Richard Guy Wilson – C-VILLE Weekly

Looking sharp: Preservation group catalogs the area’s midcentury modern architecture

Have you ever spotted the peacocks on the Downtown Mall? Once you know where to look, you can’t miss them. They’re staring down from tiles near the second-floor windows above Snooky’s Pawn Shop, their teal tail feathers splayed in semicircles.

The storefront once belonged to Levy’s department store, which is why the façade is clad in showy pink marble and boasts the flashy peacock tiles. It’s a departure from many of its neighbors downtown, and also an example of Charlottesville’s distinctive collection of midcentury modern design.

Many other midcentury modern gems are similarly hidden in plain sight. Richard Guy Wilson, a longtime UVA architecture professor and board member of Preservation Piedmont, is leading the preservation group’s new effort to identify and protect some of these structures.

“I’m not saying we have to save every damn one, I’m just trying to get people to look a bit at what the environment is out there,” Wilson says.

The midcentury modern period lasted from the end of World War II to the late ’60s. Many buildings constructed during that time have recently celebrated their 50th birthdays, meaning they’ve hit the age threshold required for listing on state and national registers of historic places. Hallmarks of midcentury modern style include sleek lines and contrast between geometric and organic shapes. Illinois’ crisp Farnsworth House is one famous example, as is the original Dulles Airport terminal, with its bowed roof and angled glass.

Wilson and Preservation Piedmont are in the process of compiling a list of notable midcentury modern buildings the Charlottesville area. Some of the structures on their list are immediately notable for their distinctive architectural style, such as the Zion Union Baptist Church on Preston Avenue. The building is a head-turner, with its acute A-frame roof, three-sided glass front, and built-in metal cross differentiating it from any other church in town. It looks like a spaceship touched down across from Washington Park.

Zion Union Baptist Church PC: Courtesy Preservation Piedmont

Architecture aside, many of the town’s midcentury buildings are worthy of preservation for social and cultural reasons. Jackson Burley School, which features on Preservation Piedmont’s list, was added to the National Register of Historic Places earlier this month. Burley was the city’s Black high school from its construction in 1951 to desegregation in 1967. The school served Black students at a time when some of Charlottesville’s white public schools shut their doors rather than integrate.

But Wilson says Burley’s design is notable too, especially the front. “The facade of that is what people like me call stripped classicism, or abstract classicism,” he says.

A close look at the building reveals that the vertical concrete pillars protruding on each side of the front entrance quote the columned fronts of more traditional buildings. “You can see that there’s a classic element there in the design, they just cleaned it up,” Wilson says. “You don’t have all the fuss that you get with buildings that were built a century earlier.”

Other buildings that might not stand out to the layman are, upon further inspection, significant for their midcentury modern characteristics, claims Wilson. The current home of Fifth Season Gardening on Preston Avenue was originally a Buick dealership. “One of the things that makes it interesting is that front of the building there, the way it’s out into the street, and has that sort of a curve on it. And then underneath it’s totally open, so you have this way you see into the building,” says the retired professor. “From an architectural point of view, [it’s] a little more interesting than the way car dealerships are today, out on 29 North.”

Does an unusual front make a building worthy of preservation? That’s a more complicated question.

Wilson has lived in Charlottesville since the ’70s, and has seen a town transform into a city during that time. He says preservationists must walk a “fine line” between maintaining the town’s history and allowing for the new development required to accommodate a growing population. He also says he’s “a little appalled” at the “tall, anonymous structures” going up on West Main Street.

“It just sort of really began to hit me that all this rebuilding that’s going on—shouldn’t we pay attention to some of the other stuff that’s around, and not tear it down?”

Teaching moment: Renaissance tradition v. Title IX

While Charlottesville debates a petition to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a quieter controversy has been ongoing at UVA about a prominent work of art.

One day after Rolling Stone came out with its now discredited “A Rape on Campus” on November 19, 2014, the Cavalier Daily wrote about artist Lincoln Perry’s acclaimed mural in Old Cabell Hall, “The Student’s Progress,” which depicts fictitious student Shannon’s journey through the university.

“Props to the University for knowing how to take a joke,” said the Cavalier Daily about one wall on the left staircase depicting partying students.

Subsequent coverage of the mural was not so amused.

Less than a week later, UVA music professor Bonnie Gordon took aim at the mural in a piece she wrote for Slate titled, “The UVA gang rape allegations are awful, horrifying and not shocking at all.”

Wrote Gordon, “The mural depicts, among other scenes of daily life at the University of Virginia, a male faculty member standing on a porch and tossing a mostly naked student her bra as his beleaguered wife comes up the stairs.”

That panel is in an alcove also on the stairs, and Gordon says undergrads who pass it are bothered and she’s seen parents shaking their heads at the painting. Nor is she a fan of the scene of the male student duct-taped to a column at the Rotunda in which a presumably drunk girl is being dragged off.

“I don’t want that mural in a teaching space or in a student space,” says Gordon. Nor is it the UVA experience she wants her children to experience, she says.

A committee was formed to examine the mural in January 2015, and it submitted more than one recommendation to the university administration, according to UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn. A decision has not been made, he says.

The mural was commissioned in 1996, funded by a prominent group of donors. Perry worked on the piece for 16 years, and the final panels were unveiled in 2012, including the ones Gordon finds objectionable. “It would be different to me if it were in an art museum,” she says.

“Museums are teaching facilities,” says Richard Guy Wilson, who is chair of the university’s public art committee and a mural benefactor. Old Cabell Hall is a “preeminent art building” and Perry’s mural plays off the copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” there, he says.

“We will become the laughing stock of the country” if the mural is removed, he says.

Perry is “arguably the best mural painter in the country,” says Paul Barolsky, who teaches Italian Renaissance art and literature at UVA. “He’s a superb draftsman and storyteller and he painted an allegory of UVA.” The idea of removing the panel, says Barolsky, is “preposterous” and sets “a dangerous precedent.”

He asked his students to look at the mural. “They just shrugged their shoulders,” he says. “It’s not obvious. One thought it was streaking.”

He says, “If you start to cover up paintings that offend one person or another, where do you draw the line? Should I not teach Italian masters because of nude figures?”

Perry’s mural is a contemporary reinterpretation of the classical theme of the virtues and vices, which comes from a long tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle and which may make some people uncomfortable, explains Lyn Warren, who owns Les Yeux du Monde gallery and who sells Perry’s works.

The artist is not trying just to paint some salacious scene, she says, and he balances good and evil, conflict and harmony. “That’s why it stays interesting,” she says. The mural is full of references to philosophy, literature and art, recreated in the context of Jefferson’s university, she says.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says Warren. “After Monticello and the Lawn, it’s one of the most important art works in this area. It’s one of the university’s greatest treasures.”

History professor John Mason is a fan of the mural and particularly likes the way it “mashes through the gentility that is UVA.” He likes the bacchanalia scene because “UVA can be uptight. It’s a feast for the eyes.” And he likes the satire in the work.

However, like Gordon, he finds the panel with the “professor and young woman clearly interrupted in hanky-panky” inappropriate. Where once, in what he calls “the ‘Mad Men’ era,” a university professor may have considered attractive female students a “perk,” he says, now there’s no faster way for a faculty member to lose his job.

“We shouldn’t smirk at it any more,” he says. “If it came today, no one would allow that panel. Times change, sometimes very quickly.”

Mason says he doesn’t have an answer about what should be done. “I’m not saying it should be painted over,” he says. “Do you offer the painter a chance to redo it? Do you make it a teaching moment?”

That’s a debate that remains ongoing. And while Perry declined to comment for this article, in a 2005 interview conducted by his wife, Ann Beattie, he said, “I was glad if people brought their own interpretations to my work.”