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.

PUBLIC ART AND COMMUNITY MEMORY: RICHMOND'S MAGGIE LENA WALKER

In the following essay, we will attempt to trace the history and character of monument-making in Richmond and how it might affect the proposed memorial to Maggie L. Walker, one of the city's great pathfinders. 

Urbanismo attended a public meeting on April 5 at the historic Third Street Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was presented by the City of Richmond’s Public Art Commission.  Two separate meetings were scheduled, each intended “to provide input on commemorative public art in Jackson Ward honoring the life and accomplishments of Maggie L. Walker.”  About thirty people attended the second meeting, held on a Saturday morning. 

Maggie Walker’s memorial will enrich the city’s collection of monuments, but only if it is designed to support and transform the larger civic realm. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, traditional monuments embody “a single powerful idea in a single emphatic form, in colossal scale and in permanent materials.” Even more important, monuments are effective to the degree that they are “made to serve civic life.” As understood in Richmond and in the cities of the past from which it took its pattern, monuments assist in ordering the city, making legible its structure and origins, both literally and figuratively. Traditionally, a city without appropriate monuments could make no claim to be a place of civility or a center of virtuous political life. While the term “monument” is frequently applied to significant works of public architecture, 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.

Installation of the equestrian statue of Washington in 1858.

The Maggie L. Walker memorial can be placed within the category of monument typically identified as “public art.” Provision of public art, mandated in certain situations by city authorities, can prove to be a source of controversy in a republic with a weak sense of common purpose. The history of most of the public sculpture in Richmond since the mid-nineteenth century shows that the conflicting expectations of those with an interest in the work of art often leads to political difficulties in its realization. It also shows that citizen groups working together can, in spite of inevitable conflict, produce work that positively reinforces local civic life and organizational patterns. Richmond’s Public Art Commission has recognized the inevitably local character of public art with this statement: “Great cities of the world inspire, uplift, instruct and heal with their particular brand of great art [our italics].” This local character results, not only from regional materials and shared traditions of artistic expression, but from the way that the community has, over time, incorporated memory into its urban fabric. The Richmond tradition of outdoor public statuary began with a monument to Virginia’s role in the nation’s founding, first proposed in 1817. After years of inaction, a committee of citizens proposed a competition for the monument, which was held in 1849. The popular and successful monument was not only a tribute to George Washington as military and political leader, but an elaborate allegory linking Virginia with the national polity. 

Among the most recent monuments to participate in the tradition is the effective and powerful Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Capitol Square. The monument, completed by artist Stanley Bleifeld in 2008, depicts eighteen figures, some historical and some representative, placed on four sides of a stone plinth and telling the story of the long struggle for equality. The sculptural ensemble avoids the sentimentality that characterizes some of the sculptor's work in other cities and takes a place among the very best monuments of recent decades. 

Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, Capitol Square, Richmond, 2008

Partly as a result of its mid-nineteenth-century role as “national capitol,” Richmond acquired an extensive and more urbane collection of public art, surpassing other state capitals of comparable size. The armature of memorial statuary extending along Monument Avenue from the old city into the projected suburbs to the west was the serendipitous result, not of public planning, but of the intentions of the Allen family, who wished to enhance the value of their property for development. These sculptures, most of which were privately organized and subscribed, vary widely in the degree to which they match memory with fact. Since that time, a wide variety of public art has been added across the city, but the city remains characterized by its collection of heroic outdoor statuary. Some are undeniably successful, but one or two of them cross the line into what James Branch Cabell, in dismissing the public art at Jamestown, described as “a collection of serio-comic sculpture” [Cabell, Let Me Lie, 51].

Maggie Lena Walker occupies an outstanding place in the list of great Virginians. As a child of former slaves, she showed a path forward in business and education among Richmond’s black population. She played an important national role based in her energy, political wisdom, and organizational powers. She promoted high standards for self reliance and education within the Richmond community. As the gifted leader of the influential Independent Order of St. Luke, she broke new ground as a black woman when she founded and managed the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Mrs. Walker is regarded today as one of the most important leaders in post-War Virginia and the nation. A high school is named for her and her house is maintained by the National Park Service as a national historic landmark dedicated to her achievements. At one time a small motion picture theater (incorporated into today's Virginia Rep on Broad Street) was renamed after her.

Maggie L. Walker, plaster bust,
commissioned by the 
Independent Order of St. Luke in 1934 [NPS]

In spite of her many honors, Richmonders have noted for decades that there is no monument to Maggie L. Walker on the city’s streets, as there are dedicated to so many who opposed the improvements she championed (there is a monument to her in front of Maggie L. Walker High School, based on the plaster bust of 1934). In Richmond, a city of monuments, the most important memorials to heroic individuals typically take the form of statues. Supporters of recent efforts to realize a Walker memorial have usually referred to the monument as a statue, with the primary intention of the perpetuation of the memory of her personal achievement as a recognizable individual beyond the current era. Although one private organization's effort to put up a statue to Maggie Walker at the intersection of Broad and Adams streets was supported by City Council in 2010, the cause is now entirely in the hands of the official Public Art Commission using public funds mandated for art.

The meeting was organized and professionally led using a popular consensus building format designed to guide groups into “ownership” and to detach individuals from any conventional viewpoints, including those that favor lifelike, representational statuary, consistently presented to the participants as the “traditional” option among many equally significant kinds of public art. Members of the Richmond Public Art Commission made presentations, one on the process for obtaining a monument and one on the various ways in which it is possible to memorialize an individual. 

Anne Fletcher (Corporate Art Administrator at Capital One) explained that a figural or narrative monument was one choice among many that would be appropriate as a memorial to Maggie Walker, including gateways, gardens, plazas designed as integral sculpture installations, and non-representational “place-making” art that can even be whimsical. We were asked to keep our minds open on the form and location of the monument, relying instead on the artists who will be asked to submit proposals. Lisa Freiman, Director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Contemporary Art, had told the group at the previous meeting that "the best works of art are ones where we don't control the artist, rather we allow them to interpret the history into art." It became clear during the question and answer period that one of the tasks that the Commission had assigned itself was the creation of a much larger definition of “monument” than that held by some members of the community, including a few more vocal members of this audience. These individuals voiced their concern and expectations in the question and answer period about the way that decisions would be made about the location and appearance of the monument. 

Public meeting held at Sixth Mount Zion
Baptist Church on April 1, 2014 [Public Arts Commission]

The Public Art Commission is not alone in the manipulative use of the facilitated small-group meeting, nor is its minimizing of traditional statuary entirely unreasonable. Conflict can be divisive over location and content, as was witnessed in the execution of the Arthur Ashe Monument, which was privately promoted and funded. Figural sculpture can be, and often is, poorly executed. According to Michael J. Lewis, “monuments and memorials today are discursive, sentimental, addicted to narrative literalism, and asking to be judged on good intentions rather than visual coherence."  We sometimes seem, as a nation, to have lost the ability to imbue civic art with clear, serious, and appropriate meaning. Giving unlimited scope to the artist can work against the goals of the community in sponsoring a memorial. In the words of art historian James E. Young, "even as monuments continue to be commissioned and designed by governments and public agencies eager to assign memory and meaning to complicated events, artists increasingly plant in them the seeds of self-doubt and impermanence."  

The city has, in any case, embraced public art as an device for economic and cultural improvement and seeks every opportunity to minimize conflict by avoiding debate. From this point of view, the overlay of a Modernist understanding of public art over the diverse expectations of the community reduces the likelihood of badly conceived art by raising the level of the conversation from the merely local to the international.  

Skyrider, a suspended sculpture at Main Street Station 
sponsored under the city's public art funding program

In the case of this project, we were informed that professional artists from around the world will be asked make proposals which will be evaluated by the Public Art Commission and the monument's Site Selection Committee. In effect, the members of the commission, with the protection afforded by their professional facilitator, successfully uncoupled the critical faculties of their audience and imposed an approach to art and remembrance very different from the traditional concepts shared, not only within the larger community, but with heroic individuals like Maggie Walker herself. In the words of Douglas Dunlap, a member of the Commission, "It's a commemorative piece of art and the reason why we're not using the term "statue" is because at the end of the day, once we go through our site selection process and the community engagement process, what we've said is we want each person coming into the process to come in with an open mind" [RVA March 24, 2014].  

The meeting continued with a tabulation, using an electronic button pad, of a series of tightly controlled questions designed to channel participants’ thoughts in directions away from the conventional. These questions concerning opinions were designed to elicit agreement with the Public Art Commission’s primary goals of producing “world-class” art works that will stimulate the city’s “community and economic development.” The questions helped transform the participants into supporters by the unswerving direction of their concerns. “On a scale of one to five should the memorial be more narrative or more poetic?” “Should the monument be more forceful or more subtle?” “Which aspects of Maggie Walker’s achievements should be emphasized?”  This was followed by a series of discussions held among groups divided and placed at small tables.

Maggie L. Walker, marble bust,
commissioned by local councils 
of the International Order of St. 
Luke in New York for the order's 
annual convention in 1925. This 
portrait sculpture touched Mrs. 
Walker deeply. She wrote in her
diary that "to live to be so 
honored is a joy inexpressible" 
[NPS]. 

This radically open-ended scenario was designed not to collect ideas, but to dispel alternate visions, generate consensus, and garner support. Members of the public, several of whom brought from their life experiences very clear ideas of the nature of a monument (specifically a statue representing the transcendent figure of Maggie Walker), were required to suspend their judgement of what constituted an appropriate monument. They were asked to concentrate, instead, on the meaning that they would like to see presented by the monument, whatever its form. When several people asked questions betraying conventional expectations, they were made to understand that their assumptions were simplistic, if only because they had been expressed outside of the Commission’s pre-established processes.    

One of the marks of the traditional city is a shared understanding among residents of the form and uses of urban features like architecture and public art, what Italian architectural theorist Gianfranco Caniggia has referred to in another context as “our common heritage of specific focussed knowledge.” Instead of this formerly shared understanding, he said, “we possess substantial uncertainty, masked in apparent freedom to do many different things or anything.” In the face of this radical uncertainty, planners and leaders turn to outside experts, who produce “highly personalized, scarcely interrelated objects.” While we, as a society, have largely rejected traditional academic artistic formulations, we have not lost the notion of the artist as a prophetic source set outside the shared values of a community. Caniggia understood the modern era to be a period of “crisis” in which traditional urban criteria are no longer available to decision makers, resulting in arbitrary cultural products that, by their poor fit, can cause sustained damage to the urban environment. 

The “crisis” in the local understanding of the role of public art means that those for whom it is intended are excluded from its production. The works that are realized appear as arbitrary consumer products disconnected from the ongoing dialog that characterizes civic life. Furthermore, the loss of a common language involving civic and artistic topics has been accelerated as bureaucracies adopt an opaque process (now quite widely used) to achieve the effect of a consensus that can be tabulated and manipulated to reduce discord and achieve visible results. 

Urban Scale Richmond takes as its focus the rediscovery of the rules, both explicit and implicit, that have guided the building of the city and give to its art and architecture a unique character. One way to achieve this result (and to reduce the diminution of local conventions and the disempowerment of citizens) is for planners to actively reconstruct the city’s operative patterns. The way in which monuments proceed from a nexus of community expectations is an important part of those patterns. By engaging critically with local issues,  it will be possible to confirm and stimulate healthy growth and change in the city. 

The way in which monuments are procured has an effect on the quality of their “fit,” although there is no consensus on the best way to control the process. Design competitions have been used since the eighteenth century to solve the interpretive disconnect between a monument’s promoters and the artist who must make it. The design control is exercised by means of a process of selection undertaken by representatives of the community from a roster of possible solutions. This remains the best means for achieving a critically successful monument, although history is littered with competition winners who later lost their position to political or financial pressure. The most complicated part of making a monument is in connecting it in some tangible way, not only with local tradition, but with the expectations of the various constituencies for which it is intended. This is only achieved through careful consideration of location, materials, scale, form, and viewer expectations. Urbanismo hopes for the best!

“In an age that denies universal values, there can also be no universal symbols, the kind that monuments once represented. The monument is a declaration of love and admiration attached to the higher purposes men hold in common...An age that has deflated its values and lost sight of its purposes will not procure convincing monuments.”              

                                       Lewis Mumford, 1949

Notes:
See Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, Interpreting Basic Buildings and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism to trace the sources of some of these ideas.   The James E. Young quote is from “Memory/Monument” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff eds, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. U Chicago P, 2010, 236. Michael J. Lewis addresses issues concerning monuments in “The Decline of American Monuments and Memorials,” Imprimis (41:4) April 2012]

THE MATRIX ROUTE IN RICHMOND

Main Street looking West in 1865 [LOC] showing early nineteenth-
century one-, two-, and three-story brick basic buildings in the
process of replacement by four-and five-story commercial
blocks and hotels during the period preceding the Civil War. 

“All this is evident in colonial towns such as New York or Buenos Aires in which routes were not originally traced with different cross-sections or with complimentary roles, but as a chessboard of joint blocks. Time has produced in them a more or less exact hierarchy, yet partially compensating for the sequential nature of the plan, because it gives rise to routes with an insufficient cross-section to bear their hierarchical role. . .” 

Gianfranco Caniggia, Understanding Basic Building, 185

Italian School of Processual Typology 

Americans tend to think of their cities as two-dimensional grids of streets that were gradually infilled as the population grew. In fact, the way cities evolve is much more complex and interesting. Cities actually form along connecting routes in obedience to rule sets that can be recreated by a critical reading of their current fabric. According to the Italian School of Processual Typology, founded and developed by Saverio Muratori and his students, city development follows predictable patterns that are analogized to biological processes. 

As understood by this highly developed theory of urban morphology, cities grow in direct relation to generative “matrix routes.”  The routes (and the building tissue along them) are “polarized,” not only by distant destinations, but by nodes that occur along their lengths, where two routes intersect or where a route branches off. This polarization affects the intensity of development along a route, a factor which changes both in relation to factors of time (diachronic diversification) and location (diatopic diversification).  

During periods of “civil continuity,” when “spontaneous” (traditional or vernacular) building is operative, serial building tissue multiplies along a matrix route and along the secondary “planned building routes” that the city provides parallel to it. The building tissue is made up of buildings constructed according to a “typological process,” whereby the maker is guided by a mental plan that corresponds to an invisible grammar of building, passed down among owners and builders over time.  

As the city expands, it develops “aggregations” of buildings that correspond to building types.  Most aggregations are made up of basic buildings (the least personalized  kind of urban building, conditioned for the use of one or more families over time and space) or specialized tissue, which includes aggregates that correspond to special building types, like those serving government, religious, or other communitarian functions. Building tissue can exhibit seriality (made up of interchangeable elements) or organicity (characterized by peculiar shape or position). Building types continually change as specialization increases or functions are spilt off. 

By reading the city’s tissue, it is possible to recreate its development and reconstruct the formerly invisible rules by which basic and specialized tissue has been extended. Then, the planner or architect makes use of “critical conciousness” to place new buildings or features into the existing city in a way that reinforces, rather than undermines, its form.  

Richmond's Matrix Route during the eighteenth century (shown diagonally from lower right to upper left). The route corresponds to Main, Governor, and Broad streets.

The Matrix Route

Each matrix route is lined with two “pertinent strips” (a series of “built lots" along a route that relate to it). In Richmond, the form of the pertinent strip was conditioned by surveying practices learned by colonial officials and an energetic cadre of surveyors during the seventeenth century, from experience in laying out towns in Virginia over a period from the platting of the new town at Jamestown in 1620 to 1680 when twenty new towns were ordered by the government [Hughes 70]. It was also affected by the lack of previous European settlement on the land, although the influence of Indian uses on the placement of routes, river crossings, landings, fields, and settlements on European adaptation of the Virginia landscape should not be underestimated.  

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a century of development had resulted in a regional surveying tradition. By now, however, the planning of towns was no longer performed at the order of the government, but was done for individual landowners speculating in land. It was undertaken by roughly trained county surveyors or untrained proprietors.  The form of towns was often the result of the simple production of the requisite number of half-acre lots on a given tract of land, sometimes without regard to topography. Four of the lots were often combined into a square block. As Sarah S. Hughes has observed, similar gridiron plans are typical of towns founded by the English along the eastern seaboard and, more generally, by Europeans wherever foreign territory has been colonized, since the expansion of the Greek civilization [Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statemen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia. Richmond VA: Virginia Surveyors Foundation (1979) 59].  

Detail from the c1865 Mickler Map of Richmond showing First, Second, and Third 
Streets crossing Main Street, showing how lots were subdivided and buildings 
placed over time in a residential area

The uninflected nature of the blocks in the gridded town of the colonial period made it possible for the lot holder to orient the buildings toward one or the other of the two streets that edged each lot. This choice was directly related to which of the two streets was the more significant route within and through the town. Since all of the first lot owners in a town were involved in promoting or conducting commercial endeavors, lot orientation was entirely based on which street carried the larger volume of the traffic each business was trying to attract.
 

Lots were rapidly subdivided along the most intensely used routes. Development in new towns was limited to the sides of a main street or other route (including river landings or cross streets) linking the town to sources of trade or production.  During this initial development period the majority grid may have been less than fully apparent. As the town progressively developed and expanded its range of functions, services, and civic activities, the grid was manifested in an ever-changing hierarchical relationship with the changing routes of the principal traffic.   
        

The grid was undoubtedly placed so as to be as closely aligned with existing routes as possible, especially when, as at Richmond (and the corresponding town of Petersburg at the falls of the Appomattox River), there was an extant, less formal settlement already on the ground adjacent to the proposed town. In an all-encompassing grid plan like that extending over the several sections of Richmond, the same process of infilling was even slower, and the grid, although there from the start, was only manifested over a period of decades as development required it. Where geography intervened, the grid was circumvented or suppressed. In this way, the grid of planned streets and blocks can be seen as a matrix which conditions the form of the aggregations of buildings and of routes, but does not block the orientation or the position of the routes and aggregates themselves. Caniggia suggests in the quote at the head of the post that American gridded cities prevent a full expression of urban hierarchy. 
 

The city extended along the “matrix route,” which took the form of an armature that extended from the eastern end of Main Street at the port of Rocketts to its western boundary on Broad Street. The route climbed the steep side of Shockoe Hill by means of a curving “county road” that became Governor Street. All taverns, hotels, shops, and many houses were at first located directly along this matrix route, and all civic buildings were placed in relation to it, whether facing towards it or placed deliberately away from it. 

Poles, Nodes, and Axes

The route through Richmond ran historically from the intensely settled areas to the east (Jamestown, Williamsburg, and later cities like Hampton Roads) to the resource extraction sites in the west (Siouan-speaking Indian trading centers, coal mines, tobacco plantations). The road from the east, originally “Powhatan’s Road” ran from near Jamestown to the falls and connected to an ancient path towards the mountains, later known as the Three Chopt Road. These destinations gave polarity to the city’s principal route.  According to a contemporary account, British forces, who traveled to Richmond from Westover along “the common road” entered Richmond through a wooded area between the river and the bluffs. This road intersected with a road from the high ground to the northeast which descended to the new town by following the ravine now occupied by 26^th Street. The main road ran along the gently sloping terrace above the river until it reached Shockoe Creek. The road continued beyond the town to the west as a trading route. 

Nodes are significant points where routes intersected and where routes meet significant geographic features. In eighteenth-century Richmond these included the crossing of Shockoe Creek (and the falls that blocked shipping), and, to a lesser degree, the intersections of the Brook Road and the Westham and Three Chopt roads west of town. The earliest, the informally organized settlement known to William Byrd II as “Shackoes” was the site of the first tobacco warehouses. These had for many years been located on the high ground on the west side of Shockoe Creek, forming what was probably the most important node in the early eighteenth century community, before it was absorbed and obscured by urban growth. 

On a matrix route, building tissue forms at a pole or at a node between poles. The settlement established by William Byrd II at Shockoes at some point before 1730 was just such a place. It is what Caniggia would call a “proto-urban nucleus,” a village with commercial and industrial functions. The irregularity of the lots shown on the west side of Shockoe Creek on maps in the early nineteenth century show the signs of spontaneous building along a pre-existing route. This was followed by the regularizing of the matrix route within the grid of planned building routes, beginning in 1737, except where geography intervened on the slope of Shockoe Hill. Near the nodes where the routes split west and north of the city grew up small settlements at Bacon’s Quarter Branch and Scuffletown, later absorbed by the expanding urban agglomeration. 

Each urban nucleus has a center and periphery. In the same way each town is made up of secondary nuclei that exhibit their own centers, outskirts, and boundaries. These nuclei or neighborhoods exhibit both linear nodalitiy (routes that act as elongated nodes) They are measured across from the axis of the matrix route to the outskirts on either side) and punctiform nodality (a point on a route). These are measured from the center of a nucleus to its outskirts along the path of the route. Both are directly related to the matrix (principal) and secondary routes. In this kind of a system, Caniggia notes, “a complex system of hierarchies naturally forms between axes and boundaries and between nodes and anti-nodes, whose complexity depends on the expansion of the urban nucleus under review” [168].  In modern cities there are often centralizing axes (commercial streets) and dividing axes (traffic routes). Along the streets in between will be found warehouses and parking.    

Punctiform Nodalities

Important special buildings will tend to be found at the intersections of nodal axes, where their organic form makes them difficult to place in the body of basic buildings. These buildings often have a single large room, such as a church, theatre, or hall. The special buildings, like branch libraries, schools or markets, that serve neighborhoods and their catchment area and function can change over time, and they can lose significance as the building use diversifies and expands into other building types. This can be seen in the sequence Market House [18th c]; Market House, City Hall, Assembly Hall, Jail, and Firehouses [19th c]; Market House(s), City Hall, Exhibition Hall, City Courthouse, Sheriff's Office, Police Stations, Jail, and Firehouses [20th c]. By the late twentieth century, changes in transportation had rendered the First Market House, which had once housed most of the official uses of the city, nearly obsolete.    

Neighborhoods

Each neighborhood (to use another name for what Caniggia calls “sub-modules” within the town or city) has its own axis, center, and boundary and over time, the building tissue resounds to these forces in a variety of ways. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the parallel “planned building routes” flanking Main Street in the oldest part of the city-  Franklin and Cary streets- held residential accommodations. By the mid-nineteenth century, these squares and lots housed mostly industrial tissue. Today these lots have been returned to use for residential purposes, albeit with a very different building type in play. At the same time, the block of Main Street between 13th and 14th Streets was perhaps the most intensely commercial street in the city in the late nineteenth century, and those commercial uses spilled onto Cary and Franklin in that area. 

Hierarchy of Urban Routes

The position of each element in the city and neighborhood, whether a route, a building, or a square,  in relation to nodal or antipodal points or axes, determines its identity, role, and level of continuity with its neighbors. Special buildings are also placed in relation to nodes and axes. By this rule there is also a hierarchy of routes within a neighborhood, in relation to the axis and the boundaries. For instance, according to Caniggia, the first route flanking a commercial street will sometimes be the least likely to have shops along it, rather providing access and service functions for the main street, while the second flanking street will be more likely to fill up with stores [184].       

For example, the pressure of the commercial uses along Broad Street from the late nineteenth through through the mid-twentieth century meant that it lost its former residential character as commercial tissue expanded onto Leigh, Grace and Franklin. 

Sanborn Map showing Second Street north of Broad Street in 1950

The importance of Second Street as a cross thoroughfare meant that the lots on the east-west streets like Leigh and Clay were realigned so that even some corner buildings faced Second Street (see map above). This street served as the center of African-American life in the early twentieth century, requiring a second, separate set of special buildings, such as theatres, churches, lodges, and funeral homes, to serve the segregated community. Another example of change over time is in the area along South 17th Street near the First Market in the era from 1897 to 1907, as studied by Drew Patenaude as part of an urban studies class at the University of Richmond. He documented the gradual replacement of small businesses operated by African-American merchants with consolidated warehouses and light industrial operations located between the market and the city docks.  

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1886

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1905

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1905

Similarly, Charles Hancock traced the changes along the 600-800 blocks of Grace Street from 1884 to 1924 (see the three maps above). This street, one block south of the commercial axis along Broad Street, was occupied by houses and churches. By 1905 hotels and small shops were found among the houses, but by 1924 changes in population caused the residential and commercial uses to be crowded out by the expansion of the churches and hotels.   

Infill

Infill building, according to Gianfranco Caniggia, occurs where serial tissue (such as row houses) fills both sides of a matrix route. At this point the back yard (pertinent area) of the buildings occupying corner lots increase in value and is “changed into a buildable, albeit undersized lot from its previous role as unbuilt are annexed to a house.” This practice is apparent throughout Richmond, conforming to  Caniggia observation that these infill lots tend to acquire variants of the adjoining basic building, but of later date and smaller scale [Caniggia and Cataldi. Interpreting Basic Building, 139]. See the Sanborn maps above for examples.

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