City Planning Commission reviews South Lawn Project

The City planning commission, along with the city public, will get the chance to offer concerns and recommendations about plans for UVA’s much-anticipated South Lawn Project at their September 13 meeting. While the City staff report is generally positive, it raises issues of sidewalks on and access from Jefferson Park Avenue (JPA).
The South Lawn project, which architects started drawing in 2004, will add an 110,000 square foot College of Arts and Sciences building that contains classrooms, offices, a café and a 250-seat lecture hall. UVA will construct a bridge across JPA, and a second Lawn will stretch from New Cabell Hall to the planned Arts and Science Building.
Per order of the so-called three party agreement between Charlottesville, Albemarle and the University, UVA “voluntarily” submits preliminary project plans to the City and the County for comment and review. However, the City and County play only an advisory role—in most instances, they cannot force changes to a design.
Planning Commissioner Cheri Lewis, who at press time didn’t wish to comment on the South Lawn plans, thinks UVA had a sound process in producing the design. “They went and got support from the neighborhood, they went and got support from their alumni, and now they’re coming to us,” says Lewis. “So we’re not seeing it at the fresh new end of it. There strategy was a good one, probably.”
In the City staff report to the commissioners, they recommend that the plans include a sidewalk on the north side of JPA, and also include access to Old Cabell Hall and the Lawn from that street. Per request from the Jefferson Park Avenue Neighborhood Association, the plans call for Valley Road to be cul-de-saced in order to prevent bothersome through traffic. The neighborhood association, which currently looks onto a parking lot where the new building is planned, included a letter of support for “all the major issues involved with the project” in the staff report.
Somewhat mimicking the Thomas Jefferson-designed Lawn, the South Lawn Project has generated controversy among the architectural community, raising questions of what being “Jeffersonian” means when applied to buildings. Critics, most notably in a New York Times Magazine piece, found earlier South Lawn designs to be too imitative, rather than truly innovative.