Building a College: The Colonial Revival Campus
at the College of William and Mary

The College of William and Mary is well- known for the beauty of its campus. The first and most recognizable buildings were constructed at the beginning of the 18th century. But in the 1920s and 1930s the College planned and built a Colonial Revival campus adjacent to the original campus that is exceptional in its character and design while remaining compatible with the neighboring buildings.  The campus plans and the details of these notable buildings will be included in an exhibition called Building a College: The Colonial Revival Campus at the College of William and Mary.

Building a College will examine the College’s Beaux Arts campus plan and its Colonial Revival buildings and grounds, which were designed by architect Charles M. Robinson and landscape architect Charles F. Gillette. Constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, this ensemble of buildings stands as an exceptionally rich and intact testament to the original designers and their time. The exhibition will also provide a brief introduction to the College’s Colonial Revival campus by reviewing the Colonial campus plan and its buildings, as well as late 19th- and early 20th-century construction at William and Mary.

Reproductions of architectural drawings and archival photos, as well as portraits, prints and drawings from the Muscarelle Museum of Art collection and artifacts from University Archives at the College’s Earl Gregg Swem Library will present the history of William and Mary’s Colonial Revival campus. Material from the archives of the Richmond, Virginia firm of Boynton Rothschild Rowland, successor firm to Charles M. Robinson, will also be included.

The exhibit is part of a four-year project funded by a prestigious Campus Heritage Grant from the Getty Foundation to design a comprehensive preservation and management plan for the College’s Colonial Revival campus. The project team includes preservation specialists from the architectural firm of Mesick, Cohen, Wilson, and Baker (Albany and Williamsburg); Boynton Rothschild Rowland Architects (Richmond); Edward A. Chappell, Director of Architectural Research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; and Carolyn Sparks Whittenburg, Director of the National Institute of American History and Democracy at William and Mary. Louise Lambert Kale, Director of the Historic Campus at the College, is the project coordinator. Located in Los Angeles, California, the Getty Foundation provides support to institutions and individuals in Los Angeles and throughout the world, funding a diverse range of projects that promote the understanding and conservation of the visual arts.

Museum Director Dr. Aaron De Groft said: “As an arts organization based in our nation’s most historic area, the Muscarelle Museum has the opportunity to fulfill two distinct but complementary roles. As an art museum, we serve as a champion for all the arts, from ancient to modern. We look to showcase what is progressive and new in the art world. At the same time, we celebrate our history because we are proud of our city’s rich traditions and those of the Commonwealth. This exhibition is an important one for exploring and honoring our history and our university.”

The show runs from September 8 through November 4, 2007. The Muscarelle Museum of Art is located on Jamestown Road on the campus of The College of William & Mary. The Museum is open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 12:00-4:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.  The Museum is closed on Mondays.  Docent tours are available at 2:00 p.m. on Sundays and other times to be announced.  During these exhibitions, there is an admission fee of $5.  Admission is free for Museum members ; The College of William & Mary faculty, staff, and students; and children under twelve.  For more information about this exhibition or the Muscarelle in general, please call 757-221-2700 or visit www.wm.edu/muscarelle.

Background Notes on Campus Development at The College of William and Mary

In the early 1920s, Charles M. Robinson and Charles F. Gillette designed a new campus at the College of William and Mary, linked in both plan and architectural detail to the College’s 18th-century campus. Their design was an elegant and historic solution to the challenge of expanding a campus that faced the east, but could only grow to the west.

Robinson and Gillette’s campus expansion was located immediately to the west of the colonial campus. Their vigorously ordered Beaux-Arts plan, arranged around a terraced green space known as the Sunken Garden, was completed to an unusual degree: 11 of the 12 buildings included in the original plan were constructed between 1921 and 1935, all but one of them under the supervision of Robinson and his associate and successor, J. Binford Walford. While these 12 buildings, are the subject of this exhibit, their history is best considered in relation to their celebrated predecessor, the Colonial campus.

The Colonial Campus

The College of William and Mary’s historic campus, which today includes the Colonial and Colonial Revival campuses, occupies land purchased by College trustees in 1693, the year King William III and Queen Mary II of Great Britain granted a royal charter establishing in the colony of Virginia “a certain Place of universal Study... consisting of one President, six Masters or Professors, and an [sic] hundred Scholars more or less.” The roughly triangular tract of 330 acres was located at Middle Plantation, a sparsely populated, rural area where, a few years later, the City of Williamsburg would be established. During the colonial period, three buildings were constructed at the easternmost tip of the triangle: the main building known today as the Sir Christopher Wren Building (1700) flanked on the southeast by the Brafferton (1723), which housed the College’s Indian School, and on the northeast by the President’s House (1733). All three buildings, which were modified over two centuries of changing architectural taste, were restored to their colonial appearance as part of the Williamsburg Restoration in the 1920s and 1930s and continue to be used by the College today.

The Colonial Revival Campus

The American Revolution marked the end of support for the College from Great Britain, and throughout the 19th century, William and Mary struggled for survival as a private college. By 1888, all but a few acres of the original 330 had been sold. During these years, enrollment seldom exceeded the charter’s projected “hundred scholars.” The three 18th-century buildings, with their various dependencies, constituted the entire physical plant until the second half of the 19th century, when the College began to build or purchase additional structures on an ad hoc basis to serve a student population that was growing by fits and starts. Robinson would later observe that, “prior to 1905, the securing of an appropriation [for construction] was such an event that no one thought of inquiring what effect its plan, character and design would have upon future development.” Many of these late 19th- and early 20th-century buildings were badly located and poorly constructed; most had been demolished by the early 1930s.

The Commonwealth of Virginia took over the College in 1906, and by 1920, William and Mary was a coeducational state college with encouraging prospects for future growth. Ultimately, these prospects were fulfilled in a remarkably unified manner. William and Mary President J. A. C. Chandler worked to reacquire most of the original tract of land, with plans for expanding the campus to the west. In 1923, with a mandate from the state to accommodate 1,200 students, Chandler, Robinson, and Gillette undertook the first planned campus expansion at William and Mary since the President’s House and Brafferton were constructed in the early 18th century.

Charles M. Robinson (1867-1932) opened his architectural offices in Richmond, Virginia, in 1906 and shortly thereafter designed the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Robinson’s early career coincided with the growth of normal schools in Virginia, and his designs can be seen on the campuses of Virginia State University (Petersburg), University of Mary Washington(Fredericksburg), the University of Richmond, and Radford University (Radford). Robinson was Virginia’s principal school architect for nearly a quarter-century, and his design for William and Mary was his most complex and sustained project.

Charles F. Gillette (1886 -1969) trained under leading landscape designer Warren H. Manning (1860 -1938), and established a practice in Richmond in 1913. He specialized in the restoration and re-creation of historic gardens in Virginia and established a regional style known as the “Virginia Garden.” His commissions included hundreds of residential projects, such as the Nelson House in Yorktown, as well as the landscaping of Virginia’s Executive Mansion and the grounds of Virginia House and Agecroft Hall, two reconstructed English manor houses in Richmond.

Robinson and Gillette collaborated on designs at several Virginia colleges, including James Madison University, Radford University, Virginia State University, and the University of Mary Washington.

At William and Mary, their campus plan reinterpreted the enclosed courtyards of English colleges and extended west the axis established by the Wren Building, its two flankers, and the Duke of Gloucester Street. The plan capitalized on the fact that the Wren Building, originally designed as a closed quadrangle with a center courtyard, had been left a three-sided quadrangle, open to the west. Located on 35 acres immediately west of the Wren Building, the new campus was visually connected to the 18th-century one by the Sunken Garden, a large terraced lawn, 158 feet wide and 730 feet long, bisected with walks, flanked by boxwood hedges and rows of beech trees, and terminated by masonry and wrought-iron screens. Designed by Gillette in 1923, at a time when Sir Christopher Wren was being celebrated as the architect of the College’s first building, the Sunken Garden was inspired by the Thames-side lawn at Wren’s Chelsea Hospital in London.

The resulting campus plan illustrates the critical American transition from court to campus, and has considerable historic significance when viewed in the context of the College’s history, the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s and 1930s, and the development of American university campus design in the early 20th century.

Robinson designed an academic court of six buildings, three to the north and three to the south, around the Sunken Garden. Residence halls and a gymnasium were built behind them (women’s dormitories on the south side, men’s on the north), lining the city streets that defined the campus and forming a larger, diamond-shaped area. His buildings were clearly intended to be an extension of the 18th-century campus. He wrote that his designs rested on “due consideration for the principles [of] color, texture, proportion and balance, with a conscientious regard for elements of design found in the earlier examples of Colonial architecture.” Of the colonial buildings at the College, he added, “There is probably no important group of buildings anywhere in which so little reliance has been placed upon ornamentation of the exterior and so much dependence placed on harmony of color, proportion and precedent.” In homage to these original buildings, Robinson’s architectural designs reinterpret their restrained Georgian architecture in a manner that combines Beaux-Arts classicism and the austere brick idiom of the colonial campus, with a result that is different from the more literal Colonial Revival architecture of Boston’s Perry, Shaw and Hepburn for Colonial Williamsburg, to the east. Robinson produced a body of work of its own time that provided dramatically expanded space, while remaining visually compatible with the College’s and town’s 18th-century buildings.

Robinson’s buildings are two- and three-story edifices constructed of tan brick with dark headers, and over-scaled moldings. Classical stone frontispieces on doorways distinguish classroom buildings from dormitories, where the portals are wooden and less elaborate. The academic buildings have H-shaped and other complex forms. The dormitories are long, thin buildings with double-loaded corridors. Barrett Hall, the largest, bends at the intersection of Jamestown Road and Landrum Drive, where it is punctuated with a cupola visible from both the campus and the historic neighborhood to the south. Barrett Hall is mirrored by Blow Memorial Hall on the north side of the Sunken Garden, also built at an angle and topped with a cupola. Barrett and Blow Halls thus establish a secondary north-south axis which intersects the primary east-west axis of the Sunken Garden. The entire complex was conceived as a pedestrian campus with the exception of James Blair Drive, which terminates at Richmond Road with the Ewell Memorial Gates, an oversized pair of brick piers supporting lead statues of the College’s patrons, William III and Mary II, sculpted in an American Renaissance manner by German American artist Emil Siebern.