While private sector construction nearly ground to a standstill in 2010, thanks to that bit of trouble American banks have been having, there were still a few standout additions to our physical world worth noting this year.

UVA’s South Lawn

After years of pre-publicity and considerable controversy, UVA’s big production number, the $105 million South Lawn Project, opened to much fanfare, but flopped at the box office.

Indeed, as the Hook asked in a cover story on the project, should the grassy area on the South Lawn, just a little longer than a tennis court, qualify as a “lawn”?

What began as a tremendously ambitious project when the University chose visionary architect James Polshek was eventually pared down by cost worries and fears among the UVA Board of Visitors that the design might not be “Jefferson” enough. In 2006, the University parted ways with Polshek and went looking for a new architect, a decision that prompted a protest from UVA’s architecture faculty. In 2005, over 30 faculty members signed an open letter condemning the University for perpetuating “faux Jeffersonian architecture” and characterized the direction the design was taking as “apologetic neo-Jeffersonian appliqué.”

When UVA hired California-based Moore Ruble Yudell to design the South Lawn, some faculty threw up their hands.

“This,” declared architect and letter signer Jason Johnson after seeing renderings of the new design, which featured familiar pergolas and red-brick columned exteriors, “is a disappointment on every possible level.”

After it was finished, University Architect David Neuman defended the project from the mixed reviews. “The South Lawn design was inspired by the integration of site planning, architecture and landscape that characterizes Jefferson’s Academical Village,” he said, “and we feel this project has been fully successful in living up to that inspiration.”

But some faculty members were adamant.

“It’s clumsy in its detail, its massing, its materials, its fenestration pattern, its effort to hide its bulk, and its relation to the street,” says one A-school faculty member. “On the interior, I look up and down those halls, and I feel as if there is a colonoscopy awaiting me behind every door.”

Not everyone, though.

“They did a pretty good job,” says UVA architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson. “I think it picks up the palette of the Academical Village, but doesn’t mimic it.”

Wilson, no stranger to bashing other recent designs, also likes the fact that the South Lawn offers places to gather outside the classrooms, in its light-filled conservatory area and gardens, and on the grassy terrace itself, which he sees as an extension of the experience Jefferson wanted to create on the Lawn.

Indeed, the jewel of the South Lawn— if there is one— may be the Conservatory, a semi-circular meeting place between Gibson and Nau Halls, which includes a Starbucks, a grassy courtyard, and seating on three levels.

Monticello

At Monticello, the upper floors of Jefferson’s home were finally opened to the public for the first time, including the mysterious third-floor Dome Room. In May, new Monticello boss Leslie Greene Bowman proudly displayed the parts of the residence that Jefferson designed for the enslaved workers who moved about the house relatively unseen, serving food, changing linens, and emptying chamber pots.

In addition to rooms for Jefferson’s granddaughters, and two narrow, almost-spiral staircases that allowed slaves to enter all the floors of the house from the basement, Bowman introduced the Dome Room, a beautiful chamber that features a Mars yellow Palladio-inspired “temple” with circular windows and an oculus skylight with beautiful views, but no apparent function.

“It was mostly constructed to be seen from the outside,” said David Ronka, Monticello’s manager of special programs. “But we don’t know what the purpose of the room was.”

It did for a time, however, offer a passage to a secret hiding place for Jefferson’s granddaughters, where they could escape the constant activity within the house.

Other changes included a new chrome yellow paint job for the dining room, the color Jefferson had chosen in his later years (after 75 years of Wedgwood blue), the newly renovated wine cellar, and the restoration of the South Pavilion, which served as living quarters for Jefferson and his wife during the two-year construction phase of the main house. All of this accompanied a new exhibit in the cellar level called “Crossroads,” which sheds light on the intersections between Jefferson, his family and guests, and the enslaved workers.

“We’re trying to make Monticello a more lively and entertaining experience,” says Susan Stein, Monticello’s senior curator.

Wood’s “cabin on the hill”

That’s how developer Wendell Wood characterized the 20,000-plus square-foot residence he was building atop Carter Mountain. However, not only is it one of the biggest houses ever built in the area, it’s also perched on the highest part of Charlottesville’s biggest mountain. Indeed, as Wood has now cleared a considerable number of trees around the property, it’s hard to miss.

“Have I seen the house?” asked Piedmont Environmental Council officer Jeff Werner. “Who hasn’t?”

While folks like Werner, former County Supe Sally Thomas, and current Supe Dennis Rooker believe the mammoth house is a scar on our mountain viewsheds, for Wood it’s the fulfillment of a life-long dream. As a kid, Wood says, he used to ride his bike up there and fantasize about someday calling it home. In 1982 his successes as a real estate developer allowed him to buy the 29-acre tract.With the recent purchase of 272 acres below the mountain along Route 20, he says, he now owns 700 acres of the mountainside.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for 30 years,” says Wood, 70, resigned to the fact that people have begun to talk about the house. “And I’m not getting any younger.”

Waterhouse

Finally, after five years, it has commenced: architect Bill Atwood’s $20 million Waterhouse project, a six-story mixed-use complex of offices, retail space, and apartments atop a parking garage that will span the gap between West Water and South Streets. Demolition began in October.

Originally, Atwood had a vision for a massive pedestrian village, complete with two nine-story towers, an underground parking structure, and a park of sorts that he hoped would “reinvent the block” by rescuing the beauty of the Lewis & Clark building from its isolated perch with a compatible neighbor along the streetscape. But when the economy tanked, so did the vision.

“Fundamentally, the world has changed,” says Atwood, meaning that the money for such creations simply isn’t available. “It’s so difficult to get things done these days.”

Casteen dedicates his last building

One of his goals during his presidency, joked former UVA president John Casteen at the dedication ceremony for Bavaro Hall, the $37 million addition to the Curry School of Education, was to see an open field where Bavaro Hall now stands. “I failed,” he deadpanned. What a card! Of course, the reason everyone chuckled: during Casteen’s presidency, UVA built or bought 134 buildings. It was kind of like George Bush saying he always wanted to see Saddam Hussein turn Iraq into an amusement park. Bavaro Hall— executed in neo-Jeffersonianism complete with brick columns and hints of Boston’s Faneuil Hall— transforms a stretch of Emmet Street by blocking the old view of Ruffner Hall.

Landmark Hotel

What a mess. What an eye-sore. The abandoned hotel project was actually included in last year’s round up, but since it went up two years ago, the 11-story shell of the planned Landmark Hotel continues to loom large over the Downtown landscape, a victim of delusions of grandeur, short-sightedness, hubris, a bad economy, and the ongoing legal battle between Halsey Minor, the hotel’s owner, and Lee Danielson, the hotel’s former developer.

When will it ever get built? Will it ever get built? Unlikely. Since Minor’s company Minor Family Hotels LLC declared bankruptcy, the worthless shell of a half-finished building has belonged to the bank that funded its construction, and if they wanted to sell it now, they would most likely have to accept much less than Minor owes them. Earlier this year, it was discovered that some people were squatting on the upper floors of the structure. And as those who’ve passed by it during heavy rain storms have noticed, it also has the distinction of being Charlottesville’s only 11-story urban waterfall.

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For years, the old Frank Ix building has been one of the most unusual, interesting spaces in the downtown area, but as you may have noticed on your way down Monticello Avenue, demolition on the Ix is well underway.

“We’re tearing it down because we just can’t insure it anymore,” says Ix complex project manager Fabian Kuttner. After the demo, Kuttner says the owners plan to pretty up the lot and perhaps build a pond at one end of the 17-acre property, which also includes an office park. He also hopes the Charlottesville City Market might be interested in locating at Ix. More on that later.

The circa 1928 building, which until 1999 was home to a fabric factory called Frank Ix & Sons, has held several spectacular parties in recent years, including the Second Street Gallery’s first Artini dance in 2006 when 500 people danced into the wee hours as lightning flashed outside and torrential rains came through the cracks in the roof.

In addition to serving as the site for (more)

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Less than three years after McGuffey Park received a controversial $700,000 make-over, work has commenced on a $75,000 repair job to correct several design flaws with what was promised to be a “world class” park.

For decades, sleepy little McGuffey Park sat at the top of Beck’s Hill relatively undisturbed, its trees lush, its shade plentiful, its play equipment vintage but serviceable; but ever since the extensive 2007 renovation, the park, which gave up 13 mature trees in the process, appears to have rejected the change.

According to city parks and rec director Brian Daly, play equipment has deteriorated, a faulty drainage system has turned the entrance stairways into waterfalls during rain storms; and new trees, grass, and shrubs have simply refused to grow.

“We have had a very hard time keeping things alive without irrigation,” says Daly.

Supporters of the park’s renovation, namely a group called Friends of McGuffey Park, a trio of Downtown moms who sold the idea to city planners and raised over over $279,000 in (more)

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Last month, UVA held a ceremonial ground-breaking at the future site of the Ruth Caplin Theatre, a three hundred-seat, 20,500 square-foot “thrust stage” theater that will rise beside the Culbreth Theater on Culbreth Road— courtesy of Ruth Caplin, 89, and husband, Mortimer Caplin, 94, who donated $4 million for the $13.5 million addition to the Drama Building and whose lives have been as drama-filled as the plays and films they hope to nurture.

UVA alum and former law school prof Mortimer Caplin is a legend in legal circles, a still-practicing tax lawyer who served as IRS Commissioner during the Kennedy Administration and briefly into the Johnson White House, during which time he made the cover of Time magazine. As a law prof at UVA, he taught future U.S. Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy. And he’s a lover of the arts, it seems.

Indeed, back in his UVA student days in the 1930s Caplin was president of the Virginia Players, and appeared in a number of UVA productions, including the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

“The theater will clearly advance artistic values cherished by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson— music, dance, architecture, painting,” said Caplin in remarks prepared for the October 21 event, which he attended with his wife. “It’s our hope that it will enrich the studies of all University students, making the arts not only a part of their course work, but a part of their lives.”

So what’s a thrust theater? It has a stage that opens and extends into the audience, which allows theater-goers to watch the performance from three sides, allowing for more intimacy. In addition to theater productions, the facility will be used (more)

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Crozet, the small village to the west, has ambitions.

Two decades ago it was known mostly for Mint Springs Valley Park and Crozet Pizza, the quirky, family-owned restaurant that was recently selected as one of the top 51 pizza parlors in the country by USA Today. Since then, however, the village with a population around 3,000 has grown in stature, welcoming the ambitious Crozet Master Plan in 2001, Starr Hill Brewery, Old Trail Village, the production of the Hollywood film Evan Almighty (which included the construction of an “ark” and visits from giraffes and elephants), various other popular eateries like Cocina del Sol, Jarman’s Gap, and the Mudhouse; the Crozet Music Festival, the Blue Ridge Shopping Center anchored by a Harris Teeter, an ACAC, and the brand-spankin’ new $10 million Crozet library soon to be built.

Charlottesville’s reputation as an attractive location over the same period, no doubt, has led to an interest in Crozet, which still remains relatively undeveloped, a new frontier that might harken back to Charlottesville’s earlier days, when UVA students weren’t even sure where the Downtown Mall was, and before we started making those number-one-places-to-live lists.

Indeed, that was the idea behind Old Trail Village, the ambitious 260-acre mixed use ‘village” with a town center, green space, a golf course, and beautiful houses nestled in a valley with spectacular views. However, while Old Trail has had some success, a drive through shows it to be (more)

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As platoons of volunteers uncover the old bones of the Rock Hill gardens, the historic Park Street estate that’s now the overgrown back yard of the Monticello Area Community Action Agency (MACAA), also unearthed has been the property’s complex history as a genteel country estate, a unique experiment in landscape design, a segregation era school, and a victim of growth.

The restoration effort has been largely organized by former City Council candidate Bob Fenwick, who, along with other preservation-mined folks, wanted to draw attention to the property so that the City and the FHWA, the Federal Highway Administration, follow through on an agreement, according to a May 2010 memorandum, to restore the garden and add it to the park system as part of the new 250 interchange project.

“It’s important as the home of the violin playing brother of Jefferson’s master builder, James Dinsmore’s, and as (more)

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Students already taking classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College’s new Kluge-Moses Science Building, which opened in the spring, had to pass through a throng of more than hundred people who’d gathered in the building’s atrium for the official opening ceremony on September 16, attended by Patricia Kluge and her husband William Moses, the couple whose $1.2 million gift for the project was the largest in school history.

As PVCC president Frank Friedman pointed out, the Kluge-Moses gift, while only a small part of the $11.5 million price tag, made up of mostly state funds, allowed the college to add cutting-edge technology that it might have had to eliminate, such as classroom whiteboards that copy anything written on them as PDF computer files, and two-way video systems that (more)

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It’s a momentous week for architect Bill Atwood. Five years after he purchased the Water Street Downtown Tire complex of buildings, once home to familiar places like Club 216, Eloise, and Sidetracks Music, it’s all coming down this week to make way for his long-planned Waterhouse project, a $20 million, six-story mixed-use complex of offices, retail space, and apartments on top of a parking garage that will span the gap between West Water and South Streets.

“The demolition will definitely change the site,” says Atwood, “but it will become a clean palette on which to finally build the building.”

Originally, Atwood had a vision for a massive pedestrian village, complete with two nine-story towers, an underground parking structure, and a park of sorts that he hoped would “reinvent the block” by rescuing the beauty of the Lewis & Clark building from its isolated perch with a compatible neighbor along the streetscape.

Fours years and a financial crisis later, Atwood is just happy to be getting something built.

Ironically, the same economic forces that have stalled development projects across the country (more)

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When a delegation from Winneba, Ghana visited Charlottesville several weeks ago, one city official criticized those who might “poo-poo” the idea of a fourth sister city as a waste of tax payer money. An appropriate phrase, as it turned out, because the African delegation visited Worrell Water Technologies, a company known for turning sewage into fresh water.

In 2007, Worrell Water built one of its “Living Machine” waste-water treatment systems— featured in a 2009 Hook cover story entitled “The Tao of poo”— in Tema, Ghana, one of more than a dozen such systems the company has installed around the world.

What’s a Living Machine? Well, imagine a man-made, turbo-charged tidal wetland. Basically, waste water is pumped and filtered, and monitored by microcomputers, through a series of cells that use plants in porous gravel to cultivate natural microorganisms that eat up the waste. The cells continuously fill and drain, mimicking the tidal action of estuaries.

Whereas the earth only has two tidal cycles a day— nature’s way of flushing the toilet— the Living Machine replicates that cycle 10 to 12 times a day.

“It was my second visit to Worrell Water this past year,” says Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who tagged along with the Ghana delegation, “and I am definitely (more)

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The Sears Hill bridge will be saved. On Tuesday, July 27, the fate of the historic Staunton footbridge was sealed with the city’s decision to take ownership and restore the 106-year-old structure.

The debate came to a close with owner Richard Macher offering to pay up to $20,000 to temporarily remove the bridge, which currently stands atop the Staunton passenger rail station which he also owns. The City of Staunton agreed to match Macher’s pledge and assume responsibility for the restoration. The city’s $20,000 portion will come from its general fund, which City Manager Steve Owen noted might require a budget amendment.

Although no firm repair cost has been determined, prior estimates suggest the price could climb as high as $250,000, so Owen expressed hope that the community will get involved to close the funding gap.

Until January, after it failed a private engineering inspection and a Staunton building official ordered it closed, the bridge provided a direct connection between the Sears Hill neighborhood and the commercial district of downtown Staunton.

For over a decade, the bridge also added flair to the Pullman, the restaurant and ice cream shop which occupied the former C&O railroad station. Macher has reportedly indicated that he intends to place a Macado’s— his 17-venue restaurant chain (more)

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In perhaps his last public appearance as president of UVA, John Casteen today dedicated Bavaro Hall, the long-awaited $37 million addition to the Curry School of Education, which has doubled the size of the school. It was a fitting end for a man who has presided over the construction or purchase of 134 buildings for UVA. That’s a lot of golden shovel and ribbon-cutting appearances.

“I think this is the last thing Betsy and I will be doing in our current identities,” Casteen told the crowd.

One of his goals during his presidency, Casteen joked, was to see an open field where Bavaro Hall now stands. “I failed,” he deadpanned.

The new building was designed by Darden School architect Robert A.M. Stern, and includes multiple open conversation areas,  conference rooms, and a garden courtyard. The building— executed in a neo-Jeffersonianism complete with brick columns and hints of Boston’s Faneuil Hall— transforms a stretch of Emmet Street by blocking the old view of Ruffner Hall.

Robert Pianta, dean of the formerly Ruffner-centric Curry School, called the project a complicated one that “went off without a hitch.” He thanked Casteen for his vision and also thanked (more)

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Last year, our local governments stood behind the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority as it spent nearly $400,000 trying to prove that recycling entrepreneur Peter Van der Linde had defrauded area tax payers. Now it appears that tax payer funds, including disposal fees that once went to the RSWA, will be headed Van der Linde’s way.

Last week, Charlottesville City Council said good-bye to its long-standing support agreement with the RSWA, which had required City trash be taken to an RSWA-sponsored transfer station for the purpose of collecting a “service contribution fee” to support the Authority’s services, awarding a new City contract for trash disposal services to Van der Linde Recycling.

Under the contract, all City curbside trash will be taken by Waste Management (whom city has a separate $759,430 hauling contract with) to Van der Linde’s Materials Recovery Facility in Zion Crossroads, which is permitted by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to process commingled recyclables, construction and demolition debris, and household waste for recycling.

With a low bid of $39 per ton, Van der Linde beat out his neighbor, former RSWA partner Republic Services Inc. (formerly BFI and Allied Waste), which has received City trash since (more)

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Demolition began Tuesday, June 8 at a 1960s-era, five-unit apartment building located near the Corner district and owned by developers Jim and Cynthia Stultz of CBS Rentals, who plan on replacing it with Charlottesville’s “greenest” apartment building, aptly named The Greenhouse. Daggett & Grigg Architects have the design honors, and Martin Horn will do the dirty work, tearing down 219 14th Street NW and creating Charlottesville’s first LEED-certified apartment building, expected to be finished in August 2011.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, is an initiative created by the U.S. Green Building Council to develop standards for sustainable design and construction.

The 40,000 square-foot structure will have four stories, a basement, and on-site parking, including some underground. Most of the 28 apartments will be three-bedrooms, but there will also (more)

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Back in 2007, sleepy little McGuffey Park near the Downtown Mall got a fancy $700,000 make-over, courtesy of the City, which pitched in $420,000, and a trio of North Downtown moms called the Friends of McGuffey Park, who raised over $279,000 for the 1.1-acre project and received an award from the City Planning Commission for their efforts. They promised that the new park, with modern play equipment and a unique design, would become a “world class” facility.

But less than two years later, structural problems, dying trees, and hoards of unruly youths have created a world class pain— as City Parks staffers intend to spend another $80,000 on repairs.

The problem with the teens has (more)

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What Washington & Lee University officials are calling a “close call” should be a wake-up one for UVA students planning to celebrate this weekend. During a W&L party in Lexington last weekend, a deck on a house with as many as 80 people on it collapsed, injuring nearly 30 students and sending 22 of them to the hospital. Luckily, no one was seriously injured in the May 14 incident.

According to the North American Deck and Railing Association, that’s not always the case. Since 2000, there have been more than 30 deck collapse fatalities, and 75 percent of the people on collapsing decks get injured or killed. What’s more, there are 40 million decks in the country more than 20 years old.

“Every weekend, somewhere in the country, a deck collapses or someone falls through a deck rail,” says Joe Loferski, a Virginia Tech professor of wood science who has been researching the causes of deck collapses since 2000.

A nearly identical disaster occurred during a weekend party at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008, when (more)

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