Urban Scale Richmond

A Proposal for 17th Street Market

2012-01-26T16:30:00.110-05:00

Proposed market and square between Main and Broad Streets with Main Street Station on the left

This proposal for the Market at 17th Street is taken from a master's thesis presented in the spring of last year at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture with the title, "Politics and Commerce: The Architectural Rhetoric of the Market Hall." The renderings are watercolor washes hand drafted on 90lb Arches.

Please click on the images to zoom in (to zoom in even more right click and select "view image").

Aerial photograph showing the existing conditions of Shockoe Bottom and the 17th Street Market

THESIS

Following the theories of urban form developed by Carroll William Westfall and Saverio Muratori and his students, including Gianfranco Cannigia and Mario Gallerati, I propose to provide a new market set alongside an architecturally unified square in order to reassert the significance in Richmond of architecture at the urban scale in furthering the civic life and to function as a rhetorical tool to civilize the commercial activities of the market within the higher and more important political framework of the city.

View of the proposed Main Street facade looking up 17th Street

INTRODUCTION

Artists and architects, in the tradition of Socrates, have always questioned accepted truths and sought to translate them into the language of their own time. The process of allowing our judgment to be informed through the comparison of the way things are with the way things should be is the basis of successful design. Many of the accepted truths that dominated the urban and architectural discourse over the last seventy years have lost their force. It is increasingly clear that a different approach to our world and the way we live is unavoidable. But how do we determine what we should do? The pattern for thriving, beautiful cities is to be found in the long history of trial and error, of genius and imitation stretching beyond written record, but preserved in our building traditions. To operate traditionally is not concerned with preserving a specific programme or way of thinking, but with ensuring that our future is the best it can possibly be.

Insofar as nature is composed of stable, unchanging classes of things, including those of human activity, architecture is capable of clarifying the structure of the city. Through the judicious use of the orders, the depiction of famous narratives of the city, and its overall suitability, architecture provides a comprehensible framework conducive to the pursuit of the good life. Architecture thus functions rhetorically by embodying and explaining the order of the city through the imitation of nature.

In the Western city, with economic freedom connected with urban life, the market and the polity are architecturally linked and the market hall is the heart or center of the city. In republican polities it is has often been in the market building that architecture most prominently holds up the ideal of the good life lived in community. In order to make that order more visible, the civility which the market reinforces can be extended through the city’s neighborhoods by means of a series subsidiary markets deriving their form from the central building. By this means, the architecture of commerce can effectively embody the struggle between what is and what ought to be.

Nolli plan of 17th Street Market and surrounding area (proposed buildings are shown in brown)

PROJECT OVERVIEW

ARCHITECTURAL SCALES
The students of Saverio Muratori work within the understanding that cities and buildings are composed of a number of scales and that to be successful each part must engage its appropriate station in the hierarchy of the city or state. The Muratori approach is interested not only in individual buildings, but in the concept of the formal square, and on a larger scale, the forms of cities. This approach is based on the idea of a system of architectural scales which can be described or “read” using “synoptic tables” that compare traditional building similarities and differences from the scale of entire regions down to the scale of window treatment.

Section showing the proposed market in its context on Main Street, a model subsidiary or neighborhood market, and a proposed public fountain

The different architectural scales of the city embody the order of communal life which has the common good as its end. These various scales are hierarchically important according to the degree to which they deal with the public realm. More directly, parts of the city on the architectural, or building scale are subordinate to the urban scale, or “urban ensemble” in the words of Carroll William Westfall. Significant events in the urban scale might include civic places such as law courts, libraries, markets and baths. These places are more important than private buildings, but in turn subordinate to the larger, more public building which is the city. The various scales are represented by their use of similar components. Without similarity between these scales comparison between them would be impossible, and yet without difference their location in a higher order would be equally unintelligible.

Historically, the First Market in Richmond was the central public building in the life of the city, linking private interest and public good. Since its non-commercial functions and most of its market functions have been dispersed to other city institutions, the market’s dissolution can be seen as a major civic loss: of the face-to-face relationship of buyer and seller, the linkage of public and private life, and the elevation of civic discourse made possible by the rhetoric of good architecture.

TYPOLOGY
European (and by extension) American markets and market halls are formally linked to the stoa, forum, basilica, loggia, exchange, and bourse. Like their ancient models, they provide a covered place to transact business within an ordered framework. Thus, the arcades of the 1794 Market Hall at Richmond are related to a long tradition of civic architecture. Markets are almost always associated with extended arcades for both practical and symbolic reasons. Examples of arcades at hand include courthouses and the Williamsburg Capitol. The compass-headed window or door opening was generally reserved for public buildings. The Virginia examples had their models in England. The arcaded piazzas found at the Williamsburg Capitol and incorporated into courthouses in neighboring counties have their roots in English market halls and the courtyards of mercantile structures in London, Oxbridge colleges, and local buildings such as almshouses built in the seventeenth century. For more on the Richmond market please read our earlier post.

View from market towards the old Loving's Produce building showing the proposed public square

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW MARKET AT SEVENTEENTH STREET

The 17th Street Farmers’ Market is operated and maintained in perpetuity as a public market where locally-grown and locally-made goods are sold directly by their producers. Independent local food producers, artisans, and crafts people are encouraged and promoted.
Current Market Mission Statement

Cities are places where people come together to pursue a common good which can only be achieved in communal life. Architecture serves this public good—politics is more important than architecture. The public realm is more important than the private realm. In order for the city’s prosperity to contribute to the common good, the market must be civilized. A market is not a city. A market serves private goods, but the city requires both public and private goods.

The current 17th Street Market sheds

The current market, consisting of a series of lightweight open sheds, serves as an anchor for community life by providing a setting for cultural and civic activities that complement the market and its location in downtown Richmond, but it does not succeed in the larger goal of reintroducing an armature of civic architecture into the marketplace. The intention of this thesis project is to reunite the old and new sections of Richmond, Virginia, to architectonically recover the commercial and civic life of the city by embodying its order.

The project will consist of a produce market and common hall for civic and cultural purposes and a resale market linked by a piazza that would serve the multiple purposes of deliveries, public entertainment, and strolling. The current night-time activities around the market will be accommodated within the market hall and piazza. The open areas will provide room for the crowds of revelers and an ordered context for the common life.

In order to effectively recapture the significance and civic value of the First Market to the city, the building will participate in the formal, poetic and material architectural traditions of the city. It will take into account the various scales of the city: the scale of building components, the architectural scale, and the urban scale. It is intended that this be the main public market for the city, but that there should be other subsidiary markets on the neighborhood scale. These smaller markets would be built as diluted versions of the First Market, reinforcing and explaining the order of the city, much as traditional libraries and post offices reveal through their scales the meaningful hierarchy of the city.

BUILDING PROGRAM

The principal First Market structure will consist of two parts: a South Market which will include a mixed public market on the first floor and a civic hall on the floor above and a North Market housing an open produce market on the first floor and city offices above. Permanent stall holders will be housed in an enclosed and secure accessible area in the South Market provided with garage-type doors opening to an exterior colonnade and connections for food storage and preparation. The narrower, northern portion of the market hall will open to the exterior through arcades and will house regular fruit and vegetable sellers like those now operating on a daily basis in the market.

Ground floor plan and elevation of the proposed market (the Main Street facade is toward the right).

The second floor of the North Market section will contain a large meeting room, smaller meeting rooms, a catering kitchen, toilets, and the offices of the Richmond City Board of Architectural Review. The existing mid-block alley will cross through a hyphen linking the two parts of the building at mid-point and containing the main stair, elevator, and public toilets.

Second floor plan and section through the proposed market

The First Market will provide a setting for the benefit of civic life. The renewed district will serve multiple purposes, including:

(1) a semi-weekly farmers’ market. Market stalls will be housed in an adjoining arcade. The adjoining square will provide access, parking for farmers’ vehicles, and additional movable market stalls.

(2) an area for festivals, performances, and public gatherings. Access will be re-opened along Franklin Street under the Main Street Station Shed to the important sites along the Richmond Slave Trail.

(3) a unifying center for a renewed market district, including a hotel fronting on the square, and new commercial/residential units based on the traditional basic building type of the city.

The elongated series of market buildings will respect the historic land divisions and take advantage of existing street paving and edging. They will occupy the same ground as the historic market. The new structures will recall the architectural forms of preceding market halls on the same site and of versions of the building type over time. They will exhibit architectural diminution as the structures move away from the principal street.

Section through the historic market site cut along Shockoe Creek looking East

The square functions on the urban scale as a public room for the entire city. Like the Civic Hall above the market, it is treated with appropriate festive and ceremonial ornament. Historic Crane Street, currently barren, has become the focus of a new residential and cultural area off Broad Street. It will be possible to walk from the streetcar stop in front of the proposed cinema on the south side of Broad along a colonnade on the west side of Crane, to the covered walk around the new civic square.

Crane Street connects the square and market with Broad Street and the proposed theater, based on the Latrobe's unrealized design for a theater in the center of Broad on Council Chamber Hill.

The sculptural program celebrates the several myths of Richmond’s founding. The proposed houses along the west side of the square are modeled on the 1809 row of houses with a giant Doric order built by the Carrington brothers on Broad Street. Other basic row houses are proposed along Seventeenth Street and Crane Street.

The west side of the square refers to Carrington Row for an overtly ordered row house precedent

The South Market is supported on a brick arcade with applied Doric pilasters that refer to the colonnade of the former market. The upper story features an implied Ionic arcade with fully realized pilasters on the principal, Main Street, facade. The Main Street frontage contains a wide loggia for public use, joining other important brick public buildings along Main Street that feature arcaded elevations. The central tower that connects the south and north sections is modeled on the incomplete tower at the rear of Richmond’s Monumental Church. The open interior spans historic Arch Alley and connects the new commercial development between the market and the train station with the Market Hall.

The central tower connects the two market buildings and spans historic Arch Alley

The second floor of the South Market contains a multipurpose civic hall ornamented with Corinthian columns. A vaulted gallery fronts on Main Street. The second floor of the North Market contains offices for the city’s Board of Architectural Review and a hearing room fronting on Franklin Street above the loggia of the 24-hour coffee shop. Representation of this aspect of city government is particularly important in reinforcing the civilizing function of political life.

The market buildings are designed using load-bearing composite masonry walls, made of lime-based masonry blocks, faced with hand-made brick. It is roofed with slate and the eighteen-foot-tall ground floor is heated with in-floor radiant piping and is naturally ventilated using roll-up doors and large ceiling fans.

Axonometric rendering showing the load-bearing composite masonry walls

The square is treated with a large, diluted Doric pilaster order. The strip pilasters are flanked by a Tuscan suborder that alternately supports trabeated and arcuated openings. The unitary architectural treatment of the entire square is articulated to permit the uses of the interior rooms to speak on the exterior. It is derived from Roman Baroque examples and motifs, such as those found at the Sapienza and Piazza Santa Maria della Pace in Rome.

Sections through the proposed public square

The integration of the shops and residential accommodations across the west side is based on Richmond precedent. The farmers’ market north of Franklin Street is supported on brick columns with stone trim. A hotel located at the north end of the square extends into the second floor of the market. A large loggia in front of the hotel can be used as a restaurant. A triple entrance on the square’s south side rationalizes the irregular historic street layout in the area.

Detail of the public square between Franklin and Grace Streets

The market complex includes the following amenities:

(1) Secondary loggia on Franklin Street containing Coffee House
(2) Two-story Market Hall between Main Street and Franklin which includes a wide loggia on Main Street, permanent stands for goods, and a colonnade for vendors.
(3) Central tower with an archway at the alley crossing and ceremonial second-
floor access.
(4) A headhouse for the Farmer’s Market north of Franklin Street surmounted by a cupola for a bell and incorporating the police station and public toilets.
(5) Resale market in the former Loving’s Produce Building off the square.
(6) Formal square between Franklin and Grace for events and farmers’
market.
(7) One-story enclosed market between Franklin and Grace for resale market.

The new First Market complex described in this thesis serves to recapture the significance and civic value of commerce to the city. The building will participate in the formal and material traditions of the city. It participates in the various scales of the city: the building component scale, the architectural scale, and the urban scale, reinforcing and explaining the order of the city.

The Main Street facade

Reorganizing the Modern City: The Case of Detroit

2012-01-24T22:06:00.004-05:00

The following text and accompanying images were composed in Genoa during the summer of 2009 as a submission by Gallarati Architetti to the ResilientCity Competition for the renewal of Detroit, Michigan. Urbanismo had the good fortune to work with Gallarati Architetti on the project in the fascinating Ligurian port city. In the process we were able to learn and apply the teachings of Italian urban morphologist, Saverio Muratori and his concept of urban scale architecture to the continental grid. Special thanks to Mario and Giacomo Gallarati for permission to use these documents. Please click on the images for more detail.

The town in the past was characterized by a high degree of organic unity, deeply rooted in its slow process of formation and transformation, by successive stratifications, strictly connected with the orthographic structure of the place, the network of roads over its territory and the systems of landed property distribution. 

To each settlement corresponded a pertinent territory, so structured as to thin away in proceeding from the centre to the periphery where it met the border-line of other settlements. As a consequence, the territorial body consisted of different scale sub-organisms, each having its own centre and its own periphery. 

The modern city, the fruit of successive expansions of the original settlements occupying a "nodal" position in the territory, grows at first by saturating its own original territory and then by acquiring areas belonging to other elementary organisms, originally endowed with an autonomous structure, to end by conglobating them totally within its undifferentiated peripheries. 

Both in the presence of spontaneous growths and in the case of planned growths, the new urban structure tends to extend itself like a uniform net over a great variety of different local realities, each having its own shape and its own functional balance.  Planning the modern city anew means, first of all, becoming conscious of the growing complexity of the territory that the town embraces in one urban "continuum", through the acknowledgement of the relations and the successive degrees of hierarchy between the elements which form - on different scales - the structure of the city.  

Sheet One: The Urban Organism 
Reading of the Urban Organism

The first level of reading considers the organization of the different sectors of the city with reference to the system of its road-axes and particularly to the different roles they have in the formation and development of its urban fabric. In Detroit we can recognize a double-scale system. One scale is linked to the larger city, and originates from the City’s earliest plan (represented in blue), and another is based on the organization of the land division. This second system is made up of several single districts each characterized by its own structure. We have considered only that part of Detroit which maintains its original orientation towards the river in contrast with the surrounding areas which correspond to the American continental grid. Within this larger city organism we have individuated up to fifteen smaller organisms each with its own center and borders, thus forming its own district. One of these districts maintains the role of city center corresponding to the original planned center of Detroit. The others are located along main axes often at their crossings (represented in red).    

Proposal of a Multi-Nucleus City 

Our proposal tries to outline a criterion by which to transform the city into several smaller self-sufficient nuclei. Each of these nuclei should be composed of a unified tissue organized by a hierarchy of axes. As a basis for each nucleus we determined which axes served as the primary connection between neighborhoods and the tissues that seem to be organized by the same axes. Between these central nuclei we converted peripheral tissue into green areas for sustainable use. In short, the city will be composed of several smaller autonomous districts, each with a central built tissue (with a concentrated population of approximately 25,000), and surrounded by areas destined for mixed agricultural use and sustainable forestry.  

Sheet Two: The District Organism 
A Proposal for The Durfee District

Within the example district of Durfee the urban nucleus will maintain the original order of the axial system that determined the layout of the urban tissue. The surrounding tissue, transformed into green land, will be divided into public parks, agricultural land and facilities for municipal services.

As in other districts, starting from a main road-axis, or matrix route, the setting evolves along planned building routes, orthogonal to the matrix route along which the building fabric evolves.

In our proposal the presence of a second main street parallel to the matrix route suggested the introduction of similar residential tissues as areas of higher density into other sectors. In relating to the existing industrial structures to the north and the sports facility to the south, our proposal accentuates the possible public function of the area along the southern matrix route and destines the remaining western areas to agricultural use, while the eastern areas will be taken up by forest and wetlands.   

Sheet Three: The Building Tissue

Reading the Building Fabric

Analogous to the general setting of the network of streets we have already seen, the study of the organization of the building fabric starts from the observation of the preexistent realities, from which we have tried to draw some general rules.  

a) Commercial lots are wider than residential lots and form autonomous strips along the main routes.
b) Most of the commercial activities concentrate along the main or peripheral axes.
c) Most residential tissues are organized by planned building routes, between which run alleys. Average lots facing these routes range from 120-130 feet by 30-35 feet.
d) Some of these planned building routes gain importance from their continuation outside the district. e) In some cases there are high-density residential lots which shift their orientation towards significant vertical axes.
f) Within the tissue there are areas of varying degrees of vacancy.

Our Proposal

Following the above guidelines we have completed the commercial tissues along main and peripheral axes, and differentiated two types of residential tissue. Along significant planned building routes and some existing or new vertical routes we have organized contiguous, high-density building tissue, while the remaining tissue will maintain its current character. High-density buildings will reach four floors. At the intersection of these main routes new squares will be created, also taking into account some currently vacant areas. Similarly, at a larger scale, a new great public square could be created on the site of present parking lots at the intersection of the matrix routes. Taller buildings could be realized around this main square and destined for administrative or institutional use.

Christmas at Sixth Street Market in 1956

2011-11-25T10:45:00.014-05:00

Bell Worsham, Bell. Catalog cover for Thalheimers, 1956 (all rights reserved, G. Worsham)

View looking south on Sixth Street toward Broad showing Thalheimer's Department Store with Lowe's Theater (Carpenter Center) beyond. Sixth Street Meat Market with terra cotta bulls heads to left. The flat princess pine and holly wreaths shown, a traditional ornament unique to Richmond doorways, are still available at the Seventeenth Street Market.

Richmond, Virginia: Basic buildings along Bacon's Quarter Branch

2011-10-01T22:42:00.008-04:00

An evocative scene along Bacon's Quarter Branch on the northern edge of Richmond, perhaps on Mitchell, Orange, or Bacon streets, in 1940, including some paradigmatic Richmond row houses- "basic buildings."

An American Search for Urban Unity: Alexandria Louisiana- Part Two

2011-08-15T23:14:00.036-04:00

A previous post detailed the planning and antebellum growth of the city of Alexandria, Louisiana. By the 1850s the prosperous city took part in a new national emphasis on the heritage of democracy among the Greeks. The new buildings were part of the confident building of civic buildings utilizing details and forms associated with the Greek Revival movement. The story continues with the conclusion of the Civil War:

The war ended in almost complete catastrophe for the town. Most of the antebellum public buildings, along with the rest of the town, were burned during the retreat of Union troops in 1864. The two decades following the war were lean, and a new, plain, courthouse was not provided until 1873. In the words of a recent historian of the city: Cloaked in an atmosphere of lethargy and defeatism, the town was not drained, and it had no waterworks or sewer system. Livestock roamed at large on the unpaved and largely unlit streets, which were obstructed by numerous ditches and not clearly designated by signs. There were no banks, and concerns vital to regional agriculture—such as cotton compresses, oil mills, and machine shops—were nonexistent. However, Alexandria’s location in the middle of Louisiana and the rich timber resources surrounding it had enabled it to attract two railroads [Spletstoser, Fredrick Marcel. Talk of the Town: The Rise of Alexandria, Louisiana and the “Daily Town Talk”. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005]. The population had risen to 1,800 by 1880.

The post-war depression eventually came to end as new mercantile and industrial capital entered the region. The increasing success of the region’s agriculture and a timber boom in the early twentieth century led to an almost complete remaking of the town. New commercial buildings appeared along the city streets and spread back three blocks from the river to form a dense downtown commercial district. While many of the buildings were modest, traditional commercial structures with a narrow plan and an unadorned front, owners of some new structures added classical details on the lower and upper stories, often in pressed or cast metal, to add dignity to the structure and a positive contribution to the streetscape.

Rapides Opera House

Among these new buildings was a splendid new theater, unfortunately demolished in the late twentieth century. According to the National Register nomination, The Rapides Opera House is a brick 3 story building set in the old central business district of Alexandria. It has floor seating (seats replaced) and one balcony (original seats), which makes for a total seating capacity of approximately 800. Built of brick and steel, the building has a type of exterior articulation which was common to many of Alexandria’s grander commercial buildings at the turn-of-the-century. Features include Romanesque sets of round arch windows with continuous label molds, Doric pilasters, and brick rustication above and below the second story [National Register form].

The buildings gradually formed a continuous wall along both sides of the central streets. Third Street, which had replaced the river as the principal route through the locality, increasingly became the chief commercial avenue. The downtown grew to include, as did most American cities, a tightly organized but flexible set of lots. A lack of planned alleys in the original design, which permitted an initial flexibility in building placement, led to a structure of dense blocks with courtyards and passageways provided as needed. The buildings tended to face the numbered east-west streets.

Churches, most of which made use of Gothic Revival decorative forms, were located off the original plat. The first church was a Catholic chapel. In 1832, by which time the parish was known as St. Francis Xavier, the church was rebuilt on a new site east of the main part of the city, at which time it was the only religious structure in the town. The church relocated to its current site west of the central city in 1897. In 1910 it was elevated to cathedral status. Emmanuel Baptist Church moved to the city from nearby Pineville in 1897. The first St. James Episcopal Church was built in the antebellum era and burned in 1864. The parish relocated to its present site east of the downtown area in 1874. The present building was built in 1926.

Joseph Bentley and E.W. Zimmermann arrived in the area about 1892, originally hailing from Pennsylvania. Bentley, in particular, proved to be a major power in the redevelopment and growth of Alexandria. The men founded the Zimmerman Lumber Company and the Enterprise Lumber Company, businesses that eventually controlled tens of thousands of acres of virgin pine forest in the region. In 1903, a huge sawmill was built near town by Enterprise Lumber. Bentley provided strong economic and aesthetic leadership as the town grew. He materially assisted in setting architectural standards and improving the urban form. Architects were summoned from New Orleans and other regional cities to assist in implementing an expansive vision for the town’s future.

In the first decades of the century, a series of important new structures were added to the city, as part of a consistent architectural and urban project to complete and perfect it as both a destination and a place to live. The era was one in which architectural and general education prepared citizens to expect a substantial expenditure on public and institutional buildings such as post offices, government buildings, churches, lodges, and schools and the important commercial buildings, such as hotels and theaters, which served a significant role in the life of a community. The effect of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on American urban planning was considerable. The movement known as the American Renaissance invigorated American planning and resulted in a full-blown and self-confident kind of classical architectural expression.

In the new American Renaissance, as in previous periods of classical expression, the elements of architectural expression were used to augment and express the community’s political order. Much of the large-scale form and detailing was based in architectural pattern books, but by the early twentieth century classically trained professional architects were available throughout the nation. As was the case throughout American architectural practice, architectural elements were often applied without close regard for their historical basis. Designers regarded the value of the ability of architectural forms to express the community’s structure as more important that any historical reference. The three basic classical orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, were present in their full variety, in their Roman and Greek forms. The hierarchy of the orders as understood in the western tradition was used to emphasize the city’s internal order. In contrast, religious buildings in the city utilized details and forms ultimately derived from European Gothic sources. This change from the traditional American provision of related classical forms for all public buildings suggests that the religious component of civic life was increasingly distinguished from its political and commercial elements.

Rapides Parish Courthouse, 1904. Corinthian

A new H-shaped courthouse was built in 1904 on the historic courthouse square. The Classical Revival-style structure utilized, as was appropriate for the most important government structure in the city, pilasters of the most elaborate of the three basic orders of architecture, the Corinthian.

Hotel Bentley, 1907. George R. Mann, architect.

Alexandria City Hall. Ionic with dome.

An important group of buildings of similar style, color, and materials were constructed in 1907, giving a consistent tone and feel to the growing city and radically improving its civic image. The most important new buildings were the Hotel Bentley and the new City Hall. The structures were apparently both built by the F. B. Hull Construction Company of Jackson, Mississippi. The company moved to Alexandria in 1907 for the time needed to construct several major buildings. The Hotel Bentley and the new City Hall were located in dramatic relation to one another with an eye to improved civic amenities. The City Hall was built in the center of a square towards the western end of the downtown section. With its four facades and central dome it provided a powerful center to a green urban park.

Three sides of the square were filled with conventional commercial buildings, but the entire west side was filled with the enormous bulk of the Hotel Bentley. In the words of the National Register nomination: “The Bentley Hotel stands as probably the only major commercial example of the turn-of-the-century Renaissance Revival architecture and of Beaux Arts axial spatial planning in central Louisiana. It shows a remarkable degree of high style sophistication for the area and for a time when commercial architecture was largely a matter of applying conventional detail to a conventional shell.” The architect was George R. Mann of Little Rock, Arkansas. The cost of construction was $750,000, including the furnishings.

Both buildings were built of matching cream-colored brick with stone trim and both featured corresponding Ionic columns. The City Hall had four matching porticoes and the hotel was provided with a dramatic, long, deep-shadowed colonnade between two projecting wings. The Ionic order, the second most elaborate of the classical orders, was probably selected as appropriate for such important secondary structures in the city’s expanding urban fabric. A Confederate monument occupied one corner of the square.

Rapides Bank Building, 1898, façade added, 1914. Tuscan/Doric.

First National Bank. 1919, Emile Weil, Architect.

In 1911 Joseph Bentley became president of the First National Bank and in 1919 the bank built the town’s first skyscraper, a ten-story bank building near the southeast corner of the square. The bank tower was also classically detailed with Ionic pilasters and built of buff brick with stone trim. In addition, the most classically correct building in the downtown area resulted from a refacing of the 1898 Rapides Bank in 1914 with an elegant Doric façade melded to the paired arches of the original building. As the National Register nomination explains: “Of Alexandria's somewhat depleted stock of turn-of-the-century commercial buildings, most depend upon an unstudied accumulation of brick pilasters, brick arches, and corbel tables for their articulation. The Rapides Bank has considerably more pretension than this. It has a fully developed classical facade with four colossal . . . columns, an entablature and balustrade which are more or less correctly proportioned. Moreover, with the one exception, which is the enormous Bentley Hotel, the Rapides Bank is the most classically refined and pretentious commercial building in Alexandria.

The Alexandria Public Library, 1907. Crosby and Henkel, architects. Greek Doric

Another significant building dating from 1907 is the Alexandria Public Library. Funded with matching money from Andrew Carnegie, the new library is classical in style. It utilizes massive Doric pilasters (antae) to support a complex entablature and features Greek-inspired details. Like the other public buildings from this period, it is built of buff-colored brick. Interestingly, the library was placed away from the downtown on the square originally intended for literary and cultural purposes, but held by the city and used for a courthouse and jail at the time. Doric, used for the banks and the library, was the plainest and most economical to build of the three classical orders and indicated the buildings’ more modest stature within the city’s hierarchy of buildings.

Calvary Baptist Church, Corinthian

Houses of worship, which often made use of Gothic Revival decorative forms, began to participate in the new classical consensus are located off the original plat. Calvary Baptist Church was founded in 1921 and was housed behind a wide Corinthian temple front built of beige brick. A second temple built in 1908 for the city’s Jewish population by Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim, featured beige brick, a central plan crowned with a tiled dome, and a highly ornamented projecting temple front. The architect combined Ionic columns with a Doric entablature featuring alternating triglyphs and disk-shaped ornaments called paterae. While the new civic architecture provided an irresistible pattern for new public buildings, the Baptist and Jewish congregations may have chosen classical rather than Gothic forms, in part, to de-emphasize the inherent challenges of these newer arrivals to the conventions of local culture.

Jewish Temple, 1908. Ionic

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the area along and adjoining Third Street had become a cohesive downtown with a varied and sophisticated building stock. Citizens centered their lives around the neat and colorful downtown. Department stores and specialty shops vied for business. The simple grid of the city, punctuated by the several green public squares, successfully borrowed the cosmopolitan air of the great Eastern and even European cities. Classically detailed cast-iron electric streetlights in some location gave a cohesion and elegance to the city in keeping with the “Great White Way,” a name for the brightly illuminated main streets installed in towns across the nation in the years after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Third Street looking North, 1920

Masonic Temple, 1927. Herman J. Duncan, architect.

Bolton High School, 1926. Favrot and Livaudais, Architects, New Orleans

The Masonic Building of 1927 and the classical façade of Bolton High School (1926) added to the complexity and dignity of local urban expression. The Masonic building is a delicate and almost Regency essay in Neo-classicism. According to the National Register nomination, “the high school “is Rapides Parish's largest and most imposing example of the neo-classical tendency of the early-twentieth century known as the ‘American Renaissance.' Exemplary features include the building's quiet lines, severe classicism, and five-part pavilion articulation. . . Bolton's local preeminence as an example of the "American Renaissance" is important for Rapides Parish. This style was regarded in its day as representing the maturity of American architecture. It was generally thought that American architecture was at last taking its place with the architecture of the older countries of the Western World. So, taken in this light, Bolton can be seen as the most urbane and sophisticated early-twentieth century building in the parish.”

U.S. Post Office

In the 1930s, a new US Post Office and Federal Courthouse was built using the popular Art Deco version of “Stripped Classicism,” emphasizing the respect afforded the increased role of the Federal government in regional affairs.

As the twentieth century progressed, Alexandria lost its position as a great regional trading center. The Southern economy lagged and the city saw few new buildings, certainly none of the caliber of the structures built during the confident years at the beginning of the century. As the automobile increasingly dominated thinking about transportation and development, the downtown area suffered from neglect and abandonment. From a high water mark at the middle of the century, when the city reached its apogee from an urban design perspective, it began to fall off rapidly. Classicism lost favor as measured against the new trends towards “modernistic” and “International style” architecture. Few buildings using the new architectural vocabulary reached the level of quality found among the earlier classical buildings, which now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned.

The present parish courthouse was built on a new location in 1940. The elegant 1904 courthouse was demolished in 1957 after years of neglect and the courthouse square purchased and built upon. In the 1960s, the elegantly detailed centrally planned city hall was demolished. The city government infilled the under-utilized but potentially urbane square on which it was sited with a large new city hall in the “Brutalist” style, executed in formed concrete.

City Hall with urban park to the east and Hotel Bentley beyond

The losses in the urban fabric during the second half of the twentieth century was immense. The city’s open squares were lost and there was no longer a vantage point from which to view the façade of the Bentley Hotel. A need for parking resulted in the demolition of many buildings and a resultant “snaggle-toothed” and incomplete streetscape. Front Street lost its character and all its historic buildings with the gradual enlargement of the levee along the water’s edge. The city lost a visual connection with the water. In 1969, no longer able to compete with newer alternatives on its original terms, the Bentley Hotel closed.

As soon as urban decay and demolition became apparent, in Alexandria and across the nation, city leaders began to search for solutions that would re-invigorate historic downtowns. What happened in Alexandria mirrors what went on in countless locations. The city commissioned a series of studies, master plans, and government-sponsored interventions, each based in current planning concepts that changed as the years passed. The Hotel Bentley underwent a series of renovations and opened and closed without any long-term success.

A new convention center, Holiday Inn motor hotel, and parking garage, all of indifferent design were built to reposition the downtown as a tourist and visitor destination. Like the new city hall, the convention center, connected by a pedestrian skyway to the Hotel Bentley, was placed without regard to the city’s grid or the historic urban layout. Traffic was redirected and some roads closed or built over. In more recent years, a new emphasis on parks and river access and a series of local festivals have been used to attempt a return of traffic and prosperity to the downtown area.

In spite of all this the city has largely failed to respond to the various surgical and prosthetic operations improvised by local and regional authorities. One reason is the obliteration of the architectural and urban amenities that made Alexandria a unique and appealing place.

Letter to a Professor

2011-07-04T15:19:00.007-04:00

Caro Professore,

I have really appreciated your willingness to discuss the issue of what I will call uniformity in architecture, or perhaps more appropriately, urban scale architecture. Obviously this is a point of contention among architects and urbanists and I will need to be able to justify my position. As I understand it your argument is predicated on the belief that modern issues in urban design can only be addressed by a carefully composed variation in architectural and urban forms, rather than a single unified vision. Unity in this view is achieved not through uniformity, like an endlessly repeated theme, but through differentiation which provides for the individual “character” of a place. This now commonplace approach is founded in the work of Leon Krier.

I think we can both recognize a pattern in our discussions this semester; namely, the role of regularity and uniformity in architectural design and in urban planning. I am convinced that there is truth to what I am attempting to put into words and buildings. I can see it both in writing and traditional architecture and urbanism; it is my lack of eloquence that is doing it a disservice. This is something I have finally had to defend because it helps me explain how architecture integrates commerce into the civic realm. So, I will try to first do the best I can to describe in writing what I have been trying to say, and secondly, attempt to defend it.

Beginning with my conversations and work with Mario Gallarati, based on the Muratori school of urban design a year and a half ago, I began to be interested in the study of formal Renaissance squares. As a student of the Muratori school, Mario Gallarati has consistently worked within the understanding that cities and buildings are composed of a number of scales and that to be successful each part must engage its appropriate station in the hierarchy of the city or state. Given this understanding, it is not surprising that I am interested not only in individual buildings, but in the concept of the formal square, and on a larger scale, the form of cities. The Muratorian approach is based on this idea of an intelligible system of architectural scales. These urban scales can be described or “read” using “synoptic tables” that compare traditional building similarities and differences from the scale of entire regions down to the scale of window treatment. I began to read the few translations available on Muratori and his students. I tried to test it against the indubitable theory of my professor Carroll W. Westfall. So far I think them consonant in their essential ideas; the main difference being their focuses on theory and practice respectively, and the empirical approach of Muratori in contrast to Westfall’s reliance on rhetoric. Together they give me a compelling theory of architecture combined with an “operative system” of practice. I am afraid I am an inadequate evangelist of this theoretical combination and have barely scratched the surface of understanding either thinker, but I am enjoying making the best of what I have.

From what I understand of Westfall and Muratori it seems that the different architectural scales of the city embody the order of communal life which has the common good as its end. These various scales are hierarchically more or less important according to the degree to which they deal with the public realm. More directly, parts of the city on the architectural, or building scale are subordinate to the urban scale (Muratori), or “urban ensembles” in the words of Westfall. Urban ensembles are members of the city, but are in turn, wholes composed of building members. Significant events in the urban scale might include civic places such as law courts, libraries, markets, theatres and baths. These places are more important than private buildings, but in turn subordinate to the larger, more public building which is the city.

The various scales are represented by their use of similar components. Without similarity between these scales comparison between them would be impossible, and yet without difference their location in a higher order would be equally unintelligible. comparison is not the same thing as finding out where you are.

Building Scale
Buildings can appear related to each other only by virtue of their parts being obviously related to one another, or obviously different in a similar way. Westfall explains this as the “pattern of the assembly of the components” and gives the examples of basic compositional types: temples look like temples, houses look like houses, etc. because they are made of the same parts. Those parts, however, are never assimilated in the same way. Buildings also relate to one another according to the physical character of these components i.e., materials, ornament, size and level of finish. These scales operate by increasing in their level of realization as they reach higher importance in the public realm. The capitol or royal palace is the most fully ornamented and finished building in a state, the city hall the best dressed of all the parts of a republican city and so forth down to the most diluted branch post office or library. Within individual buildings many different activities can take place, however, every building, according to Westfall, is in some way a dwelling, whether it be of a god, a king or a pleb, and that specific purpose of the building is what drives its overall treatment. Different floors, wings, and rooms are realized according to their individual purpose, but on a subordinate scale within the context of the building.

Urban Scale
The urban scale works in exactly the same way. In a city the urban scale is almost always the most important. Occasionally, the territorial scale may override it (as in the Palazzo del Capitaniato in Vicenza, or the Virginia State Capitol), but they each require varying levels of a related treatment. More important streets such as those linking significant nodes in the city or territory are represented as such by their relative width, or because the buildings on their “pertinent strip” are collectively on a grander scale. The level of finish or ornament of a street is the degree to which it is treated in a related or unified way. Perhaps it is lined with arches, or the buildings facing it share the same cornice, etc. The most important public places, traditionally public squares, receive the highest levels of ornament and most thorough treatment in terms of their realization as single bodies made up of different parts. Traditional squares are often wrapped with arcades or colonnades that are made up of related components, the most important receiving the most unified treatment. The distinctness with which the various purposes of the buildings surrounding the street or square are represented is proportionate to their relative importance in the life of the city. The cathedral may remain entirely distinct in even the most formal European squares because of its complete dominance in the public life of the city. Conversely, commercial or industrial activities serving the private realm will almost always be entirely invisible.

These traits are common to almost every city in the Greco-Roman tradition to some level or another. Often, as in the case of S. Petronio in Bologna, an element of the city will remain unfinished. To say that the building is better as it is today is debatable, but to argue that the intention of the architect was to leave it half-finished is preposterous.

So too with the urban scale. Much of Italian piazza’s charm is often attributed to the informal character in which Goethe encountered them in the 19th century. This is the beauty of the relationship between contingent reality and an ideal. Perhaps a piazza embodies more of a city’s order through its un-realization. I certainly find them beautiful, livable places. Perhaps they are more beautiful in ruins or incompletion, but we would never have had even the failed attempt had someone not once striven for an “inevitable” solution, in the words of Professor David Mayernik.

I personally find the intentional design of picturesque urban forms and elements today known as “New Urbanism” to be at best arbitrary and at worst contrived. There will never, ever be a shortage of reasons that the most ideally visualized urban form or building will in the end have to submit its rigor to the contingencies of reality. Perhaps, repetition or uniformity may be repellent to individual taste, however, I am attempting (how successfully remains to be seen) to form an argument based on reason, not taste. Such a hierarchy would, I feel, expand the possibility for true variety, not limit it. An alternate feeling that uniform urban or architectural forms are the product of autocratic forms of government falls into the same fallacy as the argument that ancient Greek architecture is the architecture of democracy.

To design a piazza that looks like an ancient agglomeration is to imitate symptoms of successful urbanism, but to miss the actual operative principle that makes it an enduring place. That operative principle, I am arguing, is the concept of urban scales of building which explicitly represent the order of the city according to a dilution of the unity of the whole.

Sincerly Yours,
Richard Worsham

An American Search for Urban Unity: Alexandria Louisiana- Part One

2011-06-25T12:28:00.012-04:00

Several years ago we were fortunate to have had an opportunity to study the fascinating inland city of Alexandria. What follows is the first of two original posts on the community's remarkable history of architecture and urbanism. The city's documentation in the form of tinted postcards relates directly to the article's theme by its consistency in tone and color. The postcards are published online by the Alexandria Retrospective at http://www.alexandria-louisiana.com/.

Overview

The urban form of city of Alexandria, Louisiana results from a series of interventions, summarizing in their complexity much of the history of American planning. The city began with a grid laid out around basic public elements placed on two central public squares. As time passed and public functions multiplied, the various public functions, including town hall, public market, court house, academy, and jail were dispersed onto additional public land around the city, representing civic interests at both both the local and parish scales and employing a common architectural grammar based in European-derived architectural traditions allied with a bookish classicism. Religious structures were monumental in scale as befits basic institutions serving communal purposes, but employed mostly Gothic forms and details. This clear differentiation of sacred structures appears to have resulted in part from a recognition of their essentially private character during the Antebellum era.

The city faced nearly complete destruction of its fabric at the end of the American Civil War. The two decades of poverty that followed were eventually reversed by boom times. Under the influence of a successful commercial elite, the city was redesigned after the turn of the century using sophisticated planning, consistent architectural motifs, and details borrowed from and inspired by the self-confident American Renaissance. Design at the urban scale adopted monumental patterns emphasizing the importance of civic life. City buildings, serving both civic and religious purposes, adopted a universalizing architectural grammar, as will be seen. Classical details and similar materials were shared at every level of civic significance, including the architectural vocabulary of domestic architecture. This interrelation of the private and public realms indicate the aspiration of Alexandria to the good life. As a result of the legacy of slavery, however, this extension of the public good was restricted by the limited access permitted to some members of the community to the full benefits of civic life.

Loss of commerce in the mid-twentieth century derailed the economic growth. Social conflict and loss of faith in traditional American architectural and urban goals led to an impoverishment of the central part of the city at the same time.

Background

Alexandria lies at the center of Louisiana, on the right bank of the Red River. The central Louisiana region was settled in the early years of the eighteenth century. The Natchitoches Indians lived along the Red River. A trading post was established there in 1714 by Louis Jachereau de St. Denis, a French soldier and explorer. In 1723, The French colonial government established a garrison at a portage around a series of rapids on the Red River to protect trade. The tiny settlement across from the site of Alexandria was known as Post du Rapides.

In the 1760s, when the Spaniards received control of the region, the village contained no more than fifty inhabitants. Two merchants from Pennsylvania, Alexander Fulton and William Miller, arrived in the early 1790s and were given exclusive trading rights with the Indians. They opened a store on the right bank of the river just below Bayou Rapides. Shortly before the Louisiana Purchase they bought approximately forty thousand neighboring acres from the Indians. They had the tract surveyed for sale to settlers, who they expected would flood the area. Miller sold out and moved away, but Fulton, well-connected with the leader of the new Louisiana Territory, stayed and developed his property as the U. S. took possession in 1803.

Central Louisiana 1839. Detail, David H. Burr. The American Atlas (London, J. Arrowsmith, 1839), Library of Congress. http://www.usgwarchives.org/maps/louisiana/statemap/la1839n.jpg

As settlers arrived, Fulton, with the help of his brother-in-law, surveyor Samuel Wells, laid out a town along the river near his store, with the intention of providing a mercantile center for the immediate region and a port on the Red River. When the legislature established Rapides Parish several years later, it was chosen as the courthouse town as well. It was first incorporated as a town in 1818 and received a city charter in 1882. The name “Alexandria” may derive from Fulton’s name or that of his daughter. At any rate, the ultimate reference, understood by most educated Americans at the time, was to the great Hellenistic center of learning and commerce on the Nile, site of the greatest library of classical times.

Alexandria in 1872.Original city is at the center. http://usgwarchives.org/maps/louisiana/citymap/alexandria1872.jpg

Surveyor Wells laid out the town carefully in 1805 using the basic uninflected grid employed for most new towns across the US for many years. The central grid plan was symmetrical and mostly uninflected towards the river at the start. The original platting of the town divided it into approximately eighty one-acre squares with eight streets running back from the river. The central street running perpendicular to the river was called Washington Street. A series of ten numbered streets ran parallel to the river (what would have been First Street lined the river bank and was called Front Street. Two squares at the center were reserved for public use.

One public square, located away from the busy commercial area along the river, was designated to be “solely for the advancement of learning and culture,” probably indicating a school or academy. The other, labelled "Market Square" in 1872, was the principal public provision at the urban scale, demonstrating the centrality of the public life. Markets and town government have been associated from Renaissance times for a variety of reasons (see the City Market article). A market square was needed so that the important laws regulating commerce might be applied to a specific piece of ground. While the form of any special building erected on the square is not know to us, the form of market house/ town hall is one used across the country from Colonial times onward. Later, as we will see, that square became the site of the classically-designed city hall, seen in the postcard illustration above.

Detail of Map of the Town of Alexandria, Louisiana, 1872 showing the market square now the site of the City Hall

Each square was divided into four quarter-acre lots. The streets were to all be fifty-three feet across, except for those on the periphery, which were to be one hundred feet wide. While the town did not fill the grid provided for it for some years afterward, it gradually lived up to and exceeded the promise of the first urban design. There were two courthouses in succession. The courthouses were sited on a county square at the center of Front Street along the river, since county and town government typically required separate public accommodation at the urban scale. A literary society was chartered by the leading citizens in 1824 and a theatrical society in the 1830s. The town’s small scale is shown by the provision of a single church (Catholic). There were two banks, two hotels, and a growing roster of lawyers and doctors.

Most American towns in the earliest periods existed to provide lots to house the commercial and mechanical trades who served the surrounding countryside and the parish's (or county's) non-farming professionals (lawyers, doctors, and officials), whose activities were best served by a central urban location. As industry grew in scale and scope, many of these activities were also housed on peripheral tracts associated with the town. Most of the commercial buildings were at first located along the river on Front Street. Many of these undoubtedly took the form of the basic building of Federal-period American urbanism, the house/store, in which the owner lived above his shop.

The original quarter-acre lots were subdivided as required into narrow strips as needed to form commercial building sites. John Casson, a local leader, donated a tract of land to the west of town to house an educational institution. The College of Rapides, an academy, was built on that tract and funded, at considerable cost, to provide education to the region’s youth.

The town’s promise was reinforced when, in 1837, the Red River Railroad, the first rail line west of the Mississippi, was extended from Alexandria’s courthouse square to towns and plantations in the rich Bayou Beouf region. By mid-century, the improving economic climate brought new architecture and urban ideas. Alexandria’s population doubled from 1850 to 1860, when it numbered over 1,500. A new courthouse, with iron columns, was built in 1859. A new city hall and a library building were built in the same decade. By this date, there were three hotels, three banks, and three churches (Catholic, Episcopalian, and Methodist).

The city was part of a new national emphasis on the heritage of democracy among the Greeks. The new buildings were part of the confident building of civic buildings utilizing details and forms associated with the Greek Revival movement. During this era concepts of hygiene were emphasized and public lands and streets tended to be more carefully tended and planted than formerly.

Part Two to follow

Richmond As Provincial Capitol

2011-05-15T03:24:00.014-04:00

Map of the Prize Lots in William Byrd's Lottery, 1768

When William Byrd III and the trustees responsible for liquidating his debts decided on a lottery as the best method to dispose of his land west of Shockoe Creek, they divided the land into plots of about 100 acres each, except for a tract immediately west of the creek which straddled the county road and was labelled "town land."

Plat of Shockoe Hill among Jefferson's papers with undifferentiated grid pattern.

The town of Shockoe was laid out on this site in 1769. Its boundaries, as well as the boundaries of the many lots to the north and west, set the pattern of development that guided the city's growth from that time forward. The relentless, undifferentiated, grid pattern continued the lines of the 1737 plan of Richmond and spread from the lowlands along the river up and over the knobs and ravines of Shockoe Hill. Previous holdings, or "tenements," of irregular shape make up the area of Shockoe's, the older warehouse settlement along the west side of the creek. These account for the irregularities of the street layout in the area between the towns of Richmond and Shockoes. While many lots undoubtedly sold, the area on top of the hill was slow to develop.

The act of 1779 which relocated the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond included a number of unusual directives. In it, and in the act and the execution of the act that followed, the hand of Jefferson can be discerned planning, compromising, and revising a suitably urbane setting for the purposes of the new state government. In order to facilitate the transformation of the town of Richmond into the new state capital, the General Assembly appointed the Directors of Public Buildings. This board of five (later nine) members included Thomas Jefferson as an active member.

"That six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four streets, and containing all the ground within such streets, situate in the said town of Richmond, and on an open and airy part thereof, shall be appropriated to the use and purpose of public buildings. On one of the said squares shall be erected, one house for the use of the general assembly, to be called the capitol, which said capitol shall contain two apartments for the use of the senate and their clerk, two others for the us of the house of delegates and their clerk, and others for the purposes of conferences, committees and a lobby, of such forms and dimensions as shall be adopted to their respective purposes: On one other of the said squares shall be erected, another building to be called the halls of justice, which shall contain two apartments for the use of the court of appeals and its clerk, two others for the use of the high court of chancery and its clerk, two others for the use of the general court and its clerk, two others for the used of the admiralty court and its clerk, and others for the uses of grand and petty juries. . . .; and on the same square last mentioned shall be built a publick jail; one other of the said squares shall be reserved for the purpose of building thereon hereafter, a house for the several executive boards and offices to be held in: Two others with the intervening street, shall be reserved for the use of the governour of this commonwealth for the time being, and the remaining square shall be appropriated to the use of the publick market. The said houses shall be built in a handsome manner with walls of brick or stone, and porticoes where the same may be convenient or ornamental, with pillars and pavements of stone."

The squares referred to were six blocks of the existing or proposed town (amounting to twelve acres). The double measure of land (four acres) associated with the Governor’s House was required to provide domestic areas and for associated paddocks and gardens. The caveat “for the time being” refers to the presence of a existing dwelling on the lots intended for the governor’s house, that was to be used as a “palace” until the present dwelling was substituted in 1813.

The five-part layout as described might seem naïve and unlike Jefferson, since it describes a series of public buildings placed on four contiguous plots, precluding any clear hierarchy or architectural relationship among them. Urban historian John W. Reps points out that this is the first time in an American city that “the three major branches of government were given recognition in the physical plan of the city (Tidewater Towns, 927).” The Directors of Public Building were to select the site, which could be in areas already platted or in a new section of two hundred lots “adjacent to such parts of said town as to them shall seem most convenient.”

As reported by Reps, in the following year the General Assembly responded to recommendations of the directors by a new act that designated Shockoe Hill as the site of the new “capitol, halls of justice, state house for the executive boards, and house for the governor.” It was an “open and airy part” of the town that was laid out in lots in 1768 and already partially occupied with houses. A number of old, irregular tenements, mostly on the eastern slope of the hill, and all the streets and squares were to be regularized, unless “by varying the said intervals” (such as is seen today in Governor Street) “more favorable ascents may be procured up the hill.” The location for the public market had been reconsidered and was now to be located below the said hill, on the same side of Shockoe Creek [a block west of where its was built on the opposite, east side of the creek]. In addition, the streets of Shockoe Hill, which were continuations of the undifferentiated Mayo plan of 1737, then all of the same 66-foot width regardless of importance or location, were all to be widened “to a breadth, not less than eighty, or more than one hundred and twenty feet.” Streets were to be laid out “whether straight or curved” to provide access to the tops of the hills from the valley below.

Early 19th-century map (Young, c. 1809)

The uniform street grid was adjusted by the Directors of Public Building in a more subtle way than that mandated by the statute. H Street, the major street on the hill that received the traffic from the old town below by way of the curving County Road, was widened to 120 feet by removing land from the lots on each side. Its unique scale prompted its renaming as Broad Street in later years, Interestingly, H Street was labeled Main Street on a plat of c 1787, indicating its continuity with the principal route through the older sections of the lower town [Richmond City Legislative petition 11 Nov. 1791]. The parallel streets G and I (Grace and Marshall) were to be widened to 100 feet. All the remaining streets, as shown by dotted lines on Jefferson’s drawing of the public squares in 1780, were to be enlarged to 80 feet as directed by the assembly. However, in actuality, Grace and Marshall were not widened as shown.

Jefferson plan of three public squares, 1780, showing
Capitol and Bank streets as laid out at top and bottom.

Jefferson himself drew a proposed plan of the town on Shockoe Hill in 1780. He showed the existing undifferentiated grid with the new creation of three squares between Franklin and Grace streets and between 9^th and 12^th streets. These were appropriated for the public buildings with an addition of several lots to the east along the edge of the hill east of Twelfth Street. A revised plan shows a new approach not unlike what was finally built. Grace and Franklin streets are blocked east of Ninth. These vacated streets are added to the total size of the public land and new streets created out of the inner lots in the blocks to the north and south. The public land is consolidated into “three separate parcels,” probably since the public market had been removed from the plan. This would have permitted the separate control of the three squares crowning the hill between the three branches of government.

In spite of the irregular terrain, Jefferson shows and describes in a proposed text, three elongated public squares separated by widened segments of Tenth and Eleventh streets. The southern half of each of the parcels consisted, however, of steeply sloping terrain that completely precluded the actual extension of the intervening streets shown by Jefferson, so it was inevitable that the parcels, barely outlined for decades, should be conflated into one large square, neatly squared on the north, south and west, but irregular on the east where the main route, the “county road,” climbed the steep slopes of the hill.

While the three squares are not labeled, the central square, occupying the most dramatic and advanced knoll above the river, was to become the site of the Capitol. It is possible that Jefferson intended an advanced central legislative building to be flanked by the Halls of Justice on the west and an Executive Building (Council Chamber was the name given to this structure among the temporary government buildings). As the costs of building and the limitations of revenue became apparent, Jefferson became reconciled to combining all the branches in a single structure, the Capitol of 1785-88. At the same time the three squares were combined into a single "Capitol Square."

R.B. James, Map of Richmond, Henrico Co., c. 1804, showing area of the Capitol Square and the angled route of the county road around it to the east and north.

While his direct involvement with its urban design had ended with his second term as governor in 1781, the city had not strayed too far from his vision as it grew. The urban fabric made up of “basic building” grew according to traditional patterns of urban morphology. The design and placement of specialized buildings proceeded as opportunity and funding permitted, guided by classical theories of architecture, with results adapted to local conditions and personalities.

Capitol Square as laid out by Maximilian Godefroy, from R. Young's Map, ca. 1817.

The Capitol was deliberately placed to be seen in the Virginia landscape. The public square was, as a result, not at a significant position on the city plan, although Jefferson's original idea seemed to have intended it for a commercial center by including a market. On the contrary, as built it occupies a distinctly anti-nodal position, rather like the church of 1742 on the top of the corresponding hill to the east. Maximilian Godefroy, a French-born partner of Latrobe’s, applied French formalism to organize the ravines and eroded gullies of the hillside site. His terraces, tree-lined allees, and curved walks imposed a garden-like imprint of order on what had hitherto been almost a desert.

Capitol Square, c. 1850

The official placement of the market along Shockoe Creek in 1782 recognized the reality of the city's composite form and the inevitable separation of state and city functions. The area around the square grew up to be a quiet place of deliberation and reflection far from the business of commercial Main Street below and the constant traffic of Broad Street to the north.

Appropriately, when the city grew sufficiently large to warrant a specialized government building or courthouse of its own it was strategically placed to mediate between the commercial rough-and-tumble of Broad Street and the cultivated and artificial landscape of the Public Square. Robert Mills provided the design for the new City Hall, which was begun in 1814 and first occupied in 1818. The carefully placed building took its place at the urban scale. It fronted on Capitol Street on axis with the Capitol and stood between it and Broad Street.

The Lawful, Lucid, and Intelligible City

2011-04-09T22:30:00.020-04:00

Masaccio: Frescos in the
Brancacci Chapel, Florence

Chris Miller (Early Morning Discussions) commenting on Norris Kelly Smith's Here I Stand: Perspectives From Another Point of View:

Norris Kellly Smith: "It is in keeping with the perspectivist's concern for ethical integrity that they should have been drawn to subjects exemplifying Christ's power to bring wholeness, sanity, and order into the world that perennially lacks just those qualities. This is the burden of Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel which deal with the powerful presence of the man Peter as he brings to bear the force of his authority upon the sicknesses, both spiritual and economic, of the Christian community of Florence"

Miller: Can you imagine such a mural being painted today? High-end Contemporary art is collected by a financial community that has specialized (and profited) from exactly the opposite of economic health.

In the contemporary world, only children's book illustration would suggest "the possibility of a world this lawful, lucid, and intelligible, but only by virtue of our being willing to accept a responsive and responsible position within the order of things"...as Smith feels is presented by Masaccio.

ALMOST RIGHT, BUT IS SOMETHING MISSING?

2011-03-05T11:13:00.001-05:00

"All great cities are a mixture of shopping, culture, and history. Richmond has all of those, and Carytown is a big part of that." Amy Talley, President of the Carytown Retail Merchants Association in the Homes section of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 5, 2011.

ALONG THE BANKS OF SHOCKOE CREEK

2011-02-14T01:20:00.005-05:00

Detail of the Market area from the 1879 Beers Map of Richmond. Shockoe Creek can be seen running to the left of the long Market Hall

Today Urbanismo walked the area of the First Market on Seventeenth Street and the Richmond Slave Trail, a poignant reminder of the nefarious trade in slaves that was based in Richmond. A heritage tour is being developed around archeological resources connected with Richmond’s slave markets.

Markets, since the earliest times, have been placed on the edge of built-up parts of towns, where access by wagons and animals is easiest and the noise and refuse associated with them can be segregated. The Richmond market, and, presumably, the semi-annual fair which preceded it, was placed just beyond the plat where the bottomlands prevented easy settlement, beside the bridge which connected the original town with the newer suburbs on the hill to the west. Over time edge markets are surrounded by shops and fully incorporated into the town.

Market Square in 1793 (north is to the right)

As we have detailed elsewhere, the city government laid out a formal market square in 1793. It ran between the town and the creek and extended 123 feet to the north and south of Main Street. A two-story brick Market Hall was built in the following year on the bank of the creek on the north side of Main Street. While the market hall survived for many years and has been succeeded by three more structures in the same location, the original market square layout was abandoned as the former commons was laid out in irregular lots and streets over the following decades.

Former trestle extension into Main Street Station

Our winter afternoon walk, one of a series of explorations begun last year, began at the north end of Main Street Station, in a parking lot located between the elevated railroad tracks that split apart to pass on each side of the station. In 1879, this was the location of the Chesapeake and Ohio Freight depot that stood between Broad and Grace streets (see Beers Map below). When Main Street Station was built in 1901, the tracks were carried over the streets on cast iron trestles and the tracks fanned out in this area to allow six locomotives to enter the great train shed which fronted on Main Street and ran back almost to Grace. Franklin Street ran below the station, although this was blocked off when the shed was enclosed in the 1980s. The iron trestles taken from the north end of the station were used to create decorative gates at the new side entrances to the train shed.

1905 Sanborn Map of the area along Shockoe Creek showing the large train shed (1901) in yellow and the long Market Hall of 1855 to the right. Shockoe Creek can be seen running vertically between buildings in the center. The site of Lumkin's Jail is near the angled building in red and yellow northwest of the train shed

The area where Main Street Station was built, west of the market, was a natural one for construction of a massive new structure and for the interstate highway which would later overshadow it. The area along the curving route of the creek was subject to regular flooding. Except for a continuous streetfronts added in the early nineteenth century along the valuable lots on Main and Franklin streets, the banks of the creek were nearly empty. Between Franklin and the James River the creek had been confined to a straight channel running perpendicular to Main Street, but once north of Franklin it wandered back and forth under the steep eastern slopes of Shockoe Hill.

Main Street Station seen from the Seaboard Depot

Freight wing of the Seaboard Depot sen from the northwest

The Seaboard Freight Depot, built in 1909

Where Franklin Street once ran below the great train shed of Main Street station, seen from the west.

A gently rising terrain extended for about two blocks west of Main Street Station. It was once a tightly settled neighborhood of shops, modest houses, and foundries, but is today a parking lot for state employees and the location of the two-story, early twentieth-century Seaboard Freight Depot, fronting on the short stub of Franklin Street that remains intact on that side of the station. A long freight wing extends to the north. The construction of the Richmond Petersburg Turnpike (Interstate 95) in the late 1950s so altered the eastern slope of Shockoe and Council Chamber hills that it is difficult to see their historic form. The elevated highway, wrapping closely around the southwest corner of the station’s ornate tower, also placed much of the area south and west of the station in shadow below the huge concrete highway spans. The earth fill supporting the highway north of Franklin Street creates a steep edge along the valley.

The site of Lumpkin's Slave Jail, market with stone blocks, lies here beneath fifteen feet of fill

It is in the area of the state-owned parking lots south of Broad Street that archeologists have found foundations of the infamous Lumpkin Slave Jail, one of several dealers that operated on the fringes of the city's commercial center. Much of the slave jail and associated buildings are buried beneath the slopes of fill added as part of Interstate 95. A trail with signage has been developed around the theme of slavery, including the results of the archeological explorations. A larger program of interpretation, including a museum, is planned. Similarly, a large African-American cemetery, abandoned in about 1816, is located below Interstate 95 and to the north of Broad Street.

The area along the creek was mostly residential by the late nineteenth century. The descent was steep from the hill, as can be seen in the postcard shown below, so that the Egyptian Building housing the Medical College was on the edge of the hill, as were the Brockenbrough House (Confederate White House) and the First Baptist Church (later the First African Baptist Church). The land at the bottom of the hill on Marshall Street was parceled out by the city to secondary public buildings, principally the Lancastrian School and the City Jail.

View east along Marshall Street from Shockoe Hill, Online Postcard Collection, VCU Library

The view from the the top of the hill on Broad Street probably looked similarly steep in the early nineteenth century. After Broad Street was extended to the valley in 1845, Shockoe Creek flowed through a narrow bridge under the road. Parts of this still stand, as seen below, although the creek, uncovered throughout the nineteenth century, is now fully underground. The area between the rail tracks was an ideal one for unloading materials. Hungerford Coal and Oil Company is located here. The huge timber bins into which coal was emptied and sorted remain to this day although no coal has been sold since the major flood of 2004.

Stone wall on the south side of Broad Street The stone wall marks the spot where Shockoe Creek passes beneath Broad Street.

Stone abutments on the north side of Broad Street. Rutherford's Row, a continuous line of small dwellings described on late nineteenth-century maps as "negro tenements," once lined the north side of Broad Street in this area.

Ornamental coping on the top of the walls on each side of Broad Street

Coal unloading facilities at Hungerford. Coal was bagged in the small shed until 2004

A well-preserved, cobbled section of N 16th St. north of Broad Street, west of the tracks

View looking north from Broad Street under the pylons of the railroad.

The area east of the tracks and north of Franklin Street has been used for parking for many years, but in the early twentieth century it was full of tightly spaced shops. Of these only one large building on the northwest corner of Grace and Ambler (formerly Union) streets remain. This housed Loving’s Produce, a wholesale company, until c. 2008. In 1905, it was the warehouse of the Richmond Branch of Armour and Company meat suppliers.

Loving's Produce Building facade facing Ambler (Union) Street

Continuing with the tour, we visited the area between the Market and Main Street Station. The YMCA Hotel, which corresponds to the French Renaissance detailing of the station in style and material, replaced a block of nineteenth-century shops in the early twentieth century. It sits back from the street to match the setback of the station, permitting a corner view of the market shed. Shockoe Creek once ran uncovered in a narrow straight channel just west of the YMCA Hotel. It then curved to the west and ran under the station. It is now entirely underground.

The Main Street front of the YMCA Hotel Building, east of Main Street Station

Arch or Walnut Alley from the above the path of Shockoe Creek looking east to the existing Market Shed

Early buildings between the Market and the railroad station relate to the market function of the area. include the fine, three-story commercial building on the northeast corner of Seventeenth and Franklin streets. The one-story Acme Tomato Company Building, dating from before the Second World War, occupies the space between the three-story building and Main Street Station.

The well-preserved three-story commercial building with the Acme Tomato Co Bldg. beyond

The desert-like parking area north of the market bore the brunt of the 2004 flood, which washed away much of the paving. It was, however, the site of a full block of shops in the early twentieth century, of which the Loving's Produce Building is the only remaining example.

Here we ended our tour of the fragmentary urban tissue along Shockoe Creek with a visit to Havana '59 for some much needed refreshment.

Concinnitas, or Beauty Reconciled

2011-01-08T18:41:00.002-05:00

What does Alberti mean by concinnitas? How does he learn what it is so that he can introduce it into his building? and what role, then, does concinnitas play in investing a building with beauty?

Concinnitas, Alberti’s powerful term for “the absolute and fundamental rule of Nature” denotes, with such a description and by its very nature, a difficult, and illusive theory. While Alberti makes no more specific statement than that concinnitas composes parts “according to some precise rule,” the very framework in which concinnitas is conceived will help the thoughtful architect, philosopher or political thinker in its pursuit, for concinnitas is more than a mere pattern book rule to be followed. Rather it is the way in which Beauty is reconciled to the particular example on earth. Concinnitas translates the ineffable idea of Beauty to us through minute adjustment of proportion, thereby rendering it perceptible to the senses. The pursuit of concinnitas is the highest goal of the architect, or indeed of man in general.

“Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect.” Concinnitas flourishes in birth and death, in creation and destruction, and in every changing state between these extremes. Indeed, there can be no written formula for such an idea because it is not a static result, but a defining action whose very meaning is to take parts which are in every case different, and arrange them such that they form through their correspondence a complete and perfect whole. Concinnitas is the final and defining quality of architecture, or art in general. As such, it surpasses the crude necessities of shelter and protection, enters the realm of beauty, and becomes something that arouses delight in the beholder.

Thus, a discussion of concinnitas must begin with the understanding that it is something which governs both the practical and aesthetic qualities of building; it is behind and above decisions concerning the material or order of building. What Alberti is telling us is that no truly functional thing can be made without concinnitas, and that any discussion of concinnitas must therefore govern and surpass that of firmness and commodity. Architecture, Alberti tells us, in agreement with Vitruvius, is worthy of praise when it is commodious, firm, and delightful. Yet for Alberti, the final requirement is the most vital. “Of the three conditions that apply to every form of construction – that what we construct should be appropriate to its use, lasting in structure, and graceful and pleasing in its appearance – the first two have been dealt with and there remains the third, the noblest and most necessary of all.” In other words, firmness and commodity are necessities not just of a palazzo, but also of a barn. What sets great buildings apart is that they delight our senses with the beauty arising from their proportions, not just relative to themselves, but to the cosmos.

“All care”, he tells us, “all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is to built is useful, commodious, yes – but also embellished and wholly graceful, so that anyone seeing it would not feel that the expense might have been invested better elsewhere.” Thus, architecture for Alberti is most concerned with beauty, in that every good which architecture brings to humanity is a result of its grace and appropriateness. “To have satisfied necessity is trite and insignificant, to have catered to convenience unrewarding when the inelegance in a work causes offense.” The task of the architect is to reach beyond necessity and evoke pleasure in the viewer. This is accomplished through concinnitas.

Central to Alberti’s theory of concinnitas is the idea that architecture is a composition of various individual parts that follows a rational arrangement. Beauty, Alberti tells us, “is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse." It is in the correct manipulation of these elements that beauty is achieved. “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoned faculty that is inborn in the mind… for every body consists entirely of parts that are fixed and individual; if these are removed, enlarged, reduced, or transferred somewhere inappropriate, the very composition will be spoiled that gives the body its seemly appearance.”

The theory of concinnitas is grounded in a perfect composition of the various parts. If these elements such as cornices, windows, walls, columns, doors, and porticoes are altered from their perfect manifestation in the whole, concinnitas will no longer be present in the work. Indeed, one might also say that, just as a “reasoning faculty is in born in the mind,” so too a “natural excellence” exists as a potential in every building. The individual building in this description already exists as a perfect idea which the art of the architect attempts to emulate. In other words, a failure to correctly arrange the parts according to the rules of concinnitas regulating the composition of the whole will results in an unsuccessful building, or one that does not attain the perfection it is innately capable of.

How then do we achieve this proportionate arrangement? If beauty is the reasoned harmony of all the parts, then that harmony may be described, Alberti tells us, using Number, Outline and Position. For Alberti number was a quantitative relationship between things in a formula, but more importantly, it was also a qualitative entity in its own right. As George Hersey so beautifully explains, there were whole churches, cities, kingdoms and heavens of numbers, each with its own particular character and even genealogical structure. Outline is difficult to understand as it can mean several things. I believe it is directly tied to Alberti's idea of lineamente, or the lines and angles, which form the building (as opposed to the material, or structura). Regardless, it is something like the form, or type of the building, in that in the outline informs us of the building's purpose (to some degree this is also accomplished by ornament). Branko Mitrovic has called lineamente shape, which I think is not far from the truth. Position has to do with Alberti's use of the term collocation, or the placement of the parts of a body in such a relationship that the whole, which they form, has the quality of beauty. We will return to this.

“But,” Alberti continues, “arising from the composition and connection of these three is a further quality in which beauty shines full face: our term for this is Concinnitas; which we say is nourished with every grace and splendor. It is the task and aim of concinnitas to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance.” In other words, concinnitas takes varying numbers of things which have different shapes, and lie in various positions, and creates (according to a “precise rule”) a complete and beautiful whole.

Concinnitas is not simply the combination of number, shape, and position, or a glorification position only, it is rather the manipulation of the three qualities such that each is altered to form a suitable and distinct whole, appropriate for its unique location and purpose on earth. To make this distinction more apparent, let us even say that position is sufficient to compose a literal version of a building’s heavenly counterpart, but that concinnitas breaths the life into an otherwise inanimate copy. Concinnitas fractures the perfect harmony of ideal beauty just enough for man to comprehend it. In short, concinnitas is like the bending of a perfect rectangle to fit the curvature of the globe it would otherwise be incompatible with.

After the Earthquake: Repairing Richmond's Urban Fabric

2010-11-18T22:13:00.001-05:00

Urban historian William Carroll Westfall has asserted in his web-based study “Learning from Pompeii” that those who would restore the torn tissues of American cities can learn a great deal by studying the formal histories of successful urban centers of the past. In Richmond this begins with a renewed understanding of the different standards observed by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginians observed when they laid out their principal provincial towns and proceeded to enlarge and rebuild them over time. Most importantly, the designers of our cities placed greater emphasis on the public realm than we do today. According to Westfall, like the Romans who rebuilt the much earlier Samnite town at Pompeii after an earthquake, our task in repairing our devastated cities should honor the “urban ensemble rather than the individual building. . . . mutilated by neglect or, in the case of the last half century or more of building activity, marred by a disregard for the common good.”

In contrast to modern American practice, traditional cities placed “greater value on public places than on private ones while we do the reverse.” Traditional cities were

compact and cut off from the countryside rather than loose and sprawling as our cities are. . . . built with a range of architectural and urban elements clearly belonging to the same general range of components while our cities are much more diverse--cheek and jowl is a miscellany of buildings in different architectural styles, a jumble of industrial and transportation equipment and their related yards and dumps, fields of abandoned buildings, wastelands, and miscellaneous pieces of equipment in varying states of deterioration, all diffused across open rural landscapes or depopulated urban areas. And while the expanding sprawl of our cities forces us to drive more and more to get most of what we want, most of what a person in Pompeii [and Richmond] needed to live a full and abundant civil life was accessible with the most democratic means of transport, going on foot.

In his attempt to understand a traditional city with a layered history, Westfall asks two questions: “First, What kind of life was lived in this place, that is, Why and how did its builders build as they did? And second, what rules with general validity and applicability did they follow?” If we can ask these questions of Richmond, we may discover some guidelines that may help us to recover the good life here and now. The myriad actions that result in the complexity of even such a small city as Richmond make it seem almost as difficult to untangle as Pompeii, but the effort can give us some clues about how to think through our own decisions and make needed responses to the great tradition unfolding all around us.

Understanding Richmond's Civic Order

2010-11-05T00:18:00.006-04:00

Most accounts of Richmond’s urban and architectural history have examined the city’s buildings as individual monuments rather than as part of an urban whole. Tyler Potterfield, in his history of the city’s landscape, and Charles Brownell and his students at VCU have done a great deal to dispel a good deal of the fog surrounding the deeper structure of Richmond’s overall fabric and of the history of its specialized civic architecture at the urban scale. As a further attempt to excavate some aspects of Richmond’s civic order, we have posted to the right an ongoing series of essay on some of the building types that make up the city’s tradition of public buildings.

Virginian cities were directly related to the urban structures of the ancient world, informed by later intellectual developments, in particular Renaissance Humanism and English political theory. The changing form of our city and its layered fabric can be traced by an excavation of its political structure and of the building types that correspond to the elements of civil life. Most important, in urban historian Carroll William Westfall’s view, is the relation between civic life and architectural form. Most significantly, in the light of the civil and architectural disorder evident in modern Richmond, traditional cities employ civil functions and architecture to demonstrate how that the civic life orders and enlivens both private and commercial activities. Westfall asserts, in Learning From Pompeii, that “Roman cities illustrate a general principle: In cities that take the civil life seriously, the physical reinforces the civil and vice versa, with the one used as a means of achieving the ends of the other.”

Urban life, variously religious, political, social and commercial, requires venues where public activities can be accommodated and ordered. Virginia’s most familiar models of civic order were to be found in the towns and cities of England. Basic elements of any town or city in the English civic tradition include the church, court, tavern, and market. In England, as Mark Girouard has shown, these activities were traditionally manifested in a hierarchy of scales. Town, County, and State each accommodated these and other civic functions, in some cases conflated in a single architectural form. Town government and markets stalls were conventionally housed in a single building. Similarly, as ancient seats of justice, the great halls of county castles were adapted to serve as courts and indoor regional market on the regular court days that drew a larger population to the county seat. Westminster Hall in London served a similar role at the national level.

Eighteenth-century Americans transformed English civic order and its architectural expression in ways that suited the changed circumstances of the colonies and new nation, but the forms of urban design and architectural expression continued to show their roots in Post-medieval Northern Europe. The few public buildings of the mid-eighteenth-century town at the Falls of the James- the Church on Richmond Hill and the Henrico County Courthouse- occupied sites and took forms that shaped the civic life by their careful detailing and rich materials and their placement outside the regularity of the grid of conventional lots. The church, facing due east at an angle to the grid, was placed in an elevated, anti-nodal position away from the bustle of the principal street and the courthouse was located in the middle of a principal cross street at the center of commerce and near the county jail.

When the town was selected to become the capital city after the Revolution, it acquired a new set of civic functions and a greatly expanded form. As it grew, the city’s local institutions lent civil order to the enlarged scope of commercial activities, while the market brought the prosperity that made the civic architecture possible. The institutions proper to a city included a market for commercial transactions, scales to assure fair measure, a hall for the council and court, a lockup, a constabulary to keep the gathered populace in order, and a place for the storage of records.

Following English and American tradition the city’s institutions were, at first, housed together in a new, classically detailed Market Hall, placed on the public common at the hinge between the old, county town and the new capital district. As the city civic institutions multiplied, the new public buildings, including the jail, a school, and a police station, most were located on the nearby public land along Shockoe Creek. However, by the time that the Hustings Court and City Council outgrew the Market Hall in the early nineteenth century, the valley location no longer seemed the center of the city. A new, domed City Hall with a temple front was built on Shockoe Hill in a nearly axial location directly behind the Capital on the main route though the city. A new, second market was constructed nearby.

The new state government district was strategically placed on the Richmond’s Shockoe Hill. Existing streets were widened hierarchically, a public square created, and a program for the addition of a full range of buildings projected, adapting a previous unarticulated street grid. The working out of the state’s program took several decades and underwent many transformations, but it resulted in a powerful amalgam of public and private architecture, with a series of public buildings surrounded by a landscape of architecturally distinguished villas designed by some of the nation’s most competent architects.

A group of citizens, advised by Thomas Jefferson and a series of well-informed European immigrants, such as his associate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, provided designs for the new city’s public and private realms. They enriched the English tradition in which they were immersed with political, urban and architectural theories imbibed from a variety of sources. Jefferson and his colleagues redefined the city’s institutions, elaborated its program, enriched its layout, and ornamented its fabric with a series of public and private buildings of exceptional quality. The planned institutions included the legislative, judicial, and executive arms of the government, an armory, and a jail (later known as the penitentiary). The massive, temple-form Capitol was placed, like an acropolis, on a knob of Shockoe Hill overlooking the river. Together with the other institutions of government, it was located on a calm, expansive public square in an anti-nodal position away from the principal thoroughfare.

Theaters, churches, and educational institutions were not at first included among the civic institutions in the capital district on Shockoe Hill, but instead clustered around the market. Unexecuted designs by Latrobe for an elegant theater/hotel and a new church failed to secure a sufficient level of interest or funding. Latrobe and his clients proposed to place the church at the apex of the civic order, in the center of the eastern end of Broad Street on the bluff above Shockoe Creek.

Richmond’s urban form continued to be enriched by a classical understanding of the form and meaning of the city well into the twentieth century, resulting in one the most successful amalgams of public and private architecture. We intend to continue to explore the civic architecture around us in greater depth and to bring the study into later periods as we go along. Please see the essays collected in the panel to the right for a deeper analysis of the city’s building types.

Where is Council Chamber Hill?

2010-10-21T01:19:00.034-04:00

In the late Spring, Urbanismo joined Renaissance Richmond in a tour of the neighborhood once known as Council Chamber Hill. Our search was for the site of Clifton, the long-vanished house with links to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Having completed an impressive archival search, Richmond Renaissance blogger Jessica Bankston, a student at V.C.U., had engaged our attendance at her search for the house on the ground. Jessica took the photographs attached to this essay, since Urbanismo forgot their camera.

Council Chamber Hill was a unusually dense neighborhood occupying a small spur protruding from Shockoe Hill and the steeply falling ground around it just east of Capitol Square. It commanded a dramatic view of the Shockoe Valley and of the James River. The hill was usually included in lists of "the seven hills of Richmond" and figured darkly in the accounts of some of the city's most colorful history.

Here, courtesy of a signboard in Capitol Square, is a map of Council Chamber Hill today, an area occupied by high-rise state office buildings and parking lots.

Today it is mostly a parking lot that is banked above the broad barrenness of the relocated Fourteenth Street and surrounded by aging office towers. We assumed that it would be hard to find anything in the deserted asphalt behind the labyrinthine bulk of the State Highway Department headquarters. We underestimated the resistance of the urban fabric to utter oblivion. This neighborhood, still extant when Mary Wingfield Scott wrote in the 1940s, was largely obliterated in the expansion of state office facilities at mid-century. Council Chamber Hill is little remembered today, but it was once best known for its demi-monde character, as Richmond's "Red Light District" in the post Civil War years.

Looking west along Ross St. showing the dip or ravine between Council Chamber and Shockoe Hill, up which Governor Street runs. The region east of the Governor's Mansion was a haven for bawdy houses, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution during the years before 1870, when a reformers disrupted their activities. Arabella Yarrington Worsham met her future husband, railroad tycoon Colis P. Huntington, at Johnny Worsham's gambling establishment on Fourteenth Street on Council Chamber Hill. According to Mary Wingfield Scott, Worsham later operated a faro bank in an Antebellum house that stood on the lot to the right. It was replaced by the Richmond Press Building seen on the right in the photograph above on the corner of Governor and Ross streets. Arabella Worsham's dramatic rise in fortune has been recently documented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by the reassembly of the remarkable Aesthetic bedroom from her house in New York City.

Our walk began on Ross Street (now called Grace). Ross Street is a tributary of today's Governor Street, the "county road" that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries connected the original town east of Shockoe Creek with the new platted area on the hill. The county road is the curving route dashed in to the north of the "Public Square" and eat of Twelfth Street. The land atop Council Chamber Hill was apparently acquired from the Byrd family before the newer section of town was platted. It is seen as the blank section at the upper center of the detail from 1809 map attributed to Richard Young seen above, with Governor Street (called County Road on the plat) to the west and Shockoe Creek, which ran west of Seventeenth Street on the plat, to the east. Thus it was not at first laid out in streets, although its steep geography would have stymied development for a long time had it been laid out as a continuation of the overall grid.

Col. John Mayo, builder of the eponymous bridge over the James, lived in a brick house built as the interim seat of the Governor's Council and executive offices and which gave its name to the hill. Mayo is said to have kept a close eye on the condition of his ramshackle bridge by the use of a spyglass from his house on the hill. The view above may be similar to his, if it can be imagined without the modern buildings. The view below crosses his house site, looking along Old Fourteenth Street toward Broad Street.

As the nineteenth century progressed and property values increased, John Mayo felt called to develop much of the site. This he did by creating a series of narrow lots on tiers of streets and alleys that stepped down the hill to the east and south. These can be seen on the detail from the map of 1817 by Richard Young shown above. The undeveloped portion of the hill containing the Mayo House is marked J. Mayo. The original bed of Shockoe Creek is the curving stream to the right, Ross Street is to the left, and Monumental Church can be seen in the upper left corner. Fourteenth Street was later extended up the hill to Broad Street [through the site marked J. Mayo on the map] and was flanked by Mayo Street on the east. Jessica Bankston has explored the likelihood that the watercolor illustration for one of Latrobe's most elegant villas was intended for the Mayo family on Council Chamber Hill, as she has documented on her blog. In a useful map on her website she was able to determine the modern location of Clifton by applying a section of the 1876 F. W. Beers Map to an aerial photo of the area today. Her map indicates how dense Council Chamber Hill had become by the late nineteenth century.

Here we found the only remaining (relatively modern) building from the neighborhood and the foundation of a successor building that stood on the site of Clifton, an often remembered building that Jessica believes was based on the plans for the unbuilt Mayo villa. The photo shows us standing in amazement on the nearly obliterated southeast corner of the intersection of Fourteenth and Cypress Alley. A fragment of the granite curbing of Fourteenth Street emerges from the asphalt in the foreground.

Old Fourteenth Street was itself as much the result of a radical reshaping of the topography as the new Fourteenth Street down the hill. The two views, above and below, show nearly the same spot today and in the 1860s. The house known as Clifton stood originally at the head of a steeply sloping lot running down the south slope of Council Chamber Hill. When Fourteenth Street was extended up the hill, it was necessary to cut into the slope to lessen the grade, and Clifton was left standing high above the street.

This illustration of Clifton during the war years is from In War Time, by E. G. Booth, Philadelphia, 1885.

Here is the reshaped lower slope of the hill, originally terraced by the Mayos into lots and alleys. Mayo Street ran near the sidewalk visible on the opposite side of the new, straightened, four-lane Fourteenth Street. The neighborhood continued down the slope beyond the new thoroughfare.

The final image with which our tour closes looks south along Fourteenth, completely reconfigured in the mid-twentieth century. The Exchange Hotel, Richmond's most architecturally sophisticated hotel in the Antebellum era, once stood on the immediate foreground in the photo facing toward the camera. It stood on the north edge of what is now the modern extension of Bank Street.

The Jefferson Hotel: Urban Scale Ecole

2010-10-18T23:45:00.033-04:00

Urbanismo has taken a bit of a break this summer to regroup and refresh our carefully calibrated sensibilities. We thought we would begin anew with an essay on one of our favorite elements of the urban scale in our provincial capital: the justly celebrated Jefferson Hotel.

The Jefferson Hotel, completed in 1895, outscaled in comfort and extent all that the New South metropolis of Richmond could require. It played a significant national role in the development of the hotel building type. The Jefferson embodied an ambitious effort to affirm and promote a enhanced social and civic role for the hotel in the American city by providing an uncharacteristic richness of form and symbolic content. In spite of a disastrous fire and many renovations, much of the hotel’s fabric and even some of original furnishings remain intact. Thanks to its patron and exceptional French-trained architects, the hotel is a uniquely consistent manifestation of French academic architectural theories in the American context.

The Jefferson Hotel was built for well-informed Richmond taste-maker Lewis Ginter (1824-1897), a wealthy tobacco manufacturer who played the role of civic philanthropist and patron of the arts. In later life he used his vast wealth to achieve personal and civic goals in harmony with the aesthetic movement known as the American Renaissance. By 1892 Ginter had taken up a plan to build a new hotel in the West End, determined to act as a benefactor to his burgeoning adopted city. The project’s extraordinary scale, complex plan, and high cost suggest that Ginter clearly intended to provide Richmond with an urban amenity similar to those in the American North and the capitals and resorts of Europe with which he was familiar.

The rectangular site selected by Lewis Ginter for the hotel occupied approximately one-half of a square or block west of downtown Richmond, between Franklin and Main streets, in what had been the city's most fashionable residential neighborhood for many years. The pressure of postwar industry and commerce in the city’s old center sparked new construction in the old residential areas. Franklin Street, which intersected with Capitol Square, had developed as a major axis of power as the city expanded to the west.

The lot might have suggested the massive block-like palazzo format utilized in most urban hotels of the period, but the architects took an alternate approach. The accepted proposal, as published in 1893, shows a strangely bifurcated building, with a three-story north front on West Franklin Street and a six-story section to the south facing West Main Street occupying about two-thirds of the site. This awkward juxtapositioning of facade elements, sometimes noted in the work of Carrère and Hastings, was derived from the emphasis placed on the plan in their French academic education and the subservience of facade to plan in their design philosophy.

The hotel exterior as built varied from the architects’ original proposal chiefly in the addition of two high campaniles which functioned as clock towers. The textures of the wall surfaces expressed each floor's position in the building's exterior hierarchy. Upper walls of closely laid, cream-colored brick rose above a brick ground floor incorporating banded rustication. The hotel rested on a low basement of rock-faced granite blocks sunk, on the north, into deep areaways. The walls were richly detailed with ornamental molded terra cotta window surrounds, arcades, cornices, and string courses.

The Franklin Street facade, seen above, stood back from the street and deliberately corresponded in height to the adjacent, three-story Archer Anderson House (enlarged in 1880 and since demolished) and other large Italianate-villa-style houses located along the street. A pair of towers flanked the main entry, topped with belvederes based on those at the Villa Medici. Lower wings with deep, bracketed eaves flanked the central portion of the north facade and behind these rose the tall, twin, domed campaniles that were visible across the city. A triple-arched loggia supported on paired, colored marble columns was located just above the vaulted entry porch. The campaniles served to unite the two sections more effectively and called attention to the building's civic role.

On the south front of the hotel (here seen immediately after the fire of 1901 destroyed the upper stories) Carrère and Hastings stacked terra cotta palazzo motifs. A plainly detailed ground floor, containing a smoking room, grill, billiard room, and other men's amenities, supported a long, nine-bay piano nobile, housing the dining room. The architects treated the dining room level like that of the garden front of Versailles, with an applied order (Corinthian here, rather than Ionic) clasping a window arcade. Here the order affirmed, in keeping with classical principles of decorum, that the hotel's functions culminated in and focused on a festive ritual of dining.
The Palm Court, or Pompeiian Court (seen to the right), provided with very French paired columns, each crowned with archeologically correct versions of the Pompeiian Ionic capital, functioned as an enclosed atrium or winter garden providing light to the interior of the Franklin Street section. It centered on a statue of Jefferson surrounded by beds of grass, paths, and fountains. The Franklin Street section was intended to serve families and female guests. A monumental vaulted staircase led down to the austere Rotunda Lobby in the Main Street end of the hotel, which was treated, not as a rotunda, but as an enclosed Renaissance courtyard with the deliberate imposition of cast iron girders and columns.

The Rotunda was a full story lower than the Palm Court and, like it, was brightly illuminated by a glass ceiling by day and electric arc lights by night. It served as the club-like center for the masculine lower level of the hotel, frequented by business travelers.In this remarkable space (lost in the fire of 1901 that destroyed the south end of the hotel, and rebuilt soon after in a very different manner) Carèrre and Hastings quoted directly from the sculpture court of the Palais des Etudes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The court, a central part of the school where Carèrre and Hastings had studied, was begun by François Debret in 1820, completed by Félix Duban in 1839, and enclosed by him with a glass roof in 1867. The architects imitated and elaborated the slender iron colonnettes that were added in front of the walls to support the gabled glass roof at the École. Contemporary writers noted the dramatic vista from the Rotunda to the Palm Court.

The Grand Salon, today the Dining Room of the hotel’s Lemaire Restaurant, embodied the most complete example in Richmond of what was called the "modern French style," accurately described in contemporary accounts as Louis XVI, based on the “Grand Salon” in Bordeaux’s Hôtel de la Préfecture transformed into an exercise in Beaux-Arts planning. The tripartite Dining Room, lined with gilded oak, at the opposite end of the hotel displayed contrasting features abstracted by the architects from the opulent forms associated with Napoleon III, such as the Reception Room at the Parisian Hôtel Continental and its prototypes at Versailles and the Paris Opéra.

The École des Beaux-Arts traditionally advocated the use of sculptural and painted decoration articulating or reinforcing the symbolic content of the building. Through its decorative program the Jefferson Hotel took on the character of a major public building. The works of art in the Jefferson, some of which were collected or commissioned by Lewis Ginter, conveyed the theme of civic virtue or by their presence proclaimed the hotel's role as a civilizing institution. The most important large-scale sculptural element in the hotel remains the figure of Thomas Jefferson by Richmond native Edward V. Valentine. By its position in the center of the Palm Court it emulated and rivaled Houdon's statue of Washington in the Rotunda of the Virginia Capitol.

Unexpectedly, the most direct inspiration for the front would seem to have been the Casino at Monte Carlo by Garnier (1878-79), seen to the left. The Casino served as the social center for daily promenades, gaming, dancing, and concerts at the popular resort city. The Monte Carlo Casino, like Garnier’s Opéra, in its richness of decoration, pride of place, and exuberance of form, emulated or actually displaced traditional local civic and religious monuments. The casino as a building type might be taken as an appropriate model for a social center for a post-Civil War American city. Each building answered the unprecedented need of a newly mobile bourgeois society for an appropriately splendid public setting.

It is questionable whether either building actually functioned as a civic institution. Instead, they were commercial enterprises that borrowed the scale and monumental treatment, as codified by the École, of such an institution. One very obvious way in which the Jefferson Hotel differed from a fully public building was in its relative exclusivity and focus on entertainment. Like a club, and unlike the Virginia Capitol, standards of dress and the possession of ready money were prerequisites for entry and enjoyment.

Taken as a whole, in both plan and elevation, the hotel shows a more thoroughly French architectural character than most other American buildings of its period. Like Garnier, Carrère and Hastings effectively distilled and transformed Beaux-Arts planning principles dating from the eighteenth century. The École consistently based architectural design in the plan and its exterior expression. The intersecting circulatory rectangles so characteristic of Prix de Rome plans throughout the century and ultimately expressed in the design of Garnier's Opéra were condensed in their application at the Jefferson. The architects unified the remarkably articulate plan of the hotel (seen to the right), in which circulation worked on multiple functional and symbolic layers, by a regular repetition of interlocking elements and a cage-like grid of piers, columns, and beams, organized in tripartite groupings.
The building also displays how the eclecticism of Charles Garnier and his teacher Duban profoundly influenced the work of students at the École in the later years of the nineteenth century. This can clearly be seen at work at the Jefferson Hotel, with its references to both Garnier and Duban, its compositional and decorative bravado, its scenographic central processional route, and its civic pretensions.

There were, however, several ways in which the hotel displayed the commercial side of its character. Civic buildings in Richmond, as in Paris, usually occupy positions at the urban scale. The Capitol, Market Hall, City Hall, and many churches were placed either in axial locations or as self-contained elements in the streetscape. In Richmond as in Paris, commercial structures like hotels occupied conventional lots in the overall grid plan. The symmetrical and monumental aspects of the deeply modeled Franklin Street facade, appropriate for a free-standing civic monument, were diminished by their position on the side of Franklin Street. Although the loggias and campaniles formed a picturesque skyline and dominated the view over the rooftops along the street, the design would have been better served by an axial approach or forecourt. The uninflected south front better suits the hotel’s streetside location and commercial function.
The Jefferson Hotel represents an early effort of a firm of American Renaissance architects to develop a coherent form of architectural expression appropriate for the American city and an attempt to overlay the commercial aspect of modern urban life with the classical order increasingly visible in European cities. In spite of the effort to correspond to neighboring cornice heights on its Franklin Street front, the hotel loomed on the skyline of Richmond with an uncharacteristic bulk and unheard-of European ornamental splendor. No attempt was made to recall regional building traditions. With the advent of the Jefferson the former Confederate capital turned its back on its antebellum past.
In the controlled sense of movement, the scenographic interpenetration of space, and the theatrical use of the disparate themes of Pompeiian antiquity, French kingly magnificence, and Mediterranean splendor, the hotel embodied many late-nineteenth-century French themes. The scale of the project envisioned by Ginter and the handling of volume and decor by Carrère and Hastings at the Jefferson made them precocious American heirs of the tradition of Garnier.

Critical Consciousness and the Unchanging in Architecture

2010-05-08T18:37:00.015-04:00

‹‹Bisogno fare qualsiasi cosa, fuorché l’invenzione di cose nuove: la vera invinzione è il non inventare nulla. Chi si rende consapevole di tutta l’inventabilità dell’inventabile è colui che non inventa nulla, perché ormai tutto quello di cui è capace questo nostro sistema planetario è già stato prodotto, ed è tutto qui: più esso sarà reinventato e piu sara posto in crisi.
Ma occorre viceversa capirlo.
Dunque pianificare vuol dire lasciare lavorare la realtà, comprendendone il senso del miglior utilizzo››.
S. Muratori, Autocoscienza e realtà nella storia delle ecumeni civili, a cura di G. Maranucci, Roma 1976.

One question is of singular importance to the contemporary architect attempting to return to the classical tradition amidst the dissolving wake of the modernist movement. That question is “what is unchanging in architecture?” Tradition, in this sense, is the means by which we access truth. The adjective classical denotes works of architecture which are prized as the finest exemplars of a tradition. These are held up as models for the guidance of current practice and for the assurance of future success. Therefore, the form that the examples in a classical tradition take is necessarily contingent on the material requirements and propriety connected with both time and place.

The classical architecture of one era will not take shape in the same way as that of another, nor will the architecture of one place necessarily resemble that of a different place even at the same time. Conventions such as patterns of use, fashion, language and ways of building change over time and in different places, gaining their correctness through general acceptance and habit. This accepted knowledge and these skills and customs—-means by which we pursue the true, the beautiful and the good—-are guarded and handed on by the custodians of tradition to succeeding generations. As part of this transfer, the means of accessing truth is developed and changed according to the requirements of time and place. The tradition of one place may not be the same as that of another. The purpose of tradition is to bring into conformity the way we each pursue our ends in the particular with the best possible means of achieving those ends in the universal. In other words, tradition is the way in which our judgment is informed through the comparison of the way things are with the way things should be. Thus tradition is not about preserving a unique way of building, but of ensuring that our buildings are the best they can possibly be.

The concept of imitation is essential to an understanding of tradition. The idea of mimesis, first formulated by Aristotle in his Poetics, became an explicit principle of creative formation and procedure from ancient Greece until the end of the Renaissance.[i] As James Ackerman has noted, the concept of imitation was understood in two ways both for the ancients and the thinkers of the Renaissance.[ii] Imitation in art occurred both in mimesis—the imitation of nature or human behavior, and in the imitation of preceding artists. The first mode of imitation forms the framework in which moral judgment is made possible, while the second provides a means of translating these universal truths for a particular time and place.

Imitation, as Quatremere de Quincy enunciated as late as 1823, was seen not as mere copying of natural forms or previous works, but as the embodiment of apparent universal rules governing the production of beauty in the work of art.[iii] These rules could be extracted from nature and perfected over time through the imitation of predecessors in a tradition. As Ackerman points out, imitation is inherently forward looking. By this he means that the artist is able to use imitation during the creation of the work of art. This view is in opposition to that of modern art historians who use the concept of “influence,” an idea only debatable after the creation of the work of art and in the service of the art historian.[iv]

How are we then to judge what is essential in a tradition? What can be discarded in the face of improved technology, or to suit changing political or physical conditions? This question has undoubtedly been the starting point of all architectural endeavors and probably troubled the architects of the fourteenth century as much as it did the proponents of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revivals. In a world so full of varying forms it has been difficult to determine what concepts and categories should guide contemporary practice. Compounded with a seeming abundance of choices, the void left by modernism’s denial of tradition has exaggerated its self-proclaimed goal of severing us from the past. We are faced not only with the questions raised by the contingent reality of tradition itself, but by any attempt to restore a tradition that has been systematically eradicated.

As citizens of the United States our tradition is that of the West. This is not to say that the tradition of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian architecture is the only one in our country, or the first, but that it is the visible part of our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The need to separate our new republic from the colonialism of England and justify our classically derived system of government prepared the United States for the embodiment of its constitution in an architecture of Western classicism. Little wonder that the author of the Declaration of Independence should also design the new Capitol of Virginia using the classicism of the Roman temple.

Fiske Kimball in his American Architecture asserts that “the classical ideal thus embodied was ultimately to rule in America to a degree unknown in Europe.”[v] Indeed, it was to precede it by more than a decade. The embodiment of the political order in the architecture of America is significant in that it points to the most essential truth of the classical tradition: the understanding that the highest good in life is the perfection of our nature, a good held since the Greeks to be accomplished through the moral life led in community. This is the self-evident truth behind the most just political systems of the past and the guiding principle in the American founding.

What this understanding means for architecture is that our ability to pursue our highest end as individuals is dependent on the freedom insured by our government, and that architecture serves this good as the embodiment of the state.[vi] In other words, architecture is the visible part of the more important activity of politics. Conversely, it is only in the freedom provided by well-ordered politics that architecture can be pursued. Vitruvius opens his De re aedificatoria by noting that it is in the realm of peace brought about by the Emperor Augustus’ conquest of the world that the opportunity and need for civic buildings arose, thus grounding architecture in a particular relationship with politics.[vii] Not only can mere building become architecture, but architecture can embody the polity and legitimate its claim to authority. By doing so, it can establish the means for its citizens to pursue the moral life.

Traditions are necessarily conventional. This means that they are contingent on materials, climate and circumstance. Conventional knowledge is particular, temporal and accidental, meaning that it could have been otherwise. Limited by the contingencies of both time and place, knowledge of convention is gained from experience and hearsay. The best pitch of a roof is dependant on the climate and characteristics of the location. That there exists a hierarchy of architectural orders and that they include an architrave, frieze and corona is not necessarily true (although the predominance of such features across traditions could point to a correspondence with a larger order). So too, the rules governing a given order’s proportions may vary with the changing requirements and traditions of the building and its purpose. Gaining as they do their acceptance through trial and error, such conventions are not necessary truths, or a priori knowledge, but point to a correspondence with an order outside of sense experience. Conventions have been adduced to be the best possible way of embodying the necessary truths of political life. Conventional knowledge on its own may be factually true and empirically verifiable, however, by its very nature it cannot be true in every instance. It can only tell us about the actual world and hence what is the case; it can say nothing about the ideal world and what should be the case.[viii]

When the American founders referred to the self-evident truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness they were invoking the necessary truth of nature, the repository first described by the ancient Greeks of the true, the beautiful and the good.[ix] As a priori knowledge, these truths of nature can be known through reason independently of experience or empirical evidence and are understood as incontrovertible imperatives. In platonic terms Nature can be described as the intuitive realm of perfect forms; for Vitruvius she was “the architect [who] placed the hinges as central axes” of the earth.[x] For our purposes it is sufficient to say that nature is the totality of universal truths both known and unknown including the laws of physics, the rules of geometry and logic, and the truths described in the American Constitution such as justice, liberty, the equality of man, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, nature includes not only the natural objects around us such as plants, animals and rocks, but the system of principles by which things can be explained according to reason and which were true prior to their discovery. More importantly, nature provides the mark against which rational judgment is made possible, the moral order which allows us to state confidently that democracy is the best form of government because it has as its goal the good of every citizen, and the goal of all our efforts as human beings.

We can posit the idea of democracy, though a state where every citizen has been treated equally has never existed, because we can see that a state where some or all are not free is imperfect. In other words, the truth of nature is revealed only through the comparison of things we experience or accept with things we know to be true through reason. The truth of nature is self-evident, but it can only be accessed through our experience of conventional truth. As Socrates points out to Meno, people do not enquire into what they fancy they know, though they may in fact be entirely ignorant of it, unless they begin to compare what they think they know with the truth of nature.[xi] For example, we are gifted with the concept of justice at birth, but we must experience different embodiments of justice in practice to be able to understand perfect justice, and we must always be ready to reexamine our necessarily incomplete knowledge of justice. This Socratic doubt leading to the discovery of the order of nature—to the intrinsic, universal and enduring—is made possible only through out experience with the extrinsic, particular and transient we encounter in the here and now.[xii]

For the pagan writers of antiquity truth was embodied in number. The comparison between knowledge of convention and nature could be expressed through the concept of the part and its relationship with the whole. Number and the relation between numbers, or proportion, were seen as ideal frameworks upon which the basis of nature was modeled. The application of number and proportion to conventional material resulted in measure, and the correct use of number and proportion resulted in the beauty of the building. To phrase this another way, measure was meaning embodied in experience through beauty.

For Vitruvius, architecture depended upon number in the form of Order, Arrangement, Eurhythmy, Symmetry, Propriety and Economy. In the first place, “ordering is the proportion to scale of the work’s correspondence to an overall proportional scheme of symmetry.”[xiii] In other words, for the work to be beautiful it must initially conform to a geometrical framework extending to the subsequent design.[xiv] Arrangement, eurhythmy, symmetry, propriety and economy are aspects of this proportional application of number to material and depend on measure, which determines the relationships that make up proportion. At the center of this ideal proportional analogy Vitruvius placed the human body, described in the correspondence between the form of the extended human figure within the perfect geometric shapes of the square and circle.[xv] The anthropomorphic analogy was subsequently taken as the beginning of classical imitation and dominated architectural theory well through the sixteenth century.

According to Vitruvius the architect employs both conventional knowledge gained through experience, which Vitruvius termed fabrica, and the knowledge of the necessary truths of nature to explain a work’s beauty through ratiocinatio, or reasoned judgment. Just as the limbs of the body are proportioned in relation to the whole within a meaningful framework, beautiful buildings must have a relationship between their elements and the whole corresponding to their enduring purpose. The perfect geometrical forms within which the finite proportions of the human body are inscribed allow us to explain their beauty according to a higher meaning. Thus measure is essential for Vitruvius in the application of proportion to material, but only insofar as it serves the meaning inherent in the number it defines.

Renaissance thinkers such as Leon Battista Alberti took the tradition of Socratic skepticism, or the understanding that expertise must include both the knowledge of convention and of nature to its highest level, analytically breaking up all accepted thought into its constituent parts and reassembling them in a way that could answer the requirements of new and changing circumstances. Alberti, in his own words, "never stopped exploring, considering, and measuring everything, and comparing the information through line drawings, until [he] had grasped and understood fully what each had to contribute in terms of ingenuity and skill,” or until he had determined through measure the dimensions imitated by the ancients from nature.[xvi] Critical to this ability was the understanding that the content of a thing was more important then its form, and that form served as the access to a thing’s content.

The essence of the modernist movement lies in the mistaken belief that this Socratic doubt, instigated by our encounter with conventional truth, can only be answered by conventional truth, or fact. When Enlightenment thinkers realized the possibilities of the connection between natural and conventional truth based upon improvements in the science of measurement their Socratic doubt of received ideas turned to a revolutionary doubt in the very meaning of the universe. As soon as the measure of a thing (formerly a means of extracting a material object from a universal idea) became the thing’s very meaning, the imitation of nature by architects became pointless. While previous thought had held that regardless of the form of a thing such as the universe, the meaning behind it was immutable, the new view held that the way we perceive the universe, or the form of a thing, was all we could know about it, and therefore the way it should be.

Artists and architects, in the tradition of Socrates, have always questioned accepted truths and sought to translate them into the language of their own time. However, the Enlightenment’s rejection of inherent meaning required that artists’ translations could only be descriptive, meaning that they now relied on measure devoid of meaning. Imitation, in order to avoid the trap of mere copying, must be undertaken analytically. This means that, just as Alberti carefully studied all the ways in which the greatest buildings had treated specific conditions thereby arriving at an understanding of the universal they all pointed toward, imitation must be undertaken with a thorough knowledge of the whole body of traditional architecture and extract from each model pieces of the eventual solution for the given set of conditions. Imitation in the Enlightenment became the descriptive copying of the measurements and particulars of specific buildings. It was no longer the analytical treatment of precedents as a kit of parts capable of innumerable possibilities, all working within the framework of a building’s inherent purpose.

In order to judge what is essential in a tradition and what may be discarded in the face of improved technology, it will be necessary to recover our ability to think analytically. In other words, we must recover the understanding of imitation. The twentieth-century Italian architectural theorist Saverio Muratori has posited the existence of two types of consciousness essential to all architectural traditions. Spontaneous consciousness is entirely conventional and, though invariably traditional, lacks the analytical capacity for imitation. It could be described as something quite similar to Vitruvius’ fabrica, or practice. Spontaneous consciousness is simply the way things are built. Critical consciousness, on the other hand, represents the theoretical side of architecture. "When someone builds his own house with his own hands, he does not follow the dictates of the various architectural schools or currents and does not choose to build it out of structural steel or tree trunks without distinction: he does it as a house is built at that particular moment and in his own cultural area, thus acting in full spontaneous consciousness. Acting with critical consciousness is almost the opposite: when we are going through one of those critical periods . . . people are obliged to choose what they are doing, but let us make it clear, they do not choose having acquired greater maturity but out of uncertainty that what they are doing is right or wrong, in the absence of their community codifying what is right and wrong."[xvii] Muratori describes this modern absence of communal consensus as a crisis, carefully reminding us that the term does not necessarily denote a catastrophe, but rather the point at which an unresolved question is recognized and addressed. Critical consciousness is for Muratori both the cause of modernism and the only means of returning to and continuing architectural tradition. "If it is impossible to resuscitate spontaneous consciousness when we no longer have it, it is wise to exercise critical consciousness for the best. And the best that this can produce is to stick to the world of spontaneous consciousness, i.e. to recuperate what we would do if we had continued to operate through it."[xviii] It is only with our critical consciousness that we can regain the necessary ability to compare what is with what should be.

This is accomplished, according to Muratori, through the analytical “reading” [lettura] of the great buildings and cities of the past and the extraction from them of the essential human patterns of building. Rather than merely copying details—roof pitches, façades, column diminution or plans—the traditional architect must break down all the examples of the way in which buildings in the tradition conventionally treat specific problems, and from them reassemble a theory of universal types of architecture, both on the scale of the individual building scale and that of the larger city. Central to this endeavor is the understanding that although there may be new uses for buildings and cities, there are a limited number of building and urban types. These types derive from universal constants among buildings and cities.

Modernism attempted to replace spontaneous consciousness, a principle intimately linked with tradition, with a wholly theoretical vision of the future. As a result, however, architects have come to rely completely on conventional knowledge and the denial of analytical thought. In the attempt to enthrone critical consciousness as the sole means of producing art, modernist thinkers have been forced back upon conventional truth utterly devoid of theory and meaning. Modernism, for all its insistence on originality and freedom from tradition, is in fact a slave merely to the way things are done. Neoclassicism, the ultimate manifestation of modernism, is motivated to copy only particulars in just the same way that twentieth-century modern architecture can do nothing more than conform to the whims of its architect.

In order to comprehend what is unchanging in traditional architecture, we must understand that while conventional truth cannot prescribe the way things should be, it is the only means by which we are led to compare the way things are with the way they ought to be. Practice informs theory. Conventional knowledge provides the means by which we can access the order of nature. It is only through the analytical imitation of convention that we can apprehend the universal order of nature and make manifest the city of God.

NOTES

[i] Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. (New York: Random House, 1941), 478.
[ii] Ackerman, “Imitation.” Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 64.
[iii] Quatremère de Quincy. An Essay on the Nature, the End, and Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. Trans. J.C. Kent. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1837), 11.
[iv] Ackerman, 65.
[v] Kimball, American Architecture. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 75.
[vi] Westfall, Carroll William, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 49.
[vii] Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio. Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Ingrid D. Rowland. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 21.
[viii] Westfall, Architectural Principles, 56.
[ix] Westfall, Carroll William. “Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur M. Melzer, et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. 72-91), 76.
[x] Vitruvius, 109.
[xi] Plato. “The Meno.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 389.
[xii] Westfall, in Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture, has described this doubt as “pious skepticism,” which has been replaced by the impious skepticism of modernity.
[xiii] Vitruvius, 24.
[xiv] Vitruvius, Commentary, 149.
[xv] Vitruvius, 47.
[xvi] Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Trans. Joseph Rykwert. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), 155.
[xvii] Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology. Florence, Italy: Alinea, 2001), 36.
[xviii] Caniggia and Maffei, 42.

Exploring Shockoe Slip and the Rock Landing

2010-04-09T02:43:00.011-04:00

Urbanismo continued the Tuesday evening tours of the oldest parts of Richmond. This week we visited the most organic section of the city, the area settled in the seventeenth century as the trading village of Shockoes. We looked at its connection with the Rock Landing. The landing served as the dock of Richmond until the new City Dock, an extension of the James River Canal, was fashioned in 1809. This section of the city is also the most heavily altered. Its broken lineaments often call on our most active imagination to visualize or even to locate the neighborhood in its historic context.

We began in the Shockoe Slip, one of Richmond's most appealing places and once the center of an international trade in flour and tobacco. In the nineteenth century, the city's crowded commercial district clustered around this small triangular plaza. The apppearance of the Slip has changed dramatically since the 1880s and even within our memory. The Shockoe Wareouse vanished long ago. The area continued to serve as a manufacturing and trading center until the 1960s. The buildings were eventually rehabilitated to serve as restaurants, bars, and shops, beginning in the 1970s.

In many ways the Slip was more visually effective before the rehabilitation than it is today. The cobbles used to pave the plaza formerly ran right up to the fountain with only the stone bollards serving to keep the wagons at bay but allowing the horses to get up close. Please remove the foundation planting and the anachronistic horse-head top element with the light globe! Hasn't anyone seen pictures of Rome?

This map, dating from about 1809, is one of the first to show detail in the area around the Rock Landing, labelled near the center of the map. It appears the center of the town of Shockoes consisted of the row of lots along the landing including the "Ferry Lot," the alley behind, and the narrow cross street later called Fifteenth Street. This filled the area between Shockoe Creek and the base of the bluff. The low-lying meadows behind, through which the creek meandered, were left undeveloped for any years. The large empty section to the north is the Mayo property on Council Chamber Hill, soon to be subdivided into lots by Col. Mayo. The oddly shaped tracts to the west, corresponding to the high ground occupied by Shockoe Slip today, undoubtedly were the result of adaptations to the steep topography.

Above is seen a map of the area around the mouth of Shockoe Creek, made about 1820. Shockoe Slip is in the lower left corner. It shows not only the informal shapes of the alleys and streets, but also the original curving shape of Shockoe Creek and the very narrow and straight new bed it received in the early nineteenth century just to the right of lot 334. The odd-shaped lots and crooked alleys date to the distribution of land here in irregular parcels corresponding to the curving route of the old road through the area and which were divided up into lots by the owners, principally Buchanan, Ross, Coutts and McPherson. The alleys, some lined with small lots, were given names such as Lombardy, Exchange, Cypress, True Heart, Tobacco, and Byrd's. The Rock Landing was now superseded by Water Street, seen in front of lots 323, 324, and 339. The "Old County Road" is Governor Street and was the principal way up the bluff to the top of Shockoe Hill.

The curving form of the Governor Street and the continued irregularity of its extension as Thirteenth Street to Cary is clear on this map and on the 1889 Sanborn Map 15 shown later. Above is a view from Main Street looking up "the old County Road."

Shockoe Slip was located on the south side of Main Street at the foot of Governor Street, down which most of the hogsheads of up-country tobacco were rolled on their way to the great warehouses that had stood on this site since the late seventeenth century. From the warehouse, safely out of danger of flooding, the tobacco could be rolled directly down to the boat landing.just next door. Here the area is seen on an 1859 map.

The map shown above is a Sanborn Insurance Map of 1889. Shockoe Slip and the Shockoe Warehouse are seen to the upper left and Fourteenth Street extends away to the lower right. The canal has been overlaid with a complex web of railroad tracks.

The map at the very top of the blog, dating from 1781, shows three buildings at the site of the Shockoe Warehouse and two at the location of Byrd's Warehouse on Fourteenth Street. Mordecai, Richmond's Herodotus, confirms that there were two warehouses (or "inspections") in this part of town in about 1800: Shockoe Warehouse, "a mere cluster of wooden sheds," and Byrd's, a brick structure on the northeast corner of Franklin and Fourteenth streets. Shockoe Warehouse shows up as a square structure on the west side of Thirteenth Street next on the 1809 map above. Byrd's, established in the late seventeenth century, and rebuilt and relocated several times, was long gone when Mordecai wrote and another warehouse had been built on the canal basin. In addition, Seabrook's Warehouse had been constructed in Shockoe Valley.

The Shockoe Slip fountain was put up in 1910 to provide water to the draft animals that had arrived at their destination. The Slip provided a open area at the entry gate of the great Shockoe Warehouse. It is the triangular building in the center of the map above. The warehouse was fronted by an arcaded Italianate market building, seen above. This housed the Tobacco Exchange, built after the Civil War. The site of the exchange, where the Martin Agency now stands, was to our back as we photographed the fountain.

The plaza is undoubtedly the result of the crashing together of the irregular lanes of Shockoes with the regular grid of 1768 Shockoe Hill. The distinguished Columbian Block, with its third-floor Grain Exchange or market, forms the angled east side of the plaza. The Slip continues south as an angled street running toward the river.

It is immediately noticeable that the Slip is on an elevated arm or outcrop that projects from Shockoe Hill to a point just above the canal. This is demonstrated by the deep, sunken alley to the rear of the Columbian Block seen here from ground level in the Slip. The Slip continues in the form of an angled street until it ends in a sharp declivity about a block to the south.

To get reach the edge of the bluff, the Slip crosses Canal Street on a concrete bridge. Canal Street was cut through the outcrop in the early twentieth century, creating a dramatic juxtaposition of levels. The warehouse previously extended out and filled the entire hillock.

This view, photographed from the end of Shockoe Slip, shows the site of the Shockoe Warehouse.

Returning to the entrance to the Slip at Main and Thirteenth streets, we passed a familiar sight- one of two cannons on Main Street doing sentry duty as bollards. This one used to stand at a much more rakish angle and was unpainted, as Urbanismo recalls in years gone by. We proceeded by way of Virginia Street to the gate in the flood wall at Fourteenth Street and walked along the river bank at the base of Shockoe Slip.

The legendary sewer-pipe walkway under the railroad gave us a good view of the substantial granite embankment that runs along the entire river edge of Richmond from the site of the Haxall Mills to the the mouth of Shockoe Creek. The new flood wall runs close behind it west of Fourteenth Street, but angles back to leave outside a large flat area east of Fourteenth Street, formerly the site of railroad yards.

Here is the large, unoccupied area near the Fourteenth Street flood wall gates. Haxall Mills was located to the left, south of Shockoe Slip and powered by the water in the canal. After the demise of the canal system, the area around Fourteenth Street was used as a rail yard for the many trains entering Richmond from south of the river.

The Richmond Dock ran from Pear Street to Fourteenth Street. Here the western end is seen in an 1889 Sanborn Map. A small basin was located east of Seventeenth, where a drawbridge crossed the long, wide canal that formed the dock. Shockoe Creek ran under the dock basin roughly parallel to Sixteenth Street. It still empties into the river in the same location.The straight line to the left of the creek's mouth represents the stone embankment.

This drawing shows the drawbridge that allowed Seventeenth Street to cross the Richmond Dock. The company of Davenport and Morris, seen above on Dock Street in 1893. According to the maps shown above and to the testimony of Mordecai, the Rock Landing is buried immediately to the left, out of the picture, under the site of the Richmond gas works.

Urbanismo followed the stone river embankment past the graceful arches of Fourteenth Street (formerly Mayo's) Bridge, and then proceeded back through the floodwall and along Fourteenth Street up toward Main Street.

Here we saw the former Richmond Hardware Company Building on the right at Fourteenth and Dock street and the old Southern RR Depot (it lost its south end to the new canal project). The Rock Landing was about one square to the east (right).

Here the curving irregularity of Fourteenth Street shows its pivotal position. The angled route to Mayo's Bridge meets the 1737 grid to the right and the less regular street patterns to the left. The vacant lot in the center of the photograph above was the location of the frame building that served as the Capitol until Jefferson's temple-form building could be completed on the hill.

This Sanborn Map from 1889 shows the squares north of Cary from Thirteenth to Fifteenth streets. Lombard Alley is located in the center of the lower left-hand square. Except for the southeast quadrant east of Virginia Street, the buildings and alley remain largely intact. Lombard Alley is seen below left looking west from Fourteenth Street. The extension of the alley to the east is seen to the right .

Here on the right is that characteristic Richmond feature, the parking kiosk. The photograph on the left shows the west end of Lombard Alley looking east from Thirteenth Street. A series of stone bollards protected the building's foundation.

            Urbanismo finally returned to the Shockoe Slip. To the left is a view along Cary Street looking west from Thirteenth and, on the right, a view of the wonderful scribed granite sidewalk slabs at the corner of Thirteenth and Cary. The variety in sidewalks in the area confirms Mordecai's remark that "the dealers who wished to entice the ladies into their shops (stores, I beg pardon) would present a paved entrance; those who sought rougher customers offered a rough reception, over gravel or cobble stone." Here, there are three kinds of finishes on the enormous stones, designed to give good traction. Some were diagonally grooved, others given a straight groove, and still others treated with a bush hammer. The corner stones were given a miter joint.

            Urbanismo will continue the touring later with a look at nearby Council Chamber Hill.

URBAN PALIMPSESTS

2010-03-29T02:04:00.008-04:00

Urbanismo took the opportunity of spring-like weather last week to explore the urban fabric of the oldest part of Richmond. A small company, including an obliging photographer, walked the boundaries of the original 1737 town. A pedestrian's view of the city brought home the geographic, historic, and architectural complexity of the neighborhood. Since we walked the boundary of the district (with a few divergations), we didn't, by any means, look at all the buildings and streetscapes. We began, as seen above, with a walk south along 17th, beginning at the location, since 1782, of the city's market. 17th Street (originally 1st Street) was the westernmost edge of the town until the 1760s. The market was built on the city's common, where washing was done in Shockoe Creek, which flows underground just beyond the former YMCA Hotel in the background.

A quick review: The conventional "Tidewater" town of Richmond was laid out at the falls of the James River in 1737. An uninflected 28-block rectangular grid was organized along an axis formed by a pre-existent road on the natural terrace above the river’s edge, extending southeast from the ford of Shockoe Creek that separated it from an earlier trading village called "Shockoes." The market was eventually located just left of the added range of lots identified by the letters A to O on this copy of the famous Mayo plan. Lots 97 and 98 at the upper right were donated to be the site of the town's church and churchyard by William Byrd II. Our trip takes us around the outside edge of the grid starting in the lower left-hand corner and proceeding counter-clockwise.

Each two-acre block or “square” contained four nearly square lots and was separated from adjacent blocks by sixty-five-foot-wide streets. The banks along Shockoe Creek and the waterfront outside the grid were designated as a common for the use of residents in pasturing, fishing, or other activities. The lots filled in over the next 130 years. The section is seen in the 1864 woodcut above looking west from the east end of town with Church Hill on the right.

We moved down to the southwest corner of the town, not too far from the edge of Shockoe Creek and the now-invisible site of the Rock Landing, where goods were loaded for the trip down river. This view shows the overhead railroad tracks that create, with the elevated Interstate 95, a shadow over the old landing place. These are some of the late-nineteenth-century industrial buildings that replaced the houses, shops, and warehouses that made up the former streetscape near the edge of the port of Richmond.

The ancient connection of this section of the city with the sale and processing of tobacco is apparent here on 18th Street near Cary and in later photographs that show the many warehouses and factories dedicated to its preparation for sale. The two buildings flanking the street, with their tall, deeply shadowed facades, are the among the most architecturally powerful of Richmond's industrial structures.

Urbanismo continued along the southern edge of the 1737 town. This parking lot at the corner of Cary and 19th streets is an example of the open land that serves the parking demands of the city but works against the potential urban heath of the district.

The long, impressive row of twentieth-century tobacco factories, converted for institutional and residential purposes, line the terrace of land above the city's historic port. Before the change to heavy industry, the section facing Main Street had been home to several generations of stores with accommodation above for the shop-keeper's family. Several fires in the early nineteenth century prompted the replacement of the frame shops with brick commercial buildings, often built by developers in rows of two or more stores.

The squares on the south side of Cary Street (to the right in the snapshot) were part of the town's common land and were sold in the 1780s to finance the construction of the new public buildings associated with the move of the capital to Richmond.

The lots became waterfront property in 1816 with the construction of the Richmond Dock on the north side of Chapel Island. In about 1850, John Enders built a row of fourteen warehouses on these lots between 18th and 21st streets to serve the shipping of goods by boat. Several of the warehouses burned, but those that remained (seen above) were utilized by the Confederate government to house Libby Prison.The warehouses along the water-front were replaced by lumber yards and small industry in the late nineteenth century.

Here the tour proceeded east along Main Street. The factories fill much of the southern side of the street, while a later generation of twentieth-century stores occupy the north side and sections of the south.

The location of the old Henrico County Courthouse always seemed strange, since Richmond was removed from Henrico in the late eighteenth century when it was made a city. It persisted at this location and served as the heart of the city's public life until the city received a government and a market hall in 1782.

The courthouse was built in 1750 and located in the middle of 23rd Street. Since the town lacked any public land on Main Street, the court took advantage of the cross street to provide a specialized building at an urban scale and in a position that rhetorically accentuated its public purpose. That building was replaced in 1850 with the building shown above. The current building, embedded in the factory row, was constructed in the late nineteenth century.

The extraordinary miniature bridge of sighs built of corrugated iron and leading from the jail to the courtroom had eluded the attention of Urbanismo for many years.

This poured concrete addition to the rear of the courthouse has architectural atractions not unrelated to Regency-era London.

The view from the original courthouse location shows the dominance of the site on the bluff of the eighteenth-century home of the prominent Adams family. Their neighbor, William Palmer, built the house still standing at the summit of the hill about 1810. Enlarged in 1859, it forms the centerpiece of the nineteenth-century Convent of the Visitation, now the ecumenical center called Richmond Hill. Franklin Street runs at the foot of the bluff.

This image shows the buildings that crowned the bluff in the late nineteenth century. In the foreground is the 18th-century Richard Adams House. The enlarged Palmer House is seen in the distance.

This store/residence on the north side of Main Street between 21th and 22st streets is one of few along the street to date to antebellum times.

The surviving row of brick shops across Main Street, although built in the late nineteenth century, provides a valuable sense of urban continuity.

The strong brickwork and articulated facades of these factories provides an exhilarated perspective of the city dock, elevated railroad, and the river beyond.

At Main and 25th streets, Urbanismo paused to better understand the topography, so easy to miss from a car. Main Street slopes gently up from Seventeenth Street. Here we stand at the eastern end of the William Byrd II town looking up 25th Street toward St. John's Church. Although the slope has been amended during the nineteenth century, it is clear that this was always the place where the bluff could be ascended.

As we proceeded up 25th Street, the character of the revitalized neighborhood of Church Hill overrides the mixed building stock of Main Street. Early nineteenth-century buildings, like the 1846 frame house in the center distance, survive amid bland infill, like the Charity Square Condominiums on the right and antebellum tobacco factories like the Turpin-Yarbrough Building on the left, now known as the Pohlig Brothers Paper Box Company.

Building on hilly land involves a lot of grading and has the potential to make ideal places for urban gardening. Here are some of the granite retaining walls found all around Richmond. This one is seen from the alley on the east side of 25th Street north of Franklin. The early spring garden belongs the frame house seen in the previous photograph.

The first section of Richmond and the addition to the town on Shockoe Hill were laid out, as was the long custom in Virginia, in two-acre blocks (always properly called "squares"). The owner of each half-acre lot was free to build facing any adjoining street and to subdivide the lot in any manner he chose. Thus standard lots and regular alleys are not to be met with in Richmond east of First Street. Such alleys as exist are the result of the provisions of generations of developers and of negotiations between adjoining owners.

The ways of alleys in the older parts of Richmond are unpredictable. A brief detour also provided a great reward. The alley between Grace and Broad streets turned and dwindled to a narrow cobbled path as we approached 25th Street not far from St. Patrick's Church.

                   As we turned the corner at St. John's Churchyard and walked west on Broad Street, the northern edge of Richmond in 1737, we looked across at the Patrick Henry Park, a well-meant bit of 1950s urban redevelopment. The park and the adjacent firehouse were part of the deliberate effort to give a dignified setting to St. John's Church by the removal of a square full of "unsightly and unsuitable" buildings. In fact the square remains empty most of the time and robs the churchyard of a strong northern edge. As currently laid out, the park contributes less to the civic good than would a block of houses and shops.

                The high brick walls all around the churchyard show the degree to which the streets have been cut down to improve street grades.

Carrington Row, one of Richmond's most important examples of Neo-classical domestic architecture, is a row of three dwellings unified with a marching row of stucco antae (a kind of Greek pilaster) and an abstracted Greek Doric entablature. Carrington Row served in 1957 as a pilot project for the creation of a kind of "Old Town," which at that time Richmond wholly lacked. The managers of the Historic Richmond Foundation were able to act with more abandon in 1957 than they would be today. All over Church Hill porches were removed or restored, and at Carrington Row the restorers whimsically left the added Greek Revival porch at the east end and the Italianate hood at the west end. Only the central opening retains its original appearance.

The gardens to the rear and the brick and cast iron urban mews park along the alley are wonderful evocations of the restraint, humanity, and civic largesse that could be brought by landscape designers and their patrons to urban projects in the post-War era. These gardens, designed by the firm of Griswold, Winter, and Swain of Pittsburgh and carefully maintained for fifty years by volunteers, manage to express the scale, detail, and ease of a private landscape in a public setting.

Here is a good view also of the characteristic treatment of paving in Church Hill. The sidewalks are laid in red paving bricks in a herringbone pattern. The alleys are paved with cobbles, laid with less rigor, but always with a central gutter. A distinctive apron is provided wherever the alleys cross the sidewalks. In some cases these aprons may be the remains of the adjoining street paving, but it provides an important and consistent color and material palette giving welcome depth to the city's design language.

Our trek brought us now to the long slope down from church hill to the bottom of Shockoe Valley. It is hard to realize that Broad Street did not connect across the Shockoe Valley or climb Church Hill until well into the nineteenth century. As we walked the old herringbone sidewalks, we enjoyed looking a the variety of houses that still line Broad Street from the top of the hill to the bottom. Whether built in 1850, 1880, or 1910, the houses have a remarkable family resemblance. The emphasis on decorative fashion that we learn from publishers of style handbooks conceals the essential typological continuity of the Richmond urban house.

As we saw at the top of the hill Richmond houses were often built by developers in block of two, three, or more row houses. Where the land is sharply graded and an alley is impossible to provide, some Richmond houses have narrow tunnels between the English basements to allow service access to the rear. In this brick double house midway along Broad Street the chimneys shared by the two dwellings are supported on overhead arches.

This lot on the south side of Broad Street, is typical of the many empty spots in the Shockoe Valley. Infill housing had begun to re-edge Broad Street just before the recent economic collapse. While much of the new housing is shallow in its concept and detailing, it is in the right place.

Here we turned south along the western edge of 1737 Richmond. The Market is ahead of us and the cupola of the Masonic Hall visible to the left. There is a lot of empty space in this area, much of it parking for the nightspots in the market area. This is the area that would have be radically transformed by the proposed ball park. It isn't clear what will happen in the next decade, but the past one has been great for the urban fabric of Richmond. Fueled by the Historic Preservation Tax Credit, the citizens of the city have renewed the vast majority of the city's historic buildings in much the same way that they were built, spontaneously. There has been little government intervention in the historic area, few large-scale development schemes with the influence to make changes at an urban scale, and there are few franchise restaurants or businesses in the historic area.

A variety of owner-operated businesses, dense occupied housing, and active foot traffic gave evidence of Richmond’s health and the depth of its revitalization. Another, less obvious, demonstration of the city's strength was the extreme diversity of building types and ages. Instead of a homogeneous fabric of historic buildings, the variety of buildings indicates the depth of history and the long-term vitality of the city in the American context. In fact, only three buildings survive from the eighteenth century and very few from even the antebellum period. Most date from successive rebuildings in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

Urbanismo promises to keep walking and keep looking. Next week we plan to examine the street patterns of the old town of Shockoes and of Council Chamber Hill, followed by an expedition to examine the boundaries of the 1768 plat of the extension of the city onto Shockoe Hill.

Rural Extensions: Dinwiddie County Architecture

2010-03-09T13:41:00.003-05:00

All through the winter, Urbanismo has been at work far from our customary haunts. We have been occupied several days a week with the cataloging of old houses in one of the quietest and least urban of places: Southside Virginia. There we have visited some of the most powerfully evocative places from a seemingly ancient past in the venerable county of Dinwiddie. The landscape is made up almost entirely of small winding roads, modern agricultural businesses, crossroads churches, pulp-wood plantations in every stage of propagation from clear-cut to mature, and abandoned country stores (the stretch of Route 1 south of DeWitt is startlingly beautiful, quiet, and undeveloped). The county has been spared much of the devastation of suburban sprawl due to a large extent to the lack of economic growth in the adjoining city of Petersburg, yet it has suffered a terrible forgetting nonetheless.

The small houses of freed slaves and tenants, the farmhouses of the proud black and white landowners of the post war and early twentieth century can be seen in overgrown fields, most abandoned and unrecorded. Great plantations and middling mansions, set up to be showplaces of order in a now invisible landscape, are to be seen only in truncated remnants, sometimes perched uncomfortably in center of now-dated housing developments, many shorn of their accompanying villages of outbuildings and barns. When these outbuildings survive to be recorded by us, they are usually dilapidated and disused. Often the old houses serve as weekend or commuter homes. Our experience shows that almost no-one is at home during the week in Dinwiddie County.

While much farming takes place in the county on a variety of scales from small to large, a drive down one of the many newly forested roads is a constant reminder of the wreckage of a farm-based life across the state. Here there is none of the lush but shallow horse-oriented landscape that has replaced authentic small farms in areas colonized from the cities. Hunting camps and clubs abound. The most rewarding winter sights are the silhouetted groves of oaks that cluster around many farm houses and churches, set aside for the comfort of the muggy Southside summers.

The traditional farm life lives on among a number of older farmers, some of whom spoke to us of farming with horses and mules in the 1960s and later and whose farms are still replete with granaries, corn cribs, hay barns, and the tall log dark-fired tobacco barns so characteristic of the county’s fields. The old patterns of stability continues at a greater depth under the surface, harder to detect for those who don’t take part, but the empty trailers and proliferating roadside Cape Cods indicate the rise and triumph of another way of using the land. One is reminded of the closing, elegiac words of Henry Glassie’s now-classic study of conservative architectural and farming traditions in the Piedmont counties of Goochland and Louisa:

The old farmer of Middle Virginia is left standing alone at the end of a row. He watches, without motion, the dust spun from the auto’s tires settle through his garden. He lifts his chin from the back of his hand, his hand from the hoe. He shoulders the hoe and crosses the yard, glancing to the left at the sleek mule in his pen, and drops himself into a chair on the porch, where, efficient and swift, the hands of his wife click snap beans into a pot. Staring down into the middle distance, he says to himself alone, “Many changes, many changes, many changes, many changes.”

Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, 1976.

The first forgetting of Dinwiddie was the destruction in the Civil War of all its public records before the 1830s. A survey sponsored in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration first inventoried the county’s oldest houses, already in attenuated condition. The loss of memory was scarcely made up by a thin record of owners and dates attached to blurred and enigmatic photographs. Antiquarianism had overtaken the recorders; in keeping with the times, 1830 was considered the terminus ante quem of significance in furniture and architecture. Everything later was discounted. The eighteenth century was most honorable. Invented dates have since been assumed for many houses far in advance of possibility. It is astoundingly difficult to say for sure when and for whom many of the oldest and most important houses were built (and there remain quite a few).

The second forgetting has been the destruction of the historic landscape. Since the mid-twentieth century the loss has been disheartening. Two-thirds of the houses recorded in a survey of pre-1830 houses done in 1969 are vanished. Where ten years ago, most old houses looked out at the world through the refractions of mortised wood sashes, today almost every occupied dwelling in Dinwiddie stares at the viewer with the irrevocable, sterile glare of lightweight vinyl windows. Similarly, vinyl siding renders mute and hulking the delicate solidity of a well-built country church. To the eye of an historian of the rural landscape, the visible wreckage is so great in a few areas of the county that it is almost as if a war has devastated the countryside and left only ruins. The invisible transformation of the people of Dinwiddie may only be less palpable to outsiders.

The industrialization of the activity of building and of maintaining existing building completes the process. It becomes increasingly impossible to make traditional decisions, due to the cost and unavailability of materials and workmanship and of the memory of their meaning. In the end, however, it turns out that it is not the houses that matter but what goes on in them. As traditional patterns are lost, the rural order deteriorates from community into mere arrangement. It is all too likely that cataloging of artifacts serves no civic purpose here, except perhaps to set apart some products of the former times, undeniably hallowed by their close connection with the powerful current of human life lived in liberty, what Aristotle called “the Good Life.”

The Cage

2010-01-31T03:31:00.007-05:00

Richmond's administration of justice at the city-scale consisted, at first, of the punishment of minor miscreants, using the ancient means of public shaming and of more serious offenders, by flogging. English market halls often included a cage, or grilled enclosure, where those who were picked up at night for disturbing the peace were exhibited and mocked by their neighbors. Richmond had an unusual structure, also known as “the Cage,” which functioned until 1827. Located beside the Market Hall, it contained open cells where “night-owls,” or other miscreants were held in a building designed in the architectural form of a three-story cupola. The cupola as a rooftop architectural element often housed a clock or bell, which, in the absence of any other chronological standard, established the time around which daily life was ordered. It was usually reserved for use on official buildings as a sign and function of the authority of government in both England and the colonies. Similarly, the public scales located at the market set the standard for honest measure in commerce.

Richmond City Market in 1814. Cage as shown in context of Richmond City Market.

Detail from Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy.

It appeared that, in Richmond’s Cage, that the market hall’s spire had been placed on the ground nearby to perform its function as regulator of the community’s order in a more literal fashion. The second and apparently third stages were divided into wedge-shaped cells protected by gratings, where prisoners could be observed and shamed by the passing populace. The structure was built on a stone first floor and, with apparent ironic intention, was surmounted by a dome.

Richmond City Market in 1814. Cage as shown in detail from Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy.

The building it most resembles, and from which it most likely takes its form, is the market cross, a small, often octagonal structure that was a fixture of many English market squares. It evolved from the symbol of God’s blessing on the commerce of the market town to a secular representation of political authority from which proclamations were read or to which shackles were attached for public whippings [Mark Girouard. The English Town].

The City Market

2010-01-31T02:58:00.019-05:00

Commerce must always be civilized. A market’s prosperity provides the material basis for the citizens’ pursuit of justice, but the goods of the market are not the same as the good of the citizens. The manner of conducting the market, and the visible place the market occupies in the city, must make clear this hierarchical distinction that allows the civic values that embody transcendental ends to predominate in the lives of the citizens.

Carroll William Westfall. The City in the Image of Man.
Journal of Anthropological Psychology No. 11, 2002.

Richmond's rise from provincial entrepot town to the status of a city occurred as it became the capital of the new commonwealth. One of the first acts of the new city government was to provide a market. The city was able to endow the market with a hall in which to conduct and regulate the market with fourteen years. Study of the Richmond market's history in the context of American and European traditions makes it clear just how closely associated the market is with the life of the city. Market halls, in the eighteenth century, before most regulatory functions were hived off to purpose-built city halls and jails, were the centers and regulators of civic life. Here were located official scales and timepieces, constables and lockups, magistrates and courts, and the public records.

Markets, since time immemorial, were located and ordered to serve the public interest. They were places of carefully regulated competition, where sellers were licensed, weights and measures were standardized, quality was guaranteed, and selling outside the market not permitted. Medieval traditions of market laws, continued in the New World, functioned to protect citizens from profiteering, fraud, and cheating, provided a ready supply of high-quality produce to townspeople, and guaranteed the "market peace," which meant a safe and profitable setting for both consumers and vendors. This applied to foodstuffs as well as other produce of the farms around the city. Sellers were not permitted to sell outside the market.

The Richmond City Market, like the Henrico County Courthouse and the Capitol, was built on public land off the official grid. In this case the market stood on the commons or public land along Shockoe Creek, on the edge of the original town. It served as the seat of one of the three governing bodies hierarchically ordering the life of the city and promoting the civic good. The county seat remained in the center of the old town along the river, while the state government established itself in Jefferson's redesigned new city on the hill to the west. It was not surprising that the city government placed itself directly in the middle. The market hall was built at the hinge between the two sections of the city, at the point where the main road crossed Shockoe Creek, not far from the boat landing and the long-established tobacco warehouses.

Richmond was chartered as a city in 1782. The legislature established a common council and court of hustings as the local government, a clerk of the market, and a sergeant. The new section of the city on Shockoe Hill was selected as the site of the new capitol. The state authorities, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, planned to make a new city around and on six adjoining public squares on the hill. Jefferson’s program for the new city, enacted in 1780, included a market on one of the squares. The market, however, failed to materialize, undoubtedly because there was insufficient population on the hill to support it.

The Richmond City Market in 1814. Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy. The building to the left is the end of a new brick row on Main Street west of the “Market Bridge” over Shockoe Creek.

The “Market of the City of Richmond” was founded by city ordinance in 1782. It was sited on the side of Seventeenth Street on public land beside the green, sloping common along Shockoe Creek next to Main Street and near the crossing. The first, temporary, market house was supported on locust posts. Wednesdays and Saturdays were set apart as “grand market days.” All goods carried into the city on those days were to remain in the public market until noon. It was significantly located at the hinge point between the new and old cities, at the nexus of major roads and port. For the next 150 years the City Market, with its daughter markets, was, for most residents and their suppliers, the center of urban life. For the first one hundred years, the market was emblematic of the entire urban order. Police, judicial, and city government functions were housed in the central market hall, before they split off into specialized buildings during the nineteenth century.

Richmond City Market in 1814. Detail of Market House of 1794 from

Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy. The three arches to the right were an addition.

Every market stood in some sort of precinct or square associated with the boundaries of the market regulations. The original market boundaries must have been informal, because in 1793, before building a market house, the Common Hall tasked a committee with the laying out of a market square. This square was somewhat different in form from the current market district. It occupied a 150- by 300-foot rectangle between the platted town and the creek. This square spanned Main Street, with equal space to either side of the street. The east end of new Stone Bridge projected fifty feet into the center of the west side of the square. The new brick Market House was built in 1794 on the north side of the street and the southern half of the square must have served as an open-air market.

Plat of Market Square, Minutes of the Common Council, 21 Dec. 1793.

The old shed was was torn down and sold, except for an addition that served as a fish market, retained for a while since fish markets were usually kept in a separate structure. A plan had been drawn up and the building built under the direction of a committee appointed by the Common Hall. The building measured thirty feet wide by one hundred feet long and appears to have been formed into eleven nine-foot bays, each containing an arched opening, although the later insurance drawing shows twelve arched bays in the main building and three in an extension to the north. A wide arch in the south end gave access to an eighteen-foot aisle flanked by six-foot-deep stalls corresponding to the arcade bays. The west wall, which backed up to the creek, was lined with nine stalls. The five stalls on the east alternated with four openings to the exterior. The northern two bays (eighteen feet) accommodated a "grain room" in the northwest corner adjacent to an eighteen- by twenty-foot space labeled "country market."

Plan of Market House, the Minutes of the Common Council, March 18, 1793

The hall appears to have been conceived of originally as a one-story building. Before it was completed, the Common Hall had added a second story. There is a gap in the city records, but the hall reappears in 1808, when the room above is to be fitted up and "conveniences provided for the called meetings of the hall". In 1811 and 1812, as the city government prepared to move to a new city hall, the market hall received considerable attention. A partition was added to accommodate the offices of the Market Clerk and the High Constable. The city refurnished the upper room to serve as the hustings courtroom and gave the city's rifle company permission to hold meetings in the upper room. At the same time posts and rails were place around the market square and the cage was repaired. An addition was made to the north.

Eventually, as the adjoining land was laid out in lots, the market stood in the middle of a widened section of Seventeenth Street lined with shops. It was composed of a long arcaded loggia for stalls and a second-floor public hall. As the city grew, the market was extended for a further block north to Grace Street. What appears to be a clock is shown in the pediment of the principal facade facing Main Street. This served as another representation of the ordering function of city government. Since each town set its own time in relation to the movement of the sun, it was necessary that there be an official timepiece by which watches and clocks could be set. Earlier, in 1793, the Governor had loaned a bell belonging to the capitol to be used as a public bell in the cupola of the Masonic Hall that filled that role.

The administration of justice at the the city's level was centered at the market hall. Punishment of minor offenses was prosecuted by exposure in the nearby stocks, a ducking stool, and the cage (see separate article here). Similarly, regional (county) justice was served at the courthouse and jail in the center of the original town and at the provincial (state) level at the Capitol and the new Virginia State Penitentiary on the western edge of the city. The three political scales were expressed architecturally at three points in the city, regionally in the east, locally at the center, and provincially in the west. Given the geographical barriers between sectors, each of the three polities were closely associated with an historic section of the city and with a differentiated building tissue.

The market hall is the earliest type of European government building. It is found from medieval Italy to the Netherlands in the Renaissance. From its earliest known example at Como in 1215, cited by Pevsner, the building type incorporated an arcaded market loggia on the ground floor and a single room above used for town hall and court. Although the government and market functions diverged in large cities during the late Middle Ages, the close identification of market and local government continued in regional market towns. The costs of local government were largely borne by the income derived from the stalls, as was its architectural manifestation in the form of an arcaded loggia. This pattern transferred for economic as much as political reasons to the colonies. Medieval market buildings with ground-floor arcades gave way to more classical forms, but the form most often remained very similar.

There were no market halls in the colonies until there was a sufficient population to require them. A small frame market house was built in Norfolk, possibly in the late seventeenth century. The form of the market hall was used for the frame Boston Town House in Massachusetts built in 1657 which stood in the middle of State Street. It was replaced in 1713 with the brick State House, which housed a merchant exchange on the first floor and the colonial government on the second.

The arcades of the 1794 Market Hall at Richmond are related to a long tradition of civic architecture. The market are almost always associated with extended arcades for both practical and symbolic reasons. Examples of arcades at hand include court houses and the Williamsburg Capitol. As Carl Lounsbury has observed, the compass-headed window or door opening was generally reserved for public buildings. The Virginia examples had their model s in England. The arched piazzas found at the Williamsburg Capitol and incorporated into courthouses in neighboring counties have their roots in English market halls and the courtyards of mercantile structures in London, Oxbridge colleges, and local buildings such as almshouses built in the seventeenth century.

Virginian political leaders were equally aware of the classical sources of civic architecture and of their intermediaries in England. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English use of the term piazza for a covered walk or portico is connected with the elite emulation of Italian Renaissance squares and is ultimately derived from the Roman forums. As Carl Lounsbury has noted, Christopher Wren observed of his Trinity College arcades that “according to the manner of the ancients, who made double walks . . . about the forum.” As in Virginia, English market halls stood in or adjacent to the squares provided for commerce in many market towns. Stalls displaying wares for sale were protected from the weather in an arcaded loggia beneath a second floor housing official functions. The American market took a different, but related form, in the late eighteenth century. The market house occupied the center of the market square, sometimes extending in a long line down the middle of a widened street to maximize access and ease of movement both for internal and external traffic.

In Virginia loggias were attached to the fronts of courthouses or capitol as places for the gathering of the community. They served to house the informal portion of the political or legal activity and for the rare opportunity for social interaction that life in a dispersed rural colony discouraged. It permitted, on specified days of each month, much the same purposes as the European square or ancient forum. In a way it was the forum turned inside out. The internally oriented European court or piazza, disposed in front of town halls, palaces or churches, became the arched or columned American piazza from which the citizens observed the cultivated landscape or the grassy public squares of the new republic.

The way in which Americans approach landscape, as Carroll William Westfall has noted, is different from that found in Europe. “In the United States the greensward replaces the piazza. The result is a continuity between rural and urban in the built-upon and cultivated landscape that supports the polyvalent system of governmental jurisdictions defining the multiplicity of overlapping duties within the civil realm” [Westfall. The City in the Image of Man. Journal of Anthropological Psychology No. 11, 2002]. The early Richmond market hall stood at first, like the Virginia country courthouses and like the new Capitol on Shockoe Hill, on broad expanses of open land. One contemporary remembered the “green pasture” of the town common that extended from the market house down to Shockoe Creek. Eventually the area around the market was lined with shops and it took on a more enclosed form.

Shockoe Hill Market at Broad and 12th (on the right) from a sketch by Latrobe, 1797 or 98. LC-USZ62-22881

Richmond’s Second Market. Virginia Mutual Policy of 1865 at top and 1889 Sanborn Map at bottom.

The deep connection of market and city is shown by the repeated attempts to establish a market on Shockoe Hill. A market built at Broad and Twelfth streets in 1797 was a failure. The city rejected a plan to place the Shockoe Hill Market in the center of what became Broad Street. A sketch (above) shows to have been a long arcaded frame building like several in small towns across the state. Like the first market house, it was located off the grid. It was placed on unplatted land on the eastward slope of Shockoe Hill where many public buildings were to be located in the coming decades, including the Academy, the Theater (and, therefore, Monumental Church), as well as the Medical College. Benjamin Henry Latrobe also proposed sites for his planned theater/hotel and church of c. 1798 at this key nodal location where the main route (Broad Street) turned to descend the hill.

A new market, eventually enclosed, filled a lot on the southeast corner of Sixth and Marshall streets on Shockoe Hill in 1817.. The market was expanded across the street to the north in 1834, to a lot identified as a market square and eventually lined by shops. An open market house occupied the west side and the Fish Market and the City Scales were housed in separate structures to the east. The north side and an alley running along the east side were lined with shops. The town hall form was reiterated there when in 1909, the entire market function was enclosed as the ground floor of a new armory hall for the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, in 1909, accessed through a continuous arcade. The armory hall was used for drilling and for public events.

It was not until the upper town had grown in density and diversity that it could rise to urbanity by establishing a market. By that time, Jefferson’s program for the new metropolis on the hill was, for all practical purposes, complete. At about the same time, recognizing a realignment of the city’s form, the urban governing function separated from the old First Market and moved to Shockoe Hill, where the City Court occupied a new Neoclassical temple-form building behind and on axis with the Capitol, facing the city’s principal axis, Broad Street. [The recognition of Sidney as a competent city sector resulted in the construction of a Third Market on West Main Street later in the late nineteenth century].

William Sheppard, Harper's Weekly. First Market in 1868

As the city grew the market at Seventeenth Street, known as the Old Market, retained its significance. An attempt was made to update its appearance in 1850. The city considered adding a new front on Main Street. The street on the west side was extended from Franklin to Grace Street as the market grew north. By 1853, the market building was judged by a city committee to be inadequate. It was replaced in the following year with an Italianate-style, two-story building. The dramatic second floor featured tall arched windows and a cornice with paired brackets. It was supported on a long cast-iron colonnade terminating in an arcaded loggia at the south. The colonnade concealed an inner arcade on each side that aided in supporting the floor above. A "window of appearances" with a balcony overlooked Main Street at the south end. From this time on the old market was referred to as the "First Market."

First Market as shown in Harper's Weekly in 1865. Note arcaded extensions to north.

Open market pavilions extended to Grace Street and hucksters lined adjoing streets on markets days. The market hall served as courtroom and police station in the years after the Civil War. The hall was used for various purposes, including conventions and military drills. In 1855, the city permitted the Western and Southern Commercial Convention to hold its meeting there. It was the scene of a riot in 1870, when the mayor appointed by the Federal troops refused to turn over his post to the elected mayor. Federal soldiers and a recently enrolled opposition police force battled over the occupancy of the Market Hall. The second floor was removed in the early twentieth century, leaving the loggia at the south end and a bell tower with a domed cupola at the north, connected by a long central colonnade.

Third Building at Richmond’s First Market site plan from Sanborn Map of 1889. Photo of first state (built 1854) below on left and with second-floor hall removed on the right.

In 1913, the city replaced the First market with a new building, now also gone, seen below. Like its predecessors, it put a classical facade to Main Street., but it provided the sanitation and refrigeration that enclosed markets could supply. Unlike them, it did not include any assembly or office space to functionally link the market with the political life.

The County Courthouse

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The second public building to be constructed in Richmond showed the growing influence of the town in the region. It followed the establishment of the church in the vicinity by nearly thirty years and the construction of the Church on Richmond Hill by less than a decade. The new seat of regional government appears to have been planned to occupy a conventional lot. A long-established understanding of the placement of civic architecture, however, led to its being placed in a dominating position in the center of the adjacent cross street, where, by its unique axial placement (seen in the adjacent 1809 map detail), it could become identified with the grid that ordered the city rather than ruled by it.

Richmond was selected as the new seat of Henrico County in 1750. The public land provided for the courthouse was the half-acre lot 18 on the southwest corner of E and 6^th street, what are now Main and Twenty-second streets near the middle of the town. The trustees must have realized that a corner site was not sufficiently significant a location, so they aligned the building with the center of Sixth (now Twenty-second) Street where, as the principal public building, it was distinguished from ordinary buildings not only by its substantial materials and form, but by its axial setting. The building was prepared for use by 1752, when the court made the move from Varina to Richmond. Although there is no description of the courthouse, the drawing of the prison bounds in the 1780s shows it in the center of the street and the jail located on the adjacent on the public lot. In order to fit within the street the building was longer than it was wide.

Bates Map of Richmond (1835) showing the 1825 Henrico County

Courthouse (bottom left) in the center of 22nd St. and the county jail on the original public lot to the west. St. John's Church is seen at the top.

Building a Courthouse in 1750

According to Carl Lounsbury, the pre-Revolutionary courthouse was often a small and undistinguished building. However, as the eighteenth century progressed, members of the principal county families began to express see the courthouse and the church as arenas for architectural expression. As at the Upper Church of Henrico Parish (St. John's Church), local materials and regional building technology could be pressed into the service of a more ambitious program to remake the public face of colonial government. This remaking was not only an effort of the educated gentry, but was funded, not without contention, by the freeholders, who took pride in an increasingly substantial and durable architectural program “in which building matched public expectations” and corresponded with hierarchical political arrangements [Lounsbury 85-89].

While there was never a break with traditional building practices, the increasing wealth of the colony, its more complex political structure, and the “cosmopolitan perspective” of the ruling gentry class “prompted the introduction of academic architectural elements from outside the regional building traditions” [Lounsbury]. Public building were part of the same tradition as private homes, and shared many similar details, but public buildings were distinguished in Virginia by their large scale and by the widespread employment of the arch in the form of large “compass-headed” doors and windows, as in the Upper Church at Richmond.

Henrico County was established in 1619 as one of four cities or boroughs making up the colony. Originally the parishes administered most county-level functions, including moral discipline and road maintenance. As part of an extension of government out from Jamestown eight shires, including Henrico, were to hold monthly commissioners’ courts to settle legal issues. Courts met in houses or taverns. In 1645 the county courts were authorized to hear all cases, both criminal and civil. By 1662 the courts were made up of justices of the peace. A frame courthouse was built in Henrico in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1680 the assembly established a town in the place “where the court house is” across the river from the former site of the town of Henrico, ten miles below Richmond. The site, since at least 1635, of the parish's glebe farm which housed and supported the minster, the tiny settlement was called Varina, after a type of Spanish tobacco. The act of the assembly in 1680 ordained that the village “where the courthouse is” was to be a shipping, trade, and crafts center. Like much of the town-making attempted by the colonial government, little came of the act. The small earthfast frame courthouse stood near a brick glebe house, residence of the rector of Henrico Parish. This was described as standing on blocks in 1688, when it was repaired.

The form of a courthouse

Henrico County moved like other Virginia counties to improve the court's setting at Varina. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the justices built a new, more substantial courthouse. The structure was of brick, but there is no first-hand record of its appearance or form. Richmond was made the county seat in 1750 because, with in the creation of Chesterfield County out of the half of Henrico located below the James River, Varina was no longer centrally or conveniently located. In keeping with the imitative nature of colonial building practices, the Chesterfield County court used the old Henrico Courthouse as their model for their courthouse. The new structure was to be built “of the same dimensions and material,” except that it was to have a plank floor. Photographs of the Chesterfield Courthouse give a clue as to the form of its Henirco predecessor. They show it to have been a rectangular building with five bays on the front including a central door, segmentally arched windows, a modillion cornice, and glazed-header Flemish bond walls.

The rebuilt Henrico County Courthouse from a Virginia Mutual Assurance policy, 1825.

The old Henrico County courthouse was abandoned at the same time that it was chosen as the model for new seat of Chesterfield County’s government. It is unlikely that the new Henrico court house in Richmond was similarly modeled on its predecessor, because its location in the street would have made a building that was wider than it was long impractical. We do not know what the 1750 courthouse looked like, but its successor, built in 1825, was a brick building 70 feet long and forty feet wide. In its urban context and with the comparative wealth of the county, it was probably at least as finely made as any other mid-eighteenth-century courthouse.

When a new courthouse was built in 1825 it was placed in the same axial location. The new building incorporated the new temple form assumed by Virginia courthouses, ultimately modeled on the Richmond Capitol. There it's impressive form and position punctuated the western end of an axial route that connected the state government at the Capitol on Shockoe Hill with county government in the center of the old section of town in on the river. The importance of this linkage is indicated by the route prescribed for important civic parades during the antebellum era. These carefully ordered public displays of civic unity began at the courthouse and processed to an end point at the Capitol.

Parades along the route include one for Lafayette's visit in 1824, another in 1831 for the funeral of Pres. Monroe, and the procession in 1832 to celebrate the 100^th birthday of George Washington, beginning at the "new courthouse" along E Street to 5^th and from 5^th to H and along that to the First Baptist Church at the east end of Broad Street. The funeral procession for Jefferson in 1826, which also followed the route from courthouse to capitol, showed the city and state hierarchically arrayed in its full integrity: Governor, Council, Officers of state, officers and soldiers of the Revolution and Society of Cincinnati, clergy and relatives of the deceased, Federal and State Committee of Arrangements, the mayor and corporate authorities of Richmond, citizens of Richmond, and the military [W. A. Christian, 1914].

The Henrico County Courthouse in the 1850s, relocated to the corner site.

When Richmond became a city, it no longer had any direct political connection to the county. The anomalous position of the county government in an independent civil unit undoubtedly reduced the status of the structure as a civic building. The courthouse was picked up and moved to the public land on the corner lot in the 1850s, presumably as a result of increased commercial activity and traffic along the nearby City Dock. Although damaged by fire in 1865, it served the county until it was replaced in 1896. Not until the 1970s did the county government relocate out of the city, since which time the Victorian courthouse has remained empty.

The abandoned Henrico County Courthouse of 1893 today, located on the original corner lot on Main Street.

The Richmond Church

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St. John’s Church. 1865. View from NW of original west end. From Civil War glass negative collection, Library of Congress.

There were no public buildings in the initial settlement at the Falls of the James River. The first to be built was a small chapel on what is now known as Chapel Island in the James, established in the 1720s. When built in 1742-3, the new church at Richmond architecturally proclaimed its civic role in the young town by its free-standing position on a half-square at the highest point of the grid of 1737. At the same time, the church, by its traditional orientation to the east, proclaimed its position as ascendant over political conventions.

William Byrd had the town of Richmond laid out in 1737. Since, as a privately sponsored settlement, there was no initial intention for any public buildings in the town, land was not set aside for that purpose. Soon after the town was laid out, however, Byrd convinced the vestry of Henrico Parish to place a proposed new upper church at Richmond. He intentionally gave them two prominently placed but marginal lots at the northeast corner of the plat. These were at the highest point on what was then known as Indian Town Hill overlooking the lower town.

The new church on the hill (known, since the mid-nineteenth century as St. John’s Church) was a marker of the rise of the town above a mere entrepot. Henrico Parish was over hundred years old and served the entire county of Henrico. Most Virginia parishes, responsible for building and maintaining churches, hiring ministers, caring for the indigent, settling boundaries, and punishing minor moral offenses, existed as a coterminous, spiritually oriented jurisdiction separate and parallel to that of the county. The church existed to remind the polity of its spiritual orientation, in much the same manner as the town’s first public building. Completed in 1742, it was aligned to point east in the prescribed medieval manner, ignored the street grid, resisting by its diagonal siting to fit neatly into what must have then been a barely discernable urban order. In many ways the church most closely resembled its rural rather than its urban contemporaries. At first, the majority of parishioners probably lived on farms in the higher ground around Richmond.

Mijacah Bates Map (1835) shows church near the top.

A drawing from the 1780s shows the county jail and the boundaries beyond which prisoners were not permitted to pass. A narrow path followed what must be a footpath up the hill diagonally to the church so that debtors and other prisoners could attend the services. The surrounding churchyard provided the town with a central place for burials. Often difficult of access from below, the church was, however, located on the side of a major road leading to the northeast, now know as Nine Mile Road.

The church was an elegant, if plain, rectangular building that included distinctive features such as segmentally arched window heads and a dentil cornice on the weatherboarded exterior and expensive paneled wainscoting and pews on the interior, as well as numerous costly and specialized furnishings required by the liturgy of the church. It was unmistakably a church, yet it shared the vocabulary of other urban and rural buildings such as courthouses and grand houses. It was the first public building of architectural pretensions in the western portion of the county. Although altered through the years, it retains a significant amount of original material [Worsham, Historic Structure Report].

On December 20, 1739 the vestry, ready to push ahead with the parish’s current building projects, met to select undertakers for two projects: construction of the new church and of a barn at the glebe. As undertaker for the church, they entered into an agreement with one of themselves, vestryman Richard Randolph. Col. Richard Randolph of Curl’s (1686-1748), burgess in 1740, and at one time treasurer of the colony, was one of the most prominent men of the parish and the colony and had served on the vestry from before 1730. As a member of the upper echelons of the colony’s elite, Col. Randolph was possibly drawn into the building process at Richmond by the remoteness of the location and the difficulty of finding an available professional in the immediate area.

The traditional practice in many parishes was to base the design of a new building on an existing building with which the vestry were familiar, either close at hand or, in the case of an ambitious program, on a more unusual building at a distance [Upton 31]. The Henrico vestry took as their “moddle,” the principal parish church at Curls, a proven church form.Where some vestries haggled over details, changing specifications and dimensions, the Henrico vestry never altered their pattern. Although we do not know what Curl’s Church looked like nor when it was built, it was almost certainly of frame construction and was probably rectangular in form like its successor, the original Upper Church at Richmond.

The subtle curve-topped windows at Richmond are a distinguished feature. Dell Upton discusses the significance of pedimented doors and rounded shapes like arched or compass-headed windows and ceilings and curved communion rails as setting apart the church as exalted above other buildings by the use of conventional signs of honor and dignity.

Alternate conjectural floor plans for the original Richmond Church with four windows on the north and south (left) and with five windows (right). Extant wall posts are shown hatched. There is documentary evidence of a south door and physical evidence of the chancel pews. The pulpit location is conjectural.

The form most popular for Virginia churches at that time was a simple rectangle, often considerably more than twice as long as it was wide. At twenty-five by sixty feet, the size of the church at Richmond was common among other churches in the colony [Upton 57]. The length of the frame upper chapel at Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, was settled at twenty-five by sixty feet in the specifications dating from 1711. According to Dell Upton, the overall size had to do with the acoustic limits mandated by the need for clearly audible preaching. Church lengths extended from around forty feet to sixty, but none were ever built that exceeded seventy feet in length. The frequent provision of a double square plus an additional partial square to form the popular twenty-five-by sixty foot form may represent the conceptual separation of the chancel from the rest of the church even though it was visually incorporated into the uninterrupted interior space.

Plate 45. Illustration from Meade, Old Churches,Ministers, and Families of Virginia, 1857.

The church served Richmond’s only church for nearly fifty years. It was altered in response to disestablishment and the growth and westward tendency of the city’s population. A large wing was added to the north side of the church in 1830 to increase its capacity. The vestry was careful to extend the modillion cornice and beaded weatherboard of the original building. The church began to respond architecturally to its changed responsibilities as a disestablished church competing for members with a variety of denominations. The original church was transformed into minor transepts adjoining a large rectangular preaching hall oriented to the south. A three-stage tower was added in 1833, topped by a miniature octagonal element derived from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, an icon of Greek Revival architecture.

A PARODY: RICHMOND AS VICENZA

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We were recently reading an urban history of Vicenza in a conventional biography of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. We could not help but notice some superficial similarities between Vicenza and the city of Richmond, mostly in the areas of urban form and social relations relating to their shared European derivation. It occurred to us to substitute the place and personal names and a few of the facts in the text and see if the odd parallels and the comic discontinuities between Richmond and Vicenza and Palladio and Jefferson could lead us to a fresh perspective. What is remarkable is how little it was necessary to change in order to juxtapose Richmond’s early history with the text of Vicenza’s.

Parallels with Renaissance Vicenza merely point out the stubborn continuity of Western urban life and the deliberate cultivation of classical themes of virtue and civic duty familiar to the elites of both cities. A theory of the city that can account for the likeness and dissimilarities of the two cities might be a useful tool for untangling Richmond’s current disarray. We indicate the words or phrases that have been replaced by a restrained use of the Italic. Based on an excerpt from Chapter Two of Bruce Boucher’s Andrea Palladio: The Architect and his Time( New York; Abbeville Press, 1994).

In 1791 the South Carolinian Congressman William Loughton Smith traveled through the Upper South and kept a record of his observations. He gave a positive account of Richmond, noting its seven miles of canal navigation, and the falls of the James River, that gird it on the south; of its buildings, he mentioned the Capitol, still under construction, and the excellence of some of its brick houses. Five years later the French essayist La Rochfoucauld-Liancourt jotted down his first impressions of Richmond as “truly agreeable.” He arrived just seven years after the completion of the Capitol, and it was the secular stamp of the city, its multitude of private houses, that caught his attention. The famous western view of Richmond in 1825 [above] shows just how much of Jefferson’s program was then half-finished or only just begun, but the cumulative effect must have been remarkable, especially for a traveler familiar with other southern towns. A generation later, Rochefoucault-Liancourt’s response was followed by those of William Wirt and James Kirk Paulding, and by a stream of nineteenth-century pilgrims coming to worship at the shrine of Jefferson: his revolutionary impact on Richmond’s architecture ensured the city’s fame as well as his own.

The alacrity with which the Richmonders turned what was a small town into a building site can hardly be exaggerated. Jefferson’s contemporaries were mad for building in a way that courtiers in Elizabethan England or German barons along the Weser River would have understood. What makes Richmond so extraordinary is the scale and quality of building that took place in one architect’s lifetime and within a town, in 1820, of less than twenty thousand inhabitants.

To understand the Jeffersonian phenomenon in Richmond, we must step back and look briefly at Richmond in the period prior to the capital’s arrival in 1779. The city is situated at the falls of the James River at the western edge of the Tidewater region. Its land is fertile, and notwithstanding the growth of a small iron making and coal mining trade, tobacco cultivation was the principal source of wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Jefferson’s day, the city still bore the traces of its Indian origins: the old Indian path or Powhatan’s Road running east to west divided the city into halves. Richmond’s nucleus lay within its gridded boundaries, and here stood the chief manifestations of religious and civic power, crystallized in the Town Church on the hill [above] and the Henrico County Courthouse in the center of Twenty-second Street, respectively. On the eastern bank of Shockoe Creek was a section that served for the sale of grains and produce while an open area called the Rock Landing served as a port at the end of the old Three Notched Road, the present day Broad Street, in the west; tanners and millers set up shop along the river.

The main families of Richmond, who constituted the core of the ruling class, had their mansions on the hills around the town and on secondary streets. As was often the case in deferential communities, these families staked out different sectors as their power bases. Thus the Adamses, one of the richest families, held a number of houses just below the cemetery and around the Town Church, while the Mayos, who may have been the richest family in Richmond, owned most of a large oblong block on the crest of Council Chamber Hill. A principal street like Marshall Street ran north of the old Three-notched Road and contained a preponderance of houses owned by the in-laws of Chief Justice John Marshall, as the name suggests [his house is above]. Beyond the grid lay newer settlements, corresponding to gates to the city and the main roads leading to the other centers of the Piedmont, as the central part of the Virginian commonwealth was called. Here building was less dense with a number of plantations and suburban villas with large gardens.

During the colonial era, the Richmond area had been fought over by native tribes, local forces, and the troops of Great Britain, but the selection of the town as the capitol in 1779 brought Richmond peace and prosperity on a scale previously unknown. Since Richmond was no longer a pawn in colonial politics, the gentry turned to building, as is evident from the large and varied mansions that once were seen to cluster about streets like Marshall, Clay, and Fifth. Few documents survive concerning these buildings, but they seem to have been part of a burst of private construction between 1780 and 1800. One wealthy Richmonder named Richard Adams listed property worth $20,000 in his will of 1817, holdings not untypical of the upper strata of local society. Some of these monuments, like the imposing Edmund Pendleton House on Broad Street, Moldavia on Fifth Street, and the villa at Clifton, on Council Chamber Hill [above], ranked among the most important examples of Federal architecture in the Piedmont, and the number and variety known from this period testify to the extensive construction in hand during the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

Not surprisingly, Virginia Georgian is English in origin, and the piazzas with round arches, the compass-headed windows, the Flemish-bond brick walls with wood or stone trim, and pedimented central pavilions all mirror the appearance of slightly earlier English houses. In a way, Virginia Georgian can be understood as a reflection of cultural imperialism, the attempt by a subject state to assimilate the style of its far-away rulers; symmetrical floor plans, impressive paneled interiors also bring this point home. Of course, English city houses evolved to meet the peculiar requirements of building in a mild climate and in a dense urban context. This led to a tripartite division of houses, with service functions in the ground floor, principal rooms on the floor above, and bedrooms in the upper story. In Virginia there was no reason to adopt such plans, and the result is that the forms of houses were adapted for local social and functional purposes. evolved to meet the peculiar requirements of building staircases, and the rare paneled interior also bring this point home. Of course, English city houses evolved to meet the peculiar requirements of building in a mild climate and in a dense urban context. This led to a tripartite division of houses, with service functions in the ground floor, principal rooms on the floor above, and bedrooms in the upper story. In Virginia there was no reason to adopt such plans, and the result is that the forms of houses were adapted for local social and functional purposes.

The beginnings of a new classical style appeared in Virginia as early as 1753, the date of the handsome piazza on the Georgian façade of the Old Capitol in Williamsburg. Even more striking is the Palladian façade of Mount Airy, where the ground-floor loggia incorporates roundheaded arches while on the loggia of the opposite front a pilaster order separates the bays. It had a large façade, one entirely of stone, which makes it a rarity in Virginia. The most remarkable shift in taste came with the first house at Monticello [above], singled out for praise by a European visitor during his visit of 1782. Begun in 1769, the house was extensively rebuilt around the same time that Richmond was going up. Whimsical and not without British Palladian overtones, Monticello represents the extreme of classically wrought facades found in a more Georgian idiom on Mount Airy. Both houses preserve the rich effect prized by eighteenth-century Virginian patrons, an effect that the poetaster Giovan Battista Dragoncino evoked as “proud palaces with facades and foundations of adamantine rustication.’ Gilded and painted, the late eighteenth-century mansions of Virginia underscored the wealth and aspirations of its citizens.

The earliest signs of the Classical style were derivative and often seem little more than an overlay of new elements on older ones. Sometimes, as with the Old Capitol in Williamsburg [above], a Georgian public building had been “modernized” by the introduction of Ionic columns, and a two-story piazza. The results looked incongruous, with the wide intercolumniation and uncanonical proportions. Such attempts at bringing older buildings into line with more contemporary tastes were not uncommon even though they betrayed a lack of understanding of the principles behind Classical design. The mongrel nature of such architecture was probably what Jefferson had in mind when he condemned “the burthen of barbarous ornaments with which these buildings are sometimes charged” in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

When the radical French writer Jacques Pierre Brissot published a guide to the United States in 1792, he exclaimed that “Richmond with its capitol has turned the heads of Virginians. They imagine that, like the Romans, they will someday dictate the laws of the whole world.” It was a perceptive comment, for it laid bare the strategy embraced by Jefferson and his fellow directors in most of his Richmond designs. Indeed the Capitol Square can be seen as a microcosm of the Jefferson phenomenon that, through the quality of design and the unswerving adherence to a new and distinctive approach to architecture, invested these public buildings with a status beyond their actual scale and the relatively humble nature of their materials. The readiness with which the Richmond gentry adopted the approach to architecture espoused by Jefferson transformed the face of that city in ways already apparent when men like Brissot visited it in 1788. The overlapping of public and private patronage in post-Jefferson Richmond, implies, moreover, a deliberate intent on the part of men like John Wickham, John Brockenbrough, and John Bell, who saw the creation of their own houses in much the same terms as the building of new arcades for the market house, both gestures reflected honor on their city and on themselves [the Wickham House is above]. Jefferson’s successors shared a common outlook and a commitment to building, even though they knew that family taste and economic circumstances would not remain constant and that their lineage might not occupy their houses in decades to come.