This Old House?

The Robinson House greets visitors to the newly expanded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as seen from the museum's second floor galleries. All photographs by R. Tyler King

By R. Tyler King

“Gray” can be a choice adjective for more than the color of the historic Robinson House’s exterior paint-job. The 1850s Italianate farmhouse sits on its original site and has become central to the fabric of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ new addition and campus plan by Rick Mather+SMBW Architects, a partnership between London-based Rick Mather Architects and Richmond-based SMBW Architects. But it is also chocked full of museum miscellanea and stands as an open question to the museum. What to do with the Robinson House?

Suzanne Hall, VMFA’s Director of Communications, admits, “It is really a mess in there [and] it’s what you’d expect. The interior is not even up to ADA requirements.” Peter Culley, a project architect with Mather’s office, explains that, “Even before when we first got on board, the Robinson House had been recognized by the museum as being an important component of the site.” The nature of its importance, however, is still being debated.

The three-story Italianate family farmhouse (originally two stories) was designed by Anthony Robinson, Jr. in the 1850s.

In 2009, Hall wrote a VDOT-administered grant proposing the adaptation of the Robinson House into visitor’s center for the VMFA and eventually the city of Richmond. “Even in its day in 1850, it was at a nexus of transportation, and it would be suitable use to welcome our visitors,” says Hall. Unfortunately for this grant, “Making the house relate to transportation was the challenge. But a visitor’s center is our ultimate goal.” In the proposed plans, the first floor will have an interpretive exhibition about the evolution of Richmond, and the second and third floors will be used for the study of American art.

As of now, the Robinson House is one of the VMFA’s seven top priorities to receive preservation funding from the Commonwealth.

Before a program could be worked into the house, Rick Mather+SMBW had to work around it. The project team never considered altering the house, which its members considered central to the master plan’s parti—an “expanded avenue” that placed the manse on axis with the building. “The design scheme treated the building as a ‘found object’,” says Willard Scribner, FAIA, a principal at SMBW. “[We] created a pinwheel development around the expansion with the Robinson House serving as the centerpiece of the plaza and a pleasant artifact in a multi-faceted landscape of buildings and sculpture.”

The Robinson House remains an open question for the VMFA as well as an opportunity for installation art.

“I’m being completely honest,” says Culley, “we didn’t design it around a specific function, but we designed it very much formally to become part of the conversation between all of the buildings on the site.”

But the Robinson House, sporting a $483,000 facelift from 2001, is no stranger to keeping up appearances. Since its construction as a two-story Italianate family farmhouse by Anthony Robinson, Jr. to its function in the mid-20^th century gallery, the Robinson House (and its mid-19^th century ilk) represents the rise of popular architectural pattern books, which offered adaptations of imported styles into vernacular expressions.

From its original entrance-way on Grove Avenue the house was originally framed perfectly by stone gates, an image that bears a striking resemblance to its relationship to Rick Mather+SMBW’s new McGlothlin Wing. A third story was added before its 1884 adaptation in service to Robert E. Lee Camp Number One for Confederate veterans and the house became a focal point for the camp, which included an infirmary, a mess hall, utility buildings, and a chapel.

In the 1930s, the block that is now the VMFA’s campus saw the addition of two Neo-classical buildings: Merrill Lee’s Home for Needy Confederate Women in 1934 and Peebles and Ferguson’s original VMFA building in 1936. After the camp’s last veteran died in 1941, the Virginia Institute for Scientific Research moved in and occupied the Robinson House for the next 20 years. According to Hall, “they were [all] considered very separate entities and never intended to be part of one campus. But just as the Confederate Home was never envisioned to be part of the campus, neither was the Robinson House.”

The Pauley Center, orginally the Home for Needy Confederate Women, can be seen at through the western end of Rick Mather+SMBW-designed McGlothlin Wing.

Additions to the VMFA were completed in 1954, 1970, 1976, and 1985. The museum acquired the Home for Needy Confederate Women in 1991—which opened in 1999 as the Pauley Center—and, in 1993, the Robinson House. Hall explains, “In 1993 the state transferred management of the remainder of what is the full VMFA campus, thus allowing the museum to vision a design which unifies the entire parcel.” Regarding the most recent addition to the VMFA—it’s fifth in 74 years—Culley explains that uniting the dissonant architectural language of the campus presented one of the largest challenges. “The sunken garden in the previous iteration had a high wall that separated the Robinson House from, effectively, the museum building. So it was absolutely not in conversation. Even the Pauley Center was completely separated from the dialogue on the site because the parking lot was in the middle.”

“We didn’t borrow from the Robinson House materially,” says Fred Hopkins, AIA, a project architect from SMBW, and, as a result, the McGlothlin Wing connects to the original 1936 building by simply reflecting it with a gutsy glass return. “We wanted contrast, obviously,” says Hopkins, “but we tried to make the new expansion pretty clear with glass.”

The Robinson House sits across from the VMFA's new entry courtyard.

The Robinson House may have a more pronounced relationship to the museum’s interior experience, thanks to ample glazing, its fate remains locked in a gray area until funds become available for its re-programming. According to Alex Nyerges, director of the VMFA, “Being able to tell its story requires the space. But, we are already pressed to the limits, despite the space we just added.”

Today, VMFA patrons experience the Robinson House as the monumental terminus of the entrance-way. As a distant object, it is framed by openings in the mid-20^th century galleries and its image is handily reflected back to entering visitors by exterior glazing. While Nyerges indicated that Robinson House’s transformation is easily another ten years away, it seems that Rick Mather+SMBW’s could seize upon it as an art-object, in and of itself.

Since the 1960’s, installation artists have expanded the public’s awareness of historic preservation beyond simply restoring a building to a former condition. Rachel Whiteread has made plaster casts buildings’ interiors. Gordon-Matta Clark used buildings under demolition as a sculptural medium. Christo and Jean-Claude have wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag and Bern’s Kunsthalle, among other buildings.

"It is really a mess in there," says VMFA Director of Communications Suzanne Hall, "but you have to remember: these things take time."

Culley, an architect and installation artist who has contributed to Richmond’s annual InLight exhibition may have a few ideas. “It would be a shame for [the Robinson House] to not have any treatment for that period of time. I’m sure we could come up with something if someone wanted us to. I think there’s always something rather interesting about empty houses, anyway, and I suppose there are also a lot of connotations of vacant buildings in art and literature, in particular.”

That the Robinson House invites viewers and not users is hardly a cue to eulogize the absence of a defined use. Its new presence through the windows of the McGlothlin Wing already invites patrons to view the Robinson House with the same discerning gaze as any other art object in the VMFA. “It’s partly about learning how things adjust over time,” says Culley. Hall agrees. “You have to remember: these things take time,” she says. But in the meantime, the Robinson House remains an open question and a ripe opportunity to explore its incidental—and also very intentional—condition as building in the landscape.

R. Tyler King is an editorial intern at Inform and studies architectural history at Virginia Commonwealth University.