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.

Reorganizing the Modern City: The Case of Detroit

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.

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

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

Rural Extensions: Dinwiddie County Architecture

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 Urban Crisis

This summer urbanismo worked with an Italian architect, urbanist and student of the Muratori school of urban morphology. He recomended a book by his teacher, Gianfranco Caniggia. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology serves as a good introduction to the well established Muratorian tradition. As the year progresses we will continue to explore this intriguing way of looking at the city.

"To say that a discipline is in crisis may appear to be a negative judgment; in actual fact, a crisis is always synonymous with discomfort for those involved and for those who undergo it. However, there is no doubt that crisis arises whenever any structure whatsoever is ineffective, in the above mentioned way, in adapting to new, different needs. What makes that crisis positive is that it is an attempt to adapt and laboriously strike a new balance vis-à-vis a changed reality. The history of the crisis of composition can be, perhaps reductively, delineated in brief. A certain codification of the teaching of composition was in force at the time the first “universities of architecture” in Italy were formed, that is, between the 1920s and the 1930s. This codification soon proved to be inadequate, inasmuch as, in the following decade, innovative pressures were such that the system of formal rules derived from the academies had to be replaced with a generic promotion of the personal inventiveness of individual students, in a direct relationship with the individual lecturers. The Modern Movement had, therefore, entered into teaching the point of which was almost entirely the comprehensive desecration of the academic codifications, that is to say, almost entirely the negative opposition to previous formulations.

However, what did not change in the old academy was the concept of architect’s traditional role as constructors of exceptional products and creators of new forms in opposition to methods used to produce buildings before each was its own creative act. In this way, composition was taken to be a subject suited to developing individual creativity, in a specifically personalized way, to foster the heterogeneity of products and a vague inventiveness professing aestheticism. This formula is extraordinarily efficient in educating architects capable of serving a clientele (relatively important if public or private) and providing them with a consumer product deliberately in opposition to any context, to any existing building and to any civil continuity.

This didactic form spread to almost all teaching of architectural composition (except a few, worthwhile exceptions, first and foremost the redefinition of the subject according to a consistent dialectic based on the analysis of existing building and on the conceptual and ethical assumptions of mankind’s building activities as developed in Rome by Saverio Muratori) and it lasted until the late seventies, when the evident inadequacy of the pseudo-methodology to the changed social role of architects led to a series of attempts to interrelate better with the actual human environment.

Many of these attempts undoubtedly caused uncertainty in the aims and boundaries of the discipline. Faced with a lack of specific methodology, there was an overall attempt to link up with the actual environment from other specific disciplines such as economics, sociology, and psychology. Some forms of current teaching of architectural composition, including our own, derived from directly from or indirectly from Saverio Muratori’s thought, teaching and research, and took the role of the disciple to be completely the opposite."

Gianfanco Canniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, trans. Susan Jane Fraser. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology. Alinea, Florence: 2001. p. 32.