Richmond's Civic Markers III: Fountains as a symbol of the Civic Good

"Consuls, emperors, and popes, the great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging, upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or marble."

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860

 [Fountains] are sited throughout [Pompeii], all very similar to one another and none very elaborate. While clearly more utilitarian than decorative in form, their siting is a different matter, for as we have seen, they so clearly contribute to the general urban structure that we must conclude that their placement took more into consideration than the utilitarian demands of the hydraulic engineers.   

                                         C.W. Westfall, Learning From Pompeii, 1998.



Richard Worsham, Proposed fountain for 17th St Market

Springs and fountains can be placed in a distinct category of civic amenity, but one that merges with the subset of monuments. Like monuments, fountains have been used to mark nodes along significant urban routes.

From a purely functional perspective, Richmonders, from the earliest date, relied on springs and public wells for water. As the nineteenth century passed, Richmond joined other traditional cities in the intentional use of water to mark out the public realm and to reinforce the city’s relationship with a tamed and ordered nature, while at the same time providing access to element required for life by both people and animals.  

The city's access to water began at a very basic level. Public wells at street corners and a spring located south of Main Street sufficed for the town’s water supply in the eighteenth century. By 1808, however, the city, following national trends, used ingenuity to improve the purity and volume of the supply. Water was now conveyed in wooden pipes to the market at Seventeenth Street from a spring near Libby Hill. The resulting terminal fountain at the City Market must have been a familiar and significant destination for farmers, patrons, stall-holders, and their thirsty draft animals, not to mention the residents of all sorts that relied on that and similar public sources of water placed throughout the town.  

Richmond's City Hall, site of a public well in the early nineteenth century.

The city was constantly expanding and improving its rudimentary water system. As technologies became accessible, the city applied them to the acquisition of addition supplies of water for drinking and fire prevention. In 1816, the common hall (city council) agreed to sink a well in Broad Street near the new Courthouse, which was located at the site of the current Old City Hall [Common Hall, 27 May 1816].

By 1830, Richmond’s water supply "consisted of public wells at the street corners and several public hydrants with water conveyed in wooden pipes from a spring near Chimborazo Hill and from one in the Capitol Square” [Christian, 1912, 115]. In 1827, the Common Hall had issued an order forbidding tampering with the city’s public water supply, including wells and pumps along H Street (Broad Street) installed at the city’s expense and the wooden pipes, placed by “sundry liberal and deserving inhabitants. . . [who] have at their own expense, placed wooden pipes through which water is conveyed from the Basin of the Canal, through the Main Street of the said City as far as Shockoe Creek, and have erected fountains or jets in different parts of the said pipes, whereby many Citizens are supplied with water, and in case of Fire in that part of the city, great advantages may be experienced from the water supplied at the said Fountains or Pumps. . . .” [Ordinance for keeping in repair the Fountains in the Main Street of the city of Richmond, 16 Nov. 1827].   

In 1829, the City proposed an expanded "watering" of D and E streets (Cary and Main) from the Basin at 11th Street to Shockoe Creek, using iron pipes, at a cost of $5,631.64 [Common Hall, 28 May 1829].  A pump on Fourteenth Street was also proposed for use by fire companies. In the same year, Nicholas Mills ceded to the City a twenty-five foot-wide street through his lot from 7th to 8th street, giving access to a tract containing Gibson’s Spring, guaranteeing "open access to the said Spring . . . reserved for public purposes” [Common Hall, 8 June 1829].

A new system was opened in 1832, supplied by a water-powered pump with a capacity of 400,000 gallons of poorly filtered canal water per day. This system served to fill a 4,000,000 gallon reservoir. Water was distributed through twelve miles of pipe to both public and private locations. The first private hydrant was in the yard of Corbin Warwick on Grace Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets [Christian 1912, 115]. 


Detail from 1865 view of Castle Thunder showing an iron hydrant on the NE corner of
18th and Cary Streets. The hydrant was detailed like a fluted Doric column.

In ancient times, the provision of water in cities had been delivered at regularly placed urban nodes. From Pompeii to Paris, water outlets minimally required for the civic good have been harnessed to the larger urban project, underlining, by their sensory contributions, the significance of selected urban intersections and plazas. In Richmond, as elsewhere in the region, fountains or basins were provided at major entry points to the city for the watering of draft animals and herds. Hydrants were found at certain street corners for use in filling pitchers, tubs, and fighting fires.  

The value and provision of water to city populations was one of the many topics that exercised the minds of early-nineteenth-century planners. In thinking about public water supplies, educated persons as a matter of course compared their plans to improve hygiene with the public fountains and baths of ancient Rome. They also tried to effect the most scientific and economical provision of water for the public. 

Latrobe's Center Square Pump House, Philadelphia (1799-1801)

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English architect who began his American career in Richmond, was an advocate of public waterworks in Philadelphia, where outbreaks of disease had decimated the city. Such epidemics were sometimes associated with impurities in the water supply. Latrobe completed Philadelphia's public water system in 1801. In postscripts to his proposal for the waterworks, dealing with fountains and public baths, Latrobe displayed his characteristic interest in the effects of and correction of local climatic conditions and his studied opinion that the value of water justified the imitation by Americans of the indulgent practices of despotic European countries (by which he meant imperial Rome). 

According to one study, Latrobe asserted that "the fountains, which would supply the poor of the city with free water, would also provide the 'only means of cooling the air.' Air cooled by the agitation of water was, Latrobe asserted, “of the purest kind.' While it is most likely that Latrobe was referring to physical purity (here significant because miasmatic theory charged impure air as a source of disease), the word recalls a classical climactic tradition, which emphasized air as the medium which communicated the specificities of the environment to the human body" [Jennifer Y. Chuong "Art is a Hardy Plant": Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Cultivation of a Transitional Aesthetics, Thesis, Cornell University) 2007].

Godefroys' landscape st the Capitol Square included cascades that occuied the gullies
to each side of the Capitol [Mijacah Bates, Map of Richmond, 1832].

One of the most significant ornamental uses of water were the cascades provided in the early nineteenth century by Maximilian Godefroy in the place of the former spring-fed ravines that flanked the Capitol. These aided in the transformation of a disordered landscape into the city’s first ornamental park, a suitable setting for its earliest monumental public sculpture. Later in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the language of fountains became more elaborate and the functional fountain was joined by the purely ornamental. When John Notman redesigned the square in 1850, he added tiered fountains at the bottom of each of the two dells that took the place of the former ravines. 

1850 Capitol Square Fountain seen in 1960 [RTD, Valentine].

The city developed as part of its amenities a series of artesian springs in parks and green belts on the city’s periphery for public use. These also had a significant ornamental role, using water as a powerful symbol of the public good, organized and given form by the city. The water works at Byrd Park were developed in the 1880s, and the significance of the huge reservoir was later dramatized by a miniature cascade placed at the southern end of the great urban cross-axis of the Boulevard.    



Cascade at the Southern end of the Boulevard axis. The fountain represents the
public water supply housed in the large reservoir just behind.  

Monroe Park Fountain, Post Card, c 1905
[VCU Special Collections]

When Monroe Park was first landscaped in 1872, its center was marked by a naturalistic fountain made in the form of a pyramid of rocks, the city’s first ornamental fountain outside Capitol Square. It was later replaced by the current iron tazzo or tiered fountain. This fountain was used for a wading pool during periods of intense summer heat. The Monroe Park fountain is still fed directly from the city’s public water supply. Like most of Rome’s fountains, the fountain in Monroe Park contains clean, living, water. Current plans for the revitalization of Monroe Park call for it to be replumbed with a recirculating fountain, as if the supply of water in the James River, used to water all the lawns of Richmond, including the automatic sprinklers in the park, was too precious to trickle from the fountain’s graduated bowls.  

Fountain erected in Byrd Park by the Women's Christian
Temperance Union as a memorial to the work of the WCTU and a
 successful crusade in Ohio in 1873, the beginning of the
movement that led to the 18th Amendment banning of the sale
of alcohol in 1919.

Drinking fountains were a favorite civic gesture of temperance societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richmond's temperance fountain, located near the reservoir, provided drinking water to visitors in Byrd Park and was supplied with a mounting block for children. It takes the form of an elegant Roman wall fountain. The upright tablet is supported by carved granite volutes. The basin is edged by an ornamental molding resembling a wreath of bound reeds suggesting the resolution and unity of the uncompromising band of donors.  The inscription reads: "This fountain is erected by the Women's Christian Temperence Union of Richmond and Henrico County and their friends in Memory of the Crusaders of Hillsborough who went out December 19th 1873 with the weapons of prayer and faith in God to overthrow the liquor traffic."

Fountain at the Intersection of Brook Turnpike with West Broad Street [Shorpy]. The fountain has
dog water basins at the bottom. It still serves the police horses at a
location behind the Bill "Bojangles" Robinson statue on Brook Turnpike.  

Capt. Charles S. Morgan gave this marble fountain to serve draft horses at the
center of the city's tobacco warehouse district. It is inscribed
"In Memory of One Who Loved Animals." 

The fountains that provided water to animals entering the city included an ornate cast iron one, now gone, in Manchester and the plain stone structure that distributed water to both large and small animals at the point where Brook Turnpike entered Broad Street. It was later re-located to a site now behind the Bojangles Robinson statue where it serves police horses with fresh water. A third fountain for horses and oxen, made of marble, still stands at the center of the Shockoe Slip in 1905, where tobacco was deposited in one of the city's huge warehouses. Its setting has been marred in recent years by unnecessary foundation planting.


The Monroe Park fountain was followed by similar structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including a one depicting a heron in front of the Governor’s Mansion (unfortunately replaced with a very conventional iron one during the Robb administration).  

Wayside Spring, Forest Hills Park
[https://foursquare.com/v/wayside-spring/4c73a7667121a1cda29a65d1]

Richmond residents who preferred spring water to the municipal water supply or didn't have water piped to their houses could get water that welled from the ground in artesian springs that were opened and maintained in parks around the city. These included Byrd Park, Wayside Spring in Forest Hills Park, Fonticello Park (now Carter Jones Park), where the spring has been modernized and still flows. A spring also flowed into a concrete trough along the side of Richmond Henrico Turnpike in Barton Heights. The spring water, which once poured through three lion's heads, is no longer running.

Kanawha Plaza Fountain, located as part of a plaza designed by Robert
Zion of Zion & Breen, completed in 1980

More recent fountains, such as those at the Kanawha Plaza at the James Center, installed during urban improvement projects in the mid-twentieth century, replace the conventional allegory of nature projected by earlier fountains with a literalism that fails to convince the viewer of either its natural origins or its cleanliness. 

Libby Hill Fountain, 1990s.

In contrast, the conventional iron tazzo (tiered) fountains added in recent years on Libby Hill have a much less focused connection with water as a carrier of civic meaning. They serve merely as park design amenities. These amenities (examples of the widespread rethinking of traditional fountains as superfluous “water features”) which, while they signal renewed pride in the park’s grounds and an improved level of upkeep, largely fail as markers of the public good. Their placement and form, like their recirculating contents, are inadequately related to the nature and history of the site.  

 

RICHMOND'S BALLPARK CONTROVERSY: PLANNING FOR THE MARKET SQUARE IN SHOCKOE BOTTOM

Richard Worsham, Proposed First Market fountain, thesis, Notre Dame, 2011. 

"Even as places like Austin and Seattle are thriving, much of the country is failing to adapt to the demands of the creative age. . . . They pay lip service to the need to "attract talent," but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers, underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes. Or they try to create facsimiles of neighborhoods or retail districts, replacing the old and authentic with the new and generic---and in doing so drive the creative class away."    Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

At Urbanismo, we have been putting our heads together this week, sounding out the best way to respond to the Mayor’s announcement of the proposed redevelopment of the 17th Street Market area as the setting for a new baseball field. We have championed the market for years, bought our produce and handmade Christmas wreaths there for decades, and researched its history in considerable detail. We have even adapted it for a master’s thesis towards a degree in architecture. Most recently, we developed a design for its full rehabilitation as a major civic asset, in response to a request for proposals from the city, although our proposal was not selected from among those submitted. All of this attention should have made us feel a little possessive of the currently “down at heel” district, were it possible to “own” a public space that holds such potential for the entire city’s benefit. 

Detail of proposed Shockoe Bottom project, showing the historic Market Square as a redesigned "promenade,"
 a long esplanade leading to the ball park and filled with a meandering "water feature." 

We have decided to focus our attention here on the Market Square itself, rather than the totality of the baseball diamond project, which is already the subject of much contention and  critical attention. This ill-conceived land deal will transform the heart of a gritty, vital urban district into what will be, in essence, a shopping mall development, and an economically risky one at that. It seems to us that the Market Square is the most vulnerable part of this long-contested area known as “Shockoe Bottom.” 

Detail of the "Promenade" to replace the First Market Square
 from the city's official proposal for the Shockoe Bottom Development.  

When the city's intention for First Market Square was described by Lee Downey, Richmond's director of Economic and Community Development as "establishing a 'Shockoe Promenade' that links Main Street to Broad Street," we realized that the city has been approaching the project from exactly the wrong direction all along. The goal of making the "square" into a pass-through to the ballpark is just what is illustrated in the renderings shown above. The new "promenade" represents the transformation of a historic square, with its inimitable textures and special character, into yet another extended suburban-style pedestrian mall. 

The Market Square as polling place in 1865, after the Civil War's end.   

What is remarkable about the Market Square is the astonishing layering that characterizes its historic associations. Only a few of the buildings that define its edges actually date from before 1880, yet the square embodies over 300 years of built history. It has been the scene of celebration, petty crime and public shaming, political rallies, riots, public announcements, parades, and, most of all, the highly regulated sale of the foodstuffs required to feed the households of a city. While the market was not directly associated with the selling of slaves, a function which was mostly carried on, out of sight, a few blocks away, it is, nevertheless, intimately associated with every aspect of Richmond’s history, both good and evil. 

Historic paving at Arch Alley Seen from the Market Square

As part of the rich, bottom-up, market-driven development that has characterized the area along Shockoe Creek since the late seventeenth century, the area around the Seventeenth Street or First Market is an increasingly vital neighborhood in its own right. Most of what is significant about the market area is embedded in its street layout, its pavement, and its shape. The curbing, street pavement, and sidewalks carry its history as strongly as the buildings that surround it. 

While it is very likely that the designs published for the proposed ball park do not accurately represent the final appearance of the Market Square, it is clear that the project's planners treat the square simply as a corridor leading to the ball park. It isn’t acceptable, however, to treat the square as if it was just a link in a grand scheme seen from a privileged, bird’s eye perspective. There are subtle formal and historical distinctions that must be made in order to take full advantage of the gifts this valuable civic resource offers to the city.

Market Square, Richmond, boundaries, 150 x 300 feet, 1793.

The Market Square is made up of at least two parts. The earliest part of the present square is the southern half. Its legal boundaries laid out in 1792. It contained the two-story building that served as the market house, municipal building, assembly hall, records office, and seat of justice. This building was later rebuilt and expanded to the north as far as Franklin Street. Most importantly, its two main sections were linked by a central archway in the form of a tower that spanned “Arch Alley” midway along the market, permitting movement from east to west across the square. The elongated form of the now-vanished market buildings is defined by the cobbled streets and the granite curbing, each of which dates to the heyday of the market in the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, the market extended all the way to Grace Street in a series of shed-like buildings that diminished as they moved north.

Market Square in 1889 from Sanborn Map. Note the archway corresponding
to Walnut or Arch Alley.

The square did not evolve as an open piazza. While the edges of the square are formed by building facades on the south, east, and west, there is no closure at the north. The square was meant to be filled with architecture. This does not mean that it cannot be adapted for use as a piazza designed to serve the civic good. It is, however, long and narrow and “leaky” at the corners. Without careful handling, it will appear merely as an unusually wide street running uninterrupted from Main to Grace.

Market Square from Beer's Map of 1876.

We suggest that, if the project isn't going to involve our preferred option, rebuilding the Market Hall, the following points should be considered:   

• this place has been at the heart of commerce in Richmond for over two hundred years. This area with a growing population should retain a market function, preferably with a number of permanent stalls.

• it is essential that cars and trucks be, at least during the daylight hours, able to travel along the existing streets through the square. As the recent Richmond Downtown Master Plan indicates, areas without traffic do not feel safe, seem empty, and suffer commercially. 

• “pedestrianization” sounds humane, but, except in certain high density areas, can be deadly to an area. Cars underline the activity in the area and parked cars even make visitors feel safer on the sidewalks. Keep the cars! 

• retain existing pavement, not only in the square , but along the adjacent streets that, in some cases, is the principal reminder of the historic context. 

• pave the central part of the Square to match the granite street pavers and curbs in color, so that the square visually flows from sidewalk to sidewalk. A central granite walkway from north to south could represent the central aisle that defined each of the three previous market halls on the site.

• keep the brick sidewalks to help define the edge of the square in Richmond's traditional manner, reinforcing the continuity of the city and the square. Paving with one flat plane from one side to the other will look just like Short Pump Mall! 

• widen the sidewalk in front of the restaurants along the east side of the square, where the street is too wide for comfort. 

• don’t “brand” the Market Square with aggressively stylized benches, trash receptacles, or light fixtures. Use historic lamp standards less than ten feet tall in order to meet a pedestrian scale.

• the Market Square is the site of the first public water fountain in Richmond, fed by pipes from a spring on Church Hill. Consider adding a well-designed, substantial, traditional fountain in an off-center location, but not any other sort of “water feature.” 

• avoid filling the Market Square with franchise restaurants, as is typical in many similar downtown rehabilitation projects (see downtown Chattanooga). Go out of the way to make the Market Square friendly to owner-operated small businesses.  

Shopping yesterday for a Christmas wreath with Lucille Allen (seen at right above) and her son. 
With her sister, Rosa Fleming, she has been selling home-grown vegetables and
hand-made Christmas decorations on the market for more than fifty years. 

In short, by treating the project with the care it deserves, the Market Square can become, once again, as flexible, serviceable, and exciting as any American public square or Italian piazza of today. 

A Proposal for 17th Street Market

 

 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.

To see a more recent proposal for the Market at Seventeenth Street in the context of the Shockoe Ballpark Controversy, please visit this recent post.

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

The Passaggiata in Hell

Richmond has lost the key to its stockpile of urban meaning. Meanwhile, the commercial life of the city has been transported to the outer suburbs. Short Pump Town Center (and Stony Point Fashion Park) are Richmond's newest shopping centers.

Short Pump is an urban desert. It is a parody of a city. Its architecture is sterile, banal, and without imagination, exhibiting no architectural unity or integrity. This was not entirely true of earlier shopping centers. Mid-twentieth-century shopping centers and malls such as Willow Lawn and Southside Plaza were unified by an architectural idea- in this case, that of modernism- much as the great metropolitan markets of the past exhibited architectural unity. As a commercial mart, Willow Lawn made no attempt to memorialize the past. And at any rate the shopping centers of the 1950s were aligned with major shopping streets.

Willow Lawn soon after construction

“Downtown Short Pump” represents an unprecedented intrusion into the ancient patterns of humane life. It well merits its nickname at Urbanismo: “the Outer Circle of Hell.” Like chaos, Short Pump is without form and void, because it is changeless, timeless, one-dimensional, and circular, an endless passaggiata.

An axial view of one of the tentacles of Short Pump Town Center

Short Pump is changeless (the owners pride themselves on its seamless maintenance program). It is timeless (the recorded music is always playing). It is one-dimensional and undifferentiated, while the city is endlessly varied but unified (it is differentiated within an underlying matrix of order). It is circular-even though there are different paths, ultimately the experience consists in walking in circles, like the mall-walkers who avoid climate and traffic to get relentless exercise. Such anti-urbanism was not a characteristic of earlier manifestations of the shopping center. The ancestor of the mall, the nineteenth-century galleria, functioned as a street and was an integral part of the city, aligned with the larger civic life.

Galleria Mazzini, Genova

Short Pump has a few of the traditional features of a marketplace. Its monuments, such as a trite statue of Patsy Cline and the central fountain made up of a variety of hand pumps are humorless, literal, and derivative tropes on the monumental program of the actual city. It is a controlled environment with a fully developed literature of commerce. In its attempt to supplant the city, Short Pump Town Center has constructed a diminuative founding myth.

The "Short Pump Fountain" at Short Pump Town Center

Markets are properly miniature cities. The order of the marketplace is immediately apparent. Orthogonal aisles like streets organize the stalls. The market is placed in the urban context and responds to its patterns. While markets and fairs are controlled sectors of the city, they contain individual proprietors who are responsible for their success or failure. Although the quality of their produce is carefully policed by the city, markets offer no guarantee of happiness. Unlike the vapid crowds at Short Pump, markets are frequented by people from all stations of life. A flaneur is unlikely to find pleasure at Stony Point Fashion Park.

While its open air plan is welcoming to pedestrians, Short Pump Town Center is the antithesis of a real market and far less subtle even than an American shopping mall. Its essentially circular form defies any ordering principle both locally and on an urban scale. It doesn’t matter where you are in it. A sleepy urbanist might mistakenly see it as an improvement over a shopping mall because it more self-consciously resembles a town. In fact, it is not a fragment of a city but a commercial whirlpool.