The U.Va. Rotunda and a Landscape Update

Do magnolia trees enhance or upstage the Rotunda's skyline?

As reported by the Hook on November 30, the magnolia trees that surround—some say overwhelm—the Rotunda at the University of Virginia are to be removed, according to University Architect David Neuman, FAIA. In the face of a petition reportedly signed by 3,000 individuals, the Hook quotes President Teresa Sullivan as stating that no final decision has been made.

So readinform.com posed the question to architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, who chairs the school’s Architectural History Department and has just had his revised edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece revised edition released by the U.Va. Press. (A review of that edition is forthcoming in the print Inform this spring.)

Having just returned from a Thanksgiving visit to England, Wilson confessed that he had not had time for a thorough review of the situation. He reiterated his position that Jefferson thought great buildings should stand up and stand out, with plenty of open sky behind them. Despite his often-expressed admiration of natural settings, he seems to demure to the idea of rethinking the massive foliage that the magnolias have increasingly imposed on the building since they were planted in the 1920s, many years after the 1898 dedication of Stanford White’s redesign of the original Rotunda, which burned in 1895. (A photo of that fire clearly shows the Rotunda standing well apart from its adjacent, mature trees of the time, incidentally.)

Wilson offers his thoughts here:

On one level, I’m a tree hugger. I don’t want to see trees unnecessarily cut down, and at times I get upset at how sometimes land gets cleared for development. But, in this case, there are four issues.

1. In the way Jefferson conceived of his building, he liked them to be a part of the skyline where the sky is as much a point of site as the ground and very much a part of the horizon. The two magnolias were not planned by him. They were probably planned in the 1920s, so were not part of either the Jefferson design or the McKim, Mead, & White building of the 1890s.

2. Magnolia trees are not the most comfortable trees to sit under. Those two courtyards have become practically unusable because of the trees. In the larger issue, one of the things we are hoping to accomplish—and this is a point I made in the convocation address I gave in 1995 on the centennial anniversary of the fire—was that the Rotunda is the symbol of the university, and yet it isn’t used. It’s viewed and visited by perhaps 100,000 tourists a year, which is one thing. But I had a class on Jeffersonian architecture up in the Rotunda room just this past Monday, and of the 65 undergraduate students—all of whom obviously had an interest in the topic—a third had never been up in the room before. That tells you that perhaps 50 percent of the entire university has never gone up there. We are trying to get more classes close to the Rotunda, and currently a lot of these space are totally useless. These spaces around there should be useable, but the courtyards are not. So the magnolias are not good for that.

3. I understand that there is an issue with the difficulty of putting scaffolding against the building for renovation work. And I guess the constructors could get some scaffolding up for the current ongoing work, but that is not my expertise.

4. The trees are about 90 years old, and magnolias do have a lifespan that these trees are approaching. These two courtyards should be made useable where students can gather, because that’s what they are there for. The landscape is a very large factor in that.

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