had taught at the University of Virginia from 1905 to 1911, was adamant that Virginia be the model. His vision was supported by the presence of W. A. Lambeth on the architectural advisory board for Peabody College. Lambeth, who in 1913 would co-author Thomas Jefferson as an Architect and Landscape Designer, was described in a Peabody College report on the campus plans as “thoroughly conversant with the architectural motives dominating [the University of Virginia], so tastefully planned by Thomas Jefferson and the first college in this country to be inaugurated with a consistently harmonious scheme of architecture.”

Virginia’s tree filled Lawn surrounded by academic buildings would be emulated by numerous other American campuses in the first half of the 20th century, from the University of Delaware’s Memorial Hall, to “The Oval” at Ohio State University, to the East Campus (originally the Women’s College) at Duke.

Sources consulted

• Conklin, Paul K. Peabody College: From a Former Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
• Crabb, Alfred Leland. The Historical Background of Peabody College. Nashville: George Peabody College for Teachers, 1941.
• George Peabody College for Teachers: Its Evolution and Present Status. Nashville: Peabody College, 1912.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies
 

La Jolla, California

Designed 1959-1965 by Louis I. Kahn, the Salk Institute recalls more than imitates Jefferson’s Academical Village. The austere central courtyard, with a channel of water running constantly to the Pacific, lies at the heart of a modern laboratory complex. In its open-ended form it harkens back to Jefferson’s original plan for the Lawn, which was open at its southern end (the current location of Cabell Hall). In a 1966 letter to Salk, Kahn noted, "The sensitivity of the building and this space to the many moods of the sky and the atmosphere will make the Plaza a place always changing, never static, full of the never ending anticipation of the rising and the setting of the sun." Kahn had been encouraged to leave the space empty by Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who advised him “if you make a plaza, you will have another façade to the sky.” In a 1966 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Kahn noted that when they first met, Salk “mentioned that he wanted to invite Picasso to the laboratory….It wasn’t all a matter of scientific usage. And when you deal with the psyche, you aren’t dealing with science at all. You’re dealing with something which science will never know anything about.”

Sources consulted

• Byard, Paul Spencer. The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.
• Kahn, Louis I. “Berkeley Lecture 1966: Informal Thoughts on Architecture and Personal Expression.” Perspecta vol. 28 (1997), pp. 1-33.
• Leslie, Thomas. Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science. New York: George Brazillier, Inc., 2005.

The Legacy
Architectural Influences of Thomas Jefferson’s
Academical Village

Recognized from its conception as a revolutionary plan for an institution of higher learning, the University has been emulated by countless architects both for educational institutions as well as for other architectural projects.

Share your examples of these influences here.

		Tsinghua University Beijing, China
		Trinkle Hall, University of Mary Washington, Fredricksburg VA

Yale University
Sterling Divinity Quadrangle

New Haven, Connecticut

While the University of Virginia’s brick walls are often popularly associated with the grace of the Old South, one of its most interesting replicas can be found in the heart of New England. The home of Yale University’s Divinity School was designed by the firm of William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich and completed in 1932. Though clearly descended from Jefferson’s self-contained academical village, in its bulkier, plainer appearance Yale’s Divinity School evokes a distinctly Puritan austerity while the placement of a chapel at the head of the open space seems to refute Jefferson’s deliberately secular Rotunda. Writing in 1996 in the New York Times, Paul Goldberger noted that Delano and Aldrich "turned Jefferson’s ‘academical village,’ his community of scholars arrayed beside a temple of learning, into a kind of ‘clerical village,’ a community of clerics arrayed beside their chapel….the Sterling Quadrangle has both the picturesqueness of a New England village and the tough, blunt certainty of Jefferson’s campus." Originally true to Jefferson’s ideal of integrating living space into the core a school, renovations undertaken in 2000-2003 have converted student residencies at the Divinity School to instruction and administrative use.

Sources consulted

• Goldberger, Paul, “Saving a Beloved Chapel by Cutting Out Its Soul,” New York Times, 22 December 1996.
• Pennoyer, Peter, Anne Walker, and Robert A. M. Stern. The Architecture of Delano and Aldrich. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
• “Yale University Sterling Divinity Quadrangle,” Architectural Record on-line at http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/bts/archives/adaptivereuse/04_yale/overview