A Letter to the Cavalier Daily
As a member of the School of Architecture faculty and one of the now 37 signers of the open letter, I would like to respond to two comments made in the Cavalier Daily—that Classical architecture should be taught in the school and that the quality of the modern buildings at the University is poor.
We are teaching Classical architecture, but as a discipline and not as a formula. My required courses include lectures on Classical practitioners such as Stanford White and Edwin Lutyens, Classical theoreticians such as Gottfried Semper and Carl Boetticher, and modern Classicists such as Otto Wagner and E. G. Asplund. When I taught introductory graduate drawing, the first day’s assignment was to go to the Lawn and do a detailed proportional analysis of an order. Peter Waldman’s Architecture 101 course is titled Lessons of the Lawn. Robin Dripp’s book The First House is, among other things, a long meditation on Vitruvius. Malcolm Bell of the Art Department, whose entire career has been devoted to the study of Ancient Greek art, is signer of the open letter. This is not to say that Classicism is the central focus of our teaching, or that it characterizes it in a literal way the design work of the school, only to say that it is our fundamental belief that an understanding of architecture in all periods and all cultures is essential to the practice of our profession. We are teaching the principles of Classical architecture; we are not teaching them in a way that satisfies neo-Classical practitioners, and we are not presenting Classical forms as incontrovertible facts not subject to question, nor teaching them as if they were so many recipes drawn from a cookbook.
An obvious analogy is the teaching of traditional modes of art in other departments, and I would begin by pointing out that the open letter has been signed by nine members of the Art Department. I am not as familiar with the teaching methodologies of the English, Music or other arts disciplines as I would like, but I assume that to be a composer one must understand Beethoven and to be a poet one must understand Shakespeare, and that would include a fairly detailed understanding of the structural organization of their work, but that the end product of such an education would not include literal imitations of Beethoven sonatas and Shakespearian sonnets.
As to the second question, the quality of Modern architecture at the University, we would agree that a large majority of modern buildings built here since 1960 are of a quality equally poor as that of the traditional buildings built since 1960, although the merits or faults of some of the former, Hereford College in particular, are matters of contention. For more specific answers to this question I would refer readers to our web site: http://www.uva-architecture-forum.org.
Among all the participants in this debate there is a remarkable consensus—that the Lawn is an area of great sensitivity in terms of future development, that we should seek to use Jefferson’s architecture as point departure and that Jefferson should not be slavishly imitated but followed in principle. We are in complete agreement with this statement, and disagree only in its particulars, which admittedly seem to loom large. I have certainly not heard anyone call for avant-garde buildings, whatever those might be, on the lawn. Yet while I agree that this is not an issue of Classical versus Modern, the issue of literalism must be addressed. Is the Jeffersonian legacy one of literal signs or is a set of principles that can be extracted from his buildings? In this matter I would have to side with Emerson and say that it is the latter:
There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. One class live by the utility of the symbol; esteeming health and wealth in a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men.
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