City of Monuments, Part I

Photographer Harry Stilson, Soldiers and Sailors Monument beyond 
[Style Magazine: from Richmond in Sight].

Movement through the city of Richmond is punctuated and articulated by an interconnecting series of urban-scale elements that serve to explicate, in concrete form, the city's formal connection with the past and its causal relationship to the future. In continuity with ancient and modern European and Near Eastern civic traditions, those in charge of the city’s individual and collective narratives have given voice to the city’s ideals and normative values by adding to a growing stock of monuments. These sculptural or architectural elements often served as carriers of didactic or hortatory meaning but always function as markers that clarify the city’s physical and political form and structure. 

The city’s monuments never stand alone: they join in loosely connected chains of meaning that extend across the city and through time to other cites around the world. We have explored the ways in which civic rituals like parades and processions make use of these armatures in this post.

As Lucien Steil has observed, many memorials record, not only celebrations, but times of disaster or suffering. Commemoration of great struggle and suffering  "is not about remembering and reviving acute and relentless destruction, terror, fear, etc., but about overcoming these moments of unbearable pain by moral and material acts of reconstruction. . . .  This creative sublimation of the experience of death and destruction, of horror and fear, into symbols of life, continuity and permanence is the paradoxical purpose of commemoration. . . . It is a necessary condition of any cultural endeavor of humanity" [Lucien F. Steil, "Reconstruction and Commemoration." American Arts Quarterly 4:3 (Winter 2015)]. 

The City’s Memorials

The urban-scale amenities that assist in ordering the city, making legible its structure and origins, both literally and figuratively, have been given various names through time. Here we are referring to amenities at the urban scale which have as their principal role the orientation of the citizen in both time and space. Traditionally, a city without such appropriate civic markers could make no claim to be a place of civility or a center of virtuous political life.

For the purposes of this discussion, these civic markers have been divided into three types: I. Memorials, II. Monuments, and III. Fountains. While each of these may combine some aspects of the others, mingling, for instance, sculpture and flowing water or bas relief and memorial inscription, most of the civic markers in the city can be chiefly identified under one or the other of these categories.      

Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society has defined two of these civic elements:

In current parlance, “monument” denotes a large (approximately at least 1.5 times the height of an average man) useless permanent immovable structure that honors its subject and was designed to be seen as such.  A monument is useless in the sense that it is not meant to have a function other than honoring and commemorating its subject. . . . All monuments are memorials, but not all memorials are monuments.  Some memorials contain monuments.  Monuments are clear and unequivocal in their meaning; memorials can be abstract and ambivalent.  Monuments immortalize their subjects; the subjects of memorials can be permanently dead or finished.  Monuments speak; memorials can stay silent.  Monuments need no signage; memorials often do.

An additional purpose for monuments is emphasized here: that of orienting the viewer within the city, both in the past and present.

I. Memorials

According to one commentator, a memorial is an “umbrella term for anything that serves in remembrance of a person or event,” while a monument is more specific: “a sculpture, structure, or physical marker designed to memorialize [Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Gordonsville, VA: Berg, 2007 quoted in Collette Rachel Kinane, Addressing the Nation: The Use of Design Competitions in Interpreting Historic Sites. Master’s Thesis, U of Penn, 2012].” At the same time, a “memorial often signifies mourning and loss, whereas a monument signifies greatness or valor.” 

The earliest memorials in Richmond were the grave markers in the cemetery surrounding St. John’s Church at the top of Richmond Hill near the northeastern entry to the city at the top of 23rd Street as well as in the city’s successive African American burial grounds (the first Burying Ground for Negroes and the other public and private African American burying grounds that replaced it after 1816) on the sloping sides of Shockoe and Academy hills. It appears that many of the earlier burials at the city's cemeteries were not marked with stones. Stone grave markers would have been the exception in favor of wooden head and footboards. Those early stone markers which do survive at St. John’s not only incorporate carved decoration, but include inscriptions praising the virtues of the dead. 

St John's Churchyard in the early 20th century

The city was necessarily provided with places for burial of the dead. It appears that the races were separated from an early date, although there is no information concerning the places in which slaves and free blacks were buried in the 18th century. Henrico Parish had originally provided, as was regular practice in the established Church of England, a one-acre burial ground for the citizens of the town, all of whom were assumed to be members of the parish. 

Disestablishment of the church coincided with a need for an enlarged burial ground for whites. A first step was the purchase by the city, in 1799, of two adjacent lots on Broad Street to double the size of the burying ground to two acres. The city and church worked out a cooperative agreement for management of the graveyard that holds to this day.  

Shockoe Cemetery in 1865 showing overgrown lots and fenced graves with the 
City Almshouse beyond [Library of Congress]

Cenotaph tomb of William H. Cabell in Shockoe Cemetery

Early burials are not organized in any regular plan. The city’s numerous later cemeteries are laid out like miniature cities, with a grid pattern like Shockoe (1822) and Evergreen cemeteries (1891) or a picturesque layout like Hollywood (1847). In these graveyards, many of the earliest burials take the classical form of a cenotaph, or empty tomb, covered with a raised tombstone either raised on balusters like a table, or with the sides infilled to resemble a classical sarcophagus. Other gravestones used the traditional vertical form, sometimes provided with delicate carving representing themes associated with death and resurrection.

Turkey Island Obelisk, Henrico Historical Society

The unusual obelisk built in 1772 below Richmond on the plantation known as Turkey Island is often cited as an early monument memorializing the “Great Fresh,” a catastrophic flood. It has, however, recently been proposed that the obelisk was not intended for this purpose, but was primarily a component in an important early English Baroque rural landscape design [William Rhodes, "Ryland Randolph and the Palladian Triangle of Colonial Central Virginia." Presentation at the VCU Architectural History Symposium, 2012].

Monumental Church, Richmond

Richmond’s first purposeful civic monument was a constituent but self-contained part of a larger, hybrid work of architecture. Monumental Episcopal Church was planned in 1812 and completed in 1814 to memorialize a deadly theater fire on the same site. Designer Robert Mills grafted a dramatic thirty-two-foot-square monumental Aquia stone porch onto the front of an equally unusual octagonal stuccoed brick church. Mill’s portico is the architectural setting for a monument in the form of a Neoclassical funereal urn symbolically representing the shocking loss felt by Richmond’s citizens. The portico can also be seen as a monument: a symbolically detachable loggia or templum with details and materials contrasting with the body of the church. 

The relative independence of the loggia helps to justify the public funding of a sectarian church to memorialize members of the wider population. The exigencies of the situation suggested the hybrid nature of the monument; the city’s Episcopalians desired a new church and were prepared to build in the general area of the theater. The city improvised, not a new building type, but a largely unprecedented composite of models that would permit an effective memorial to those whose remains were indiscriminately mingled in the theater’s foundation. In combining the memorial to so large and diverse a group of victims in one monumental building, the city emphasized, not only a collective sense of loss, but a communal resolution to promote the public good. 

Monumental Church, Monument (John Milner Associates)

Like the raised table tombs that appeared in St. John’s Churchyard in the early nineteenth century, the neoclassical cenotaph at Monumental Church formed a symbolic repository for the bones of the dead, which were actually mingled in the earth beneath the church. Their bones were set aside and marked so that examples would live on in the lives of the city as a whole, whenever a passerby saw the marker or read the text. The monument which consisted of a sarcophagus form topped by an urn, similar to those used in Mycenean times to contain the bones of the dead, is a linear descendent of the tumulus which covered the tomb central to the cults of the Ancient Greek heroes. A form of immortality was achieved when the place of burial was made of permanent materials and the memory of the great deeds of the tomb's occupant was kept alive.   

Newport Cross, Richmond Canal Walk

The city’s expanding practice of monument-making also paid deference to the ancient importance of a founding myth, which we have explored here. In much the same way that Richmond was said, improbably, to have seven hills like Rome, in order to lend it a classical air, those responsible knew that by venerating its ancient founders the young city might acquire a sense of permanence. The first monument of the city’s founding may be the copper cross atop a rough pyramid of stones placed on Gamble’s Hill to mark the first visit to the falls by the English settlers. It was dedicated by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in 1907 (and relocated to the Canal Walk in 1983). The monument reenacted the planting of a cross by Captain Christopher Newport three hundred years before, which served to claim the land for the English monarch. The new version was intended to gave legitimacy to the ongoing project of making a city. 

Powhatan Stone, Chimborazo Park

The Mayo family, descendants of the city’s original surveyor, had lived for generations at Powhatan’s Seat, on the hill east of Richmond that probably served as the local seat of the Powhatan’s personal tribe. The Mayos carefully preserved at their house a talisman in the form of a stone said to have formed part of Powhatan’s house, sited in the native village at the falls which had been purchased by Captain John Smith and named by him “Nonesuch.” This stone, formerly located along the river, was moved to the crest of Chimborazo Park overlooking the river when it was displaced by the city’s gasworks about 1911. Oddly, William Byrd, the putative father of Richmond, who was an accomplished founder and namer of cities, which he once called “castles in the air,” was never honored with a monument at all, although his name has been applied to a park, a hotel, a theater, and a community center. 

Monument to the scuffle between British pickets and Virginia forces in 1781, Grove Avenue

One of the city’s earliest outdoor monuments was a small marble obelisk set up in 1834 to memorialize a skirmish between the otherwise victorious British Queen’s Rangers and the Virginia militia. According to the marker on Grove Avenue in the Fan District, probably placed by veterans of the engagement, Virginia forces under Col. J. Nicholas had “driven in” Arnold’s picket on 4 January, 1781. Benedict Arnold had taken Richmond in late 1780 and a regiment under Lt. Col John Simcoe were returning from burning the foundry at Westham west of Richmond. This may have been the “scuffle” for which the nearby hamlet of Scuffletown was named [Drew St.J. Carneal. Richmond’s Fan District. Historic Richmond Foundation, 1996, 14-15].      

The two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Richmond as a city and of its elevation from a county seat to the state capital was memorialized in 1982. A plaque was appropriately placed at the Old Henrico Courthouse on East Main Street to mark the site where, in the absence of any other city meeting place, there took place the initial election of the twelve members of the city's common hall and of its first mayor, William Foushee.

Memorial plaque at the Old Henrico County Courthouse recognizing the election there of the
city's first governing body.

Hebrew Confederate Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia [Hebrew Cemetery]

Although there were non-sculptural memorials set up before the Civil War, the Confederacy became the subject of the city’s greatest outpouring of memorial-making. The elaborate iron fence surrounding the Hebrew Confederate Cemetery was made in 1866. The posts consist of furled Confederate flags and stacked muskets, with a soldier's cap perched on top. The posts are connected by sabers and swords hung with laurel wreaths. The earliest large-scale monument, built in 1869, rose in Hollywood Cemetery to honor the thousands of dead soldiers buried around it. The ninety-foot granite pyramid reinforced a ritualized theme of loss and death. A large marble obelisk at Oakwood Cemetery in the city’s east end followed soon after funds were raised by 1871.

Confederate Monument, Oakwood Cemetery

Confederate Monument, Hollywood Cemetery

 










The memorialization of history became institutionalized soon after. Plaques recording locations and events were attached to buildings by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society in the first decades of the twentieth century, including the site of Libby Prison in 1911. The series of “Freeman Markers” named for author and editor Douglas Southall Freeman, who promoted them and wrote the texts around 1925, mark the locations of fortifications and battlefields in and around the city for the use of tourists and returning veterans. 

Freeman Marker

A consideration of monuments follows in Richmond's Civic Markers, Part II, located here.

Confederate Memorial Plaque at the Old Henrico
Courthouse on East Main Street

A PROPOSED NEW CITY HALL FOR WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

A recent design project provided the StudioAmmons design team, of which we are a part, with an unmatched opportunity, not only to make great civic architecture, but to aid in the definition of an important new urban space in the beautiful, restored colonial capital of Virginia. We present here a design intended to transcend the unconvincing and thoughtless “traditional” building projects in evidence in the suburbs surrounding the historic city center.  Although StudioAmmons was not selected to design the building, the design process provided a valuable opportunity to explore appropriate forms for civic architecture in the present day. 

The proposed building was intended to: 

• provide a dignified place for the legislative functions of city government

• act as an engaging and flexible place for cultural events and ongoing exhibits

• reinforce the framework supporting the civic and cultural life of the city

• contain the ingredients of sustainability

• acknowledge and embody the local ethos to ensure long-term vitality

• set a convincing model for new building in the Williamsburg area, that it is possible to make fine buildings that model themselves on the best that has come before.

Existing Stryker Building (1967)

The Program

The project involved replacement of the outmoded Stryker Building, a centrally located city government building that houses the Williamsburg City Council Chamber and other offices of city government. The building was constructed in 1967. In addition to a meeting room for the City Council and other boards and commissions, the proposed new Stryker Center would add public meeting and exhibition space, as well as offices to augment the current public library facilities.

The program suggested the form, plan, and architectural detail of the proposed design.  The local context stresses, not only responsiveness to local tradition and history, but an economical use of the most durable and environmentally responsible materials to achieve a sustainable result that complements, not only the location on the emerging City Square, but the city as a whole. 

The best connection with the architecture for which Colonial Williamsburg is so widely known can be found in an expanded use of the same effective architectural design methods used by the builders of those structures and further developed by designers of the principal public buildings in U.S. cities.  The role of the civic authorities in the region, as well as precedent in the historic courthouse on Market Square, former seat of government for both the county of James City and the town of Williamsburg, indicated the use of a monumental form and a suggestion of that dignified and sober architectural order, the Ionic. 

The proposed “city hall,” not only the meeting place of the city council, but the venue for civic debate and exhibits of art and history, responds to the historic and contemporary nature of the city on several levels. It achieves this result by its siting in relation to the growing city on a wonderful civic plaza, its historical models, its materials, and its floor plan, without mimicry or irony.

An important civic building like this will draw indirectly on the scale and form of Virginia's colonial courthouses, but the design should also incorporates knowledge developed in the design of nineteenth- and twentieth-century civic architecture.  Building materials, particularly the elements of brick, allude to local tradition, while the painted character of masonry contrasts with the many derivative Colonial buildings in the locale and directly relates the building to the impressive Community Building that dominates the square by its location at the center of the east end. 

The building takes as its cue the five-hundred year tradition, seen in disparate examples from Renaissance Italy to twentieth century Boston, of orienting government buildings on a civic plaza and of mediating the connection between those buildings and the public square by means of sheltering porches or arcades. These intermediate structures represented the accessibility of civic institutions and serve, not only as transitional places, but as markets for ideas as well as goods. 

The Community Building, City Square, Williamsburg VA (Carlton Abbott, architect)

The Urban Setting

In a well-ordered city, new buildings are carefully placed within intentional urban patterns in order to support a robust civic life. The new City Hall should take its place within the overall pattern established by the city at the center of civic life. It should neither dominate the square by its architectural form, nor should it give no indication of the importance of the its role, but it should join with the other buildings around the square to create a balanced whole reflective of the city’s shared ideals for a strong, wise, and just community. 

The Stryker Building currently does not relate well to its most immediate context, the remarkable urban amenity known as City Square. It faces instead towards Boundary Street, a busy street that bisects the square. City Square was created in 1999 within the nondescript grid on the northern edge of the historic district and forms the heart of the city’s 23-acre Municipal Center. It represents a very successful attempt, engineered by architect Carleton Abbott, to carve a new urban place out of the desert of parking lots and back lots that formerly provided the only context for the Stryker Building. 

The square unites the various forms and styles of the city’s civic buildings, from the low bulk of the Williamsburg Public Library on the south to the axially placed Community Building at its east end. Its planners also included a series of smaller urban gestures, built and unbuilt, that seem intended to complete the definition of City Square by enclosing its long sides.

Williamsburg's Municipal Center, just north of the historic district, with the City Square
 at the center. The Community building is the prominent cross-shaped structure to the
 center right. The Stryker Building is at the upper left, just north of the square. The Public
 Library is at the lower left.

In our view, the new Stryker Center should fulfill two important urban requirements:

1) It should serve as a symbolic seat of government appropriate to the city’s civic heritage

The proposed building would house the City Council Chamber, designed to seat 100 persons for regular meetings of council and other government bodies and as a well-equipped venue for other community events, such as lectures and concerts. Its architecture should support its purpose and it should serve as a worthy heir to the buildings housing Williamsburg's historic civic institutions.

2) The building should act as an activator and full participant in the ongoing definition of City Square

The new Stryker Center, correctly handled, should assist in structuring City Square as a successful civic plaza. It would provide essential definition to the northern edge of City Square and it will clarify the public value of the plaza by making larger connections among civic institutions. The Stryker Building would join, functionally and visually, with the Public Library and the existing Community Building to make City Square an active and appropriately unified public place.

The proposed new Stryker Building shown in orange (StudioAmmons).

Bird's eye view of the proposed Stryker Center (watercolor by Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons) 

Perspective of the Proposed Stryker Center looking NW (Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons)

Site Analysis

City Square occupies an important location on the functional map of the city. It is placed at the heart of the 23-acre Municipal Center, a complex of city government buildings that are sandwiched between Colonial Williamsburg and twentieth-century residential areas associated with the nearby College of William and Mary. The award-winning public green was created in the late 1990s by carving out streets from a grid of lots on the east side of Boundary Street and on the west side from parking lots owned by the city and the public library. Interestingly, the southeast corner of the Boundary Street at the southern edge of the square represents the northwest corner of the 1699 city of Williamsburg.

The central green is cut in two by Boundary Street, a busy thoroughfare that cuts across the city at the west end of Duke of Gloucester Street. This division into two parts gives a definite character to the square. Rather than forming an intrusion, the street gives citizens exposure to the unifying value of this civic green space and reminds them of the many activities that take place there. The eastern half corresponds to the Community Building and its key role in the life of the city, while the western half corresponds to the two institutional expressions of civic life that flank it, the Council Chamber and the Library, mediated by the leisure zone of the fountain and trellis. The central green is bounded by fictive, granite-curbed streets that lie on public land and is flanked by single lines of trees. The city has provided lots for development on the north side of the square and controls a similar narrow lot on the south side.

North and South Sides

The north side of the square is characterized by the pre-existing green lawn of the Stryker Building that lines the west side of Boundary Street and the tightly spaced buildings that conceal the parking garage that was built at the same time to serve the Municipal Center. The existing Public Library occupies the southwest side of the square across from the trellis and fountain. Two additional lots along the north and south side of the street are intended to be the sites of buildings designed to enclose the square and screen neighboring structures from view.

East and West Ends

Most significantly, the east and west ends of the green are book-ended by major civic elements that effectively close off the ends of the rectangular piazza. At the east stands the dominating form of the Community Building, which by its symmetrical form and axial location, is clearly the most important building in the entire municipal area. It shows, to the users, that the cultural and imaginative lives of the citizens carry the highest value in civic life.

Library Plaza

At the opposite end of the square is Library Plaza, a rambling public pavilion which incorporates a trellis in the form of a deconstructed eighteenth-century house frame and a naturalistic fountain. This feature effectively forms the square’s western end and conceals a municipal parking lot beyond. This public amenity seems intended to serve, not only as a fair-weather picnic trellis, but as an idealized representation of the relationship of the citizens to their historic context in Colonial Williamsburg.

The Envelope

It is important to emphasize that the buildings, not the streets, form the actual edges of every fully realized square or piazza. In this way each, this urban square can be seen as
the central hall of the Municipal Center or as a large urban room, out of which open the various public functions which join together to make it a single civic place. The volume of the square can be accentuated by blending materials so that the textures and colors minimize the difference between the streets and the central area. In this case, however, the central area is a green lawn intended more for visual gratification than active use as a public venue. Even so, the essence of a traditional square or piazza is its sense of enclosure. Most American squares fail in this regard because they are too large or too open at the corners. City Square has an opportunity to reinforce its form by strengthening its edges and the Stryker Building can act its part to achieve this goal.

Building Placement

A reorientation of the Stryker Building towards City Square will not give it in the most important position. The Community Building retains that character. Like the Public Library, which faces it across the green, the Stryker Center takes on an important supporting role in the larger structure of the Municipal Center. In addition to a new inflection toward the square, the building, in order to establish its volume, is aligned with the other buildings on the square’s northern edge. It is also be placed close to Boundary Street so as to create a dynamic contrast with the openness of the square.

It is very important for the building to join in establishing a northern edge for the square while, at the same time, expressing its relative importance in the civic life of Williamsburg. This is achieved by establishing a well marked, but not too strongly emphasized, entry centered on the western half of the square, in order to balance axial and edge-creating lines. In order to establish its presence, the building should be fully on the square, and not permitted to run past its visual ending point at the Library Plaza Trellis.

The building signals its important role as the official home of city government by an advanced central pavilion and pediment. This feature announces the building’s importance without limiting its contribution to the square as a whole and acknowledges its counterpart in the Public Library directly opposite. In addition, by not advancing beyond the outdoor pavilion which forms the effective western wall of the square, the new building establishes a northwestern corner for the square. 

Floor Plan, Proposed Stryker Building

Building Description

The program for the replacement of the Stryker Building by the City of Williamsburg suggests the form, plan, and architectural detail of the proposed design.  The local context stresses, not only responsiveness to local tradition and history, but an economical use of the most durable and environmentally responsible materials to achieve a sustainable result that complements, not only the location on the emerging City Square, but the city as a whole. 

The proposed Stryker Center is structured as a composite form extending around three sides of the central Gallery or gathering space. The primary entry is from the south through a public loggia linking exterior and interior. It is located convenient to primary and more distant parking areas. Secondary entrances give access to a shallow courtyard on the east side. A staff entry to the library offices is located on the north end and emergency exits are placed on each side of the council chamber. A hipped roof defines the central spine of the building and visually connects the south facade with the body of the building.

Buildings with complex public roles often take composite forms, and the proposed City Hall is no exception. The building partakes of at least two of the most basic building types, the regia and the theater. The regia, or seat of government, most often appears as a rectilinear building divided into smaller rooms for various governmental purposes, arranged to surround a courtyard or hall. The theater, a place where citizens are able to gather to visualize a better civic life, is usually given a semi-circular shape so that everyone present can engage with each other in the activities which take place there. In this case, the Council Chamber makes use of the theater form. As in most successful examples of similar kinds of buildings, the combination of the two building types, if handled well, can make a stronger result. An example of a similar composite of two types can be seen at Williamsburg's Colonial Capitol, where two theaters join to form an H-shaped regia and flank a central loggia. 

While buildings that embody the regia are often the most important building in a town and is sited in a free-standing location off the street grid (like the Colonial Capitol and the old James City County Courthouse) here the free-standing position has already been granted to the Community Building, a formal composition taking yet another form, that of the templum, at the center of the square’s eastern end. It indicates, by its position and formal type, that the community  honors most highly the gathering of citizens for organizational, private, and educational events. It recognizes that the beneficial activities of citizens, rather than the act of governing, is at the center of Williamsburg’s civic life. 

Gallery looking north (Richard Worsham for StudioAmmons)

Council Chamber looking NE (Gibson Worsham for StudioAmmons)

The Gallery or lobby is placed at the center of the east side of the Stryker Center. It is lit by tall windows facing Boundary Street, which provide a visual connection between passersby and the activities in the center. The gallery is the tallest room in the building. 

The proposed “city hall,” not only the meeting place of the city council, but the venue for civic debate and exhibits of art and history, responds to the historic and contemporary nature of the city on several levels. It achieves this result by its siting in relation to the growing city on a wonderful civic plaza, its historical models, its materials, and its floor plan, without mimicry or irony. and is treated with carefully designed moldings. The Council Chamber, with its semicircular form, extends from the west side of the building and incorporates a semicircular seating layout for both council and the audience. An outer ring provides circulation space and standing room for overflow at events. Modern audio-visual systems are controlled from a booth next to the podium. The Council Work Room, which doubles as a meeting room, connects directly with the seating in the Council Chamber. Short corridors connect the Gallery with the Council Chamber and give access to service rooms, the public toilets and a catering kitchen.

The three meeting rooms, large, medium, and small in size, are grouped around the Gallery. Flexibility is the keyword: the largest room can be sub-divided by a sliding wall if needed. The large and medium meeting rooms can be accessed from the exterior by means of the south entrance when the rest of the building is closed. The catering Kitchen is nearby. Each meeting room is provided with capacious storage for equipment, tables, and chairs. The Library Executive Suite is located in the north end of the building. The clerical staff will staff the services desk in the center of the north end of the Gallery and the adjacent Library Offices Waiting Room. Each of the five offices has a window and access to the office workroom. The Executive Suite has exterior access through a staff entry from the north.

Architectural Design Overview

• A site near the sidewalk at the northwest corner of Boundary Street and City Square that will reinforce the north edge of the square.

• South and east walls that provide strong edges to the square and to the west side of Boundary Street to make a strong contrast between the square and the thoroughfare that bisects it.

• A site axially related to the western half of the square

• A porch or loggia over the sidewalk, joining the building directly to the urban space of the square, encouraging participation in the events within and without. It acts as a porte cochere to provide a covered drop off at the entry.

• A projecting semi-circular wing on the west economically expressing its role as the council chamber.

• A shallow courtyard opening off Boundary Street providing light and outdoor space and supporting the central Lobby or Gallery.

• Provision for expansion to the north along Boundary Street built into the design.

• Economical use of circulation space in the building, reducing construction costs. Due to this sensible use of circulation space, the design is 1,000 square feet smaller than the previously submitted project, representing a cost savings of as much as $400,000. 

• A white-painted brick exterior to provide a clear connection to the Community Building and, like it, appropriate differentiation from the many Neo-colonial buildings in the area surrounding Williamsburg.

• Simple, carefully proportioned, traditional details to make essential connections with Williamsburg’s place in American urban history.

• Legible, elegant building form and floor plan that connects with the architectural heritage of the city.

• Permanent and technologically sustainable materials result in ease of maintenance over time.

StudioAmmons made this unsolicited submission to the City of Williamsburg in 2012. The proposal, in the development of which the members of Urbanismo took part, was presented as an alternate design, proposed under the Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act of 2002, as revised in 2007.

Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Krier

Dear Malcolm,

All traditional architecture is not necessarily classical. The classic is the very best of a tradition. Jefferson's Capitol would be an example of a classical building because it not only hearkens back to former classical buildings, but has itself become a classic. It is so because in it Jefferson took a previous example, namely the ancient Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and made it thoroughly modern for the new seat of provincial government in Virginia. In this example lies part of the answer to your question about the practical uses for classical architecture in the modern world. 

Classicism is not un-modern. One of my professors in fact describes classicism as the "other modern." Modernism, the ideology that has held architecture around the world in a death grip since the 1920's, was based in the denial of all previous models and sought to replace them with the paradigm of the machine. The "international style" is a good example of such a mentality based in the desire for a new, unsullied architecture, fitting form to function. All but a few anachronistic modernists have long since left the machine slogan behind, however its influence can still be seen in even the tamest new construction. 

Traditional architecture, on the other hand, seeks to work with and continue local traditions, to render the urban order of the city more intelligible, and to tell the user and passer-by about itself through its form. Part of this process involves the adaptation of the way things have been done in the past to suit current needs. In other words, it does what buildings have always done until roughly eighty years ago. In opposition to many modernist buildings which are often either completely inexplicable to anyone but their designer, or hideous blights on the land, (and more often both) the traditional building seeks to be a good neighbor. Being a good neighbor entails a willingness to have a dialogue with one's surroundings, not to be offensive, to understand one's place in the order of the city, and most importantly to contribute to the public good. This means that in a Western city such as Richmond, the provincial capitol will be the most important building, traditionally ornamented with a fully expressed order, etc., all at an appropriate scale. Lesser buildings take their cue from this and are ornamented in a way that tells the story of the city. Classical buildings like the State Capitol are the best of these good neighbors.   

So, perhaps another question might be "what are the practical uses of an architecture that refuses to look to the past and continues to build indefensible, un-neighborly buildings?" Of course I have made this seem very cut-and-dry. There are many current architects who seek to use the modernist language in a communal, legible way, with varying degrees of success. I would argue, however, that such efforts are inherently futile. 

I am not sure what exactly you mean by the resources and processes originally used, but your question does raise an interesting question: how do we recover the skills and traditions of a building craft ignored for the last half century? One of the main difficulties with such an undertaking is the difficulty of mastering many of the required skills of the traditional architect and builder. Many of these traditions have been protected or rediscovered in the preservation field. There are several institutions around the world, my school among them, which seek to continue and spread the skills and traditions of the last 2700 years.

If you would like to know more about traditional and classical architecture and urbanism I would recommend the book, Architecture: Choice or Fate, by Leon Krier. It is a great place to start understanding classicism in a modernist world.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best, 

Richard