University of Virginia Library

Charlottesville Succumbing To Urban Expansion

By Charles C. Calhoun

Twenty years ago - may be as recently as ten
- Charlottesville was a sleepy little Piedmont
town, a dusty red-brick sort of town bordered
by the University and handsome farmland and
remembering Jack Jouett's ride as the last
instance of much urban excitement. The
University of that day likewise was a quiet,
self-contained place. There was the Lawn, the
unrestored gardens, and a few other buildings
of uninspired yet pleasing design.

Today, Charlottesville is one of the fastest
growing cities in Virginia. Its suburbs are
greedily devouring the rolling farmland, its
traffic often moves more slowly than it did in
horse-and-buggy days, and a look at its
commercial periphery confirms the view expressed
in a recent British satirical flick that the
modern world is being taken over by
"Tastee-Freezes and Wimpy-Burgers."

The University today is a sprawling mass of
buildings that are often uninspired and usually
aren't even pleasing. Its development ostensibly
is governed by a well-thought-out Master Plan,
but two architecture students writing in the
new issue of UVM raise a few doubts about
that. (See Review on Page 2.) Jeffersonian
excellence is a rare quality, architecturally at
least, around Charlottesville these days.

What a pleasure it is then, for the nostalgic
among us, to look back to an age when man's
attempt to control his environment, to blend
the natural and the artificial, was more successful.
This was the eighteenth century, an age
which architecturally stressed the rational and
the human, two qualities reflected in Mr.
Jefferson's "academical village" - a creation
that owes an intellectual debt to the century
that ended some two decades before the
buildings on the Lawn took shape.

Consider the case of Nuneham Park, an
Oxfordshire estate described by Country Life
as "not only a monument to the personalities of
its creators, but also a microcosm of
18th-century life and feelings."

Laid our on a bluff overlooking the Thames
with the spires of Oxford on the skyline,
Nuneham Park was created by the first Earl
Harcourt, a hard-drinking man who was governor
of the young prince who was to become
George III. Harcourt had made the usual Grand
Tour as a young man and had returned with
vivid memories of the Italian countryside
around Rome, which he sought to recreate in an
English Italianate style on his estate. The result
has been described as an "apparently effortless
scene of classical beauty," but it required
several drastic measures. An entire village that
spoiled the view had to be removed, an enormous
project of tree-planting had to be undertaken, a
lake created, a Roman temple built, and an
elaborate series of tunnels dug to enable the
cattle and sheep essential to a pastoral idyll to
move from one field to another without
trampling through his Lordship's pleasure
grounds.

Although city planners may secretly envy
Lord Harcourt's high-handed willingness to
move both the landscape and the populace,
there are few individuals today who can
command his wealth, taste or political power in
an effort to make our surroundings more
livable.

The single individual is lucky if he can
relandscape his backyard garden (indeed, he
may be lucky to have a garden at all), and it is to
the great institutions of the day that we must
turn for the financial and political muscle
required for any effective long-range and
large-scale planning.

The University of Virginia is one of these
institutions It is being given a rare opportunity
in the next few decades to create an exciting
academic environment — an experiment all the
more challenging because of the inevitable
comparison of the results with the splendid and
unique set of buildings that was the University's
first home, and hopefully, will remain its
center.

That is why Master Plan development —
which created quite a flurry when first revealed
three years ago but which hasn't been talked of
very much lately — should be a subject of the
greatest interest for us all.

While the details of the Master Plan need
study by far more experienced critics, I should
like to risk the suggestion that the University
and the city of Charlottesville have not exactly
worked together at every stage of the planning.

Last year's controversy over a highway
complex in the Grady-Gordon Avenues residential
area — an area that in spirit is as much a
part of the greater University as any section of
McCormick Road, say — revealed a distressing
lack of co-ordination.

(It is interesting to note in this regard that
the Federal Highway Administration last
month laid down strict rules giving the public
strong legal weapons in challenging freeway
projects in major cities. The Washington Post
commented: "The rules are expected to win
wide support from conservation, beautification
and inner-city citizen groups that have accused
road officials of riding roughshod over urban
neighborhoods and scenic areas".)

And such developments as Howard Johnson's
latest contribution to urban ugliness at
the Corner — a building that violates the height
limitations the University has gone to great
expense to maintain in the nearby hospital
complex — indicates either an indifference on
the part of the city's zoning authority to what
the University is trying to achieve or an
unwillingness on the University's part to exert
its influence in municipal government.

The orange and aqua neon Ho-Jo's sign that
now competes in the visitors eye with the
Rotunda may be just a taste of things to come.
Someday the older part of the University may
be a walled garden in the midst of hamburger
joints, used car lots, filling stations,
super-highways and mass-produced motels.

That is why a first-rate Master Plan and
intelligent zoning are so badly needed. It seems
to me that both require closer relations
between the University and the city than have
existed to date.

The underlying assumption in all this is that
a University pursuing excellence in the academic
realm cannot afford not to pursue it with
equal vigor architecturally and environmentally.
Just as Lord Harcourt's Nuneham
Park expressed the aesthetic and political ideals
of his day, just as Mr. Jefferson's Lawn
embodied his educational theories, the University
we build in the seventies should reflect the
best efforts of our own generation, for it is one
of the most enduring records we leave behind.