University of Virginia Library

Architectural
Excellence

After years of architectural mediocrity,
the University has finally produced a building
of first-rate design. We refer to the
new home of the chemistry department on
McCormick Road, a relief to the eye
wearied by the artistic sterility of the
Physics Building and New Cabell Hall or
by the neo-Georgian pretension of Newcomb
Hall.

On the exterior, it appears that the
architects have rejected the very human
scale of Mr. Jefferson's pavilions on the
Lawn in favor of something approaching
the monolithic, but the effect is not unpleasant
and can be seen as reflecting an
age in which the science of chemistry plays
so powerful a role. The great expanses,
at any rate, are broken up with balconies
and by brickwork design of the sort that
adds so much to Tudor and Jacobean
architecture in England. The interior, on
the other hand, is clearly designed for
people (something that can't be said for
every building at the University-the first-year
dorms, for example). There is a wood-paneled
teaching auditorium of great warmth
and beauty, a spacious and soaring entrance
hall, walls of rough-hewn looking
brick, large and well-equipped laboratories.

The University is scheduled to construct
a number of buildings in the decade ahead,
most important among them the law and
business school complex in the Faulkner
House area. We hope that the University
will follow the example of good design set
by the new chemistry building, remembering
its founder's own efforts a century
and a half ago that resulted in "the finest
group of collegiate buildings in the world."