University of Virginia Library

The Dynamics Of A Plaza

(61) Conceivably you could arrange things so that windows
could look into the cafeteria kitchen, onto an attractive
internal staircase in a building, a billiard room, a swimming
pool, and any number of other rooms or places where motion
and activity are taking place. This, then, is our plaza, our
campus center, and its periphery of destination-type
buildings—a voyeur's delight! Add benches, kiosks, and
clusters of shade trees, for comfort, color, and softening.

(62) In talking about a periphery of destination-buildings
connected by a covered passageway (yes, there is a similarity
to the Lawn part of Mr. Jefferson's long-outgrown plan). I am
not proposing an unbroken ring of buildings. We do want some
space to leak out, to open onto grass and trees. It is, in fact,
for the sake of contrast to our concrete (or
concrete-and-gravel) plaza that a softening ring of woods and
grass might well surround the backs of our plaza-fronting
buildings, making for a pleasant passage to an outer ring of
buildings which could be primarily student and faculty rooms
and places for classes.

(63) These rooms, all with exterior entrances, could be
organized in some six or seven rambling structures running up
and down the contours of the land. I picture the use of
modular units after the manner of Moshe Safdie and see in my
mind's eye a low-rise, dense skyline partaking of his Habitat
effect (Expo 67). Covered terraces and walk ways at the second
and third-story levels, as in Safdie's scheme, could conceivably
link all the buildings together so that a person could make a
walking circuit of the campus at several levels, not only passing
by many different residence rooms but avoiding a tiresome
routine of down-three-flights, across-the-lawn, and
up-two-flights to class. If then each of these six or seven
complexes had at its farthest point from the main central plaza
its own multi-use lounge type room, each such room would
serve as one of the secondary focuses I earlier alluded to.