The new clinic for Affiliated Dermatologists of Virginia is an intentional departure from the typical Richmond medical facility. The complex was conceived as a pair of Zen pavilions in a partially wooded landscape, spare and elegant in their design. The site solution preserves the tree canopy along the Shrader Road frontage and places the buildings and parking to the rear of the site. This treed area, with small groves of holly and swamp magnolia, serves as a stormwater management area and bio-filtration device. The overall use of the site reflected the Owner’s concerns for the environment and her desire that the building would reflect her values and those of the practice.

The two pavilions, a 6,500 square foot clinic and a 2,500 square foot surgery center, define a walled garden. A high sheltering roof hovers over the waiting areas, connecting the two buildings, covering a landscaped terrace, and framing the view into the garden. Waiting areas and lobbies open onto this contained landscape, providing a serene and daylit environment for waiting patients. The result is an interior environment that exerts a calming influence on patients waiting to see the physician.

The layout of the building interiors was driven by a functional model designed for maximum efficiency in the movement of patients, physicians, staff and supplies. The orderly layout is easily “read” by patients who no longer get lost in a maze of corridors and small rooms. The material and color palette is light and crisp, and the furnishings are Modernist and sleek, reinforcing the message of a clinical efficiency. According to the staff, patient reaction to the building has been extremely positive, with a noticeable increase in patient volume.

In a marriage of architectural design and practice considerations, the two-building concept creates a pleasing engagement with the landscape and admits filtered daylight into the exam rooms  – the best lighting for color rendition when performing skin exams.

www.smbw.com

Click to view slideshow.

This little jewel won’t last long, so contact realtor and modern aficionado Kevin Daley to find out more.

A suburban modern “loft” in Richmond’s West End is for sale at an affordable price of $215K. In 2005, it was featured in the book Great Houses on a Budget, by James Grayson Trulove. The house occupies a very small footprint and makes clever use of its site with a sunken private terrace and accessed from the street by a foot bridge. The  tall interior space is full of natural light through a generous window wall which makes this compact house feel much larger.

“Live-in Art  / Architecture! The entry level is a light filled living/dining & kitchen + 1/2bath. High ceilings, large windows cantilevered deck,sitting above 2 bedrooms a full bath and laundry. All perfectly sited on a corner lot.Details include: Silestone counters on dovetailed cabinets w/ebony stained facing, double sink, Amana, Bosch and GE Profile appliances. Pendant, sconce and museum lighting. Built in storage/seating wall and computer nook. Hardwood floors, plenty of closets, laundry & 1.5 baths. Entry bridge, private concrete paver patio and fully fenced yard. On demand hot water. Solid, environmentally thoughtful construction. “

S  T  U  D  I  E  S

“Unrealized projects have always fascinated me; they are more easily forgotten than constructed work, so it’s always a surprise to come across the old drawings and model studies of un-built ideas. Their abandonment has many causes: better ideas replace them, clients quit, even successful competitions are either not built or, if so, made unrecognizable from the entry. But, although unborn, these lost projects don’t die; their ideas remain in play and tend to migrate to later, and perhaps realized buildings. Often we are not even aware that an old idea is influencing a new scheme; it’s how fossils work, where the material becomes replaced, but the form remains true to the original.

The work in these rooms, with the exception of the East Addition to Campbell Hall, represents things never built, only imagined. They exist solely as artifacts of design, but they each have contributed importantly to the evolution of the larger body of work over time.”

W G Clark Architect

Belvedere Gardens in Salem, Va., completed in 2004 by SMBW Architects follows contemporary European examples of cemetery design.

Originally written for American Cemetery Magazine by Ron Wolfe, AIA in December, 2006 while with SMBW Architects in Richmond, Virginia. The original article has been republished here with written permission of the publisher, Kates-Boylston.

A serendipitous meeting in 1847 by two men from Richmond, Va., led to one of the most important civic landscapes in that city’s history. Upon realizing they were both in Boston, Joshua Jefferson Fry and William Henry Haxall chose to visit Mount Auburn cemetery. Dedicated only 16 years prior, the cemetery was a very popular escape from the bustling city. They were so inspired by the beauty and solemnity of this first American cemetery in the “rural” aesthetic, that they quickly began planning a similar project for Richmond, whose cemeteries suffered from severe overcrowding.

By 1850, Hollywood Cemetery was opened and joined the ranks of numerous American cemeteries that followed Mount Auburn’s lead, including Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, Pa., Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Green Mount in Baltimore, Md. Through the mid-19th century, Hollywood Cemetery became very popular with the citizens of Richmond, with its fame permanently established after President James Monroe was reinterred there in 1858.

What has attracted Richmonders and other visitors to Hollywood Cemetery left throughout its history, though, is the fundamental premise that it is a place for the living and not simply the dead. This is achieved through the magnificent site along the James River; the picturesque, almost romantic, winding lanes flanked by tall trees and rolling hills; and the absolute conviction that this is a space to both honor the past and heal the present and future.

In his seminal book, “Lost Landscapes,” Ken Worpole wrote: “We make these places to assuage our fears and apprehensions, to calm and ameliorate our sense of loss and grief.” The design of the cemetery landscape should inherently allow us to move forward with our lives. Hollywood, Mount Auburn and others within this rural cemetery framework provided, and still provide today, solace and healing – a landscape that “tempers the loss and hopelessness felt at such times,” according to Worpole. Unfortunately, the contemporary American cemetery landscape has lost its way. The banality that has followed, primarily within the lawn cemetery style, provides very little articulation of a cemetery’s true purpose, no understanding of the passage of time and a universal placelessness. Therefore, there is little provision of emotional support for those grieving. A current lack of sacredness, which had historically created the emotional qualities of the cemetery, burying ground or graveyard, is now at risk of rejection by the generation on the cusp of retirement.

The size of the baby boomer generation is staggering: An estimated 76 million Americans were born between the years of 1946 and 1964. They are the most educated and driven generation this country has seen to date, and while the prospect of retirement is daunting to them, so is the prospect of their own mortality. The death rate is predicted to expand from 2.4 million a year to 3.2 million in the near term and 4.1 million by 2040.

These predictions provide an interesting paradox to cemeterians: They may struggle to keep up with this increasing pace, yet they also may struggle to attract business due to the boomers’ continued defiance of the status quo. As has been written frequently, the baby boomers are more self-aware than any other previous generation and have trended away from geographic familial ties. Boomers, specifically, and Americans, generally, want to find a way to express in their death, the vitality of their life. Therefore, there is a deep need to establish a rationale for both their burial rite and its location.

Looking back again at a historical model, Père Lachaise left is the largest cemetery within the boundary of Paris and one of the most famous in the world. But its beginning was far less auspicious. Founded in 1804 by Napoleon after the prohibition of new cemeteries within the city center, many Parisians thought Père Lachaise to be too far from the heart of Paris and chose to be buried elsewhere. Only when the remains of La Fontaine and Molière, in addition to Abèlard and Hèloïse, were moved to this site was it suitably attractive to its enlightened citizens. The number interred quickly rose exponentially. Through its popularity, Père Lachaise became the first cemetery in modern history to become a vital component of a city’s cultural inventory.

The market-based connection between what occurred in Paris and in Richmond is obvious, but without the ability to re-inter the famous, how can the modern American cemetery transform itself to acknowledge its past, articulate the promise of the future and remain relevant in modern civic society? The simple answer is through thoughtful and evocative design, which is honest about site, material, and programmatic use of the space. This requires humility, sensitivity to the psychology of grief and a profound sense of place to be successful.

At its most base level, architecture expresses a sacred connection between humanity and nature. The 20th century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” wrote in his first line of the work that, “We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building.” It can be extrapolated that even though the cemetery is not truly for “dwelling,” “[this … is] in the domain of our dwelling.” These spaces are inherently endowed with a sacred purpose, due to our intention of building.

Once the act of building is seen as essentially sacred, we must then look to a process that allows for the systematic, and sometimes more overt, expression of this notion. Critical Regionalism, as proposed by Kenneth Frampton in his essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” attempts to provide a path to both look back and look forward, thus resolving this dilemma. This architectural approach strives to inscribe the history of a specific regional culture, through its geologic and agricultural histories, into a building.

“This inscription, which arises out of ‘in-laying’ the building into the site, has many levels of significance, for it has the capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archaeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time.” That would, essentially, create a fundamental sense of place inasmuch as the built form arises from and articulates the essence of the site. This principal is essential to reconnecting the cemetery with the sacred.

On the outskirts of Stockholm in the early 20th century, Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz designed the most important cemetery landscape of the Modern era: Woodland Cemetery. Through the design, which ran counter to the prevailing philosophical modern trend of the time, they “sought to imbue the site with a sacred quality by using landscape as the essential point of departure for their architectural solution,” according to Caroline Constant in her book on the project, “The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape.”

Asplund and Lewerentz turned away from historical precedent and instead, “relied primarily on enhancing attributes of the landscape – ridge and valley, earth and sky, forest and clearing, meadow and marsh – to evoke associations of death and rebirth in a landscape of spiritual dimension.” Woodland Cemetery became the first Modern typological example of the inseparable intertwining of nature with humanity and the essential sacredness this implied. In this case, though, the individual memorial was primarily set aside in lieu of the communal within the context of an overwhelming presence of the forest and gentle topography.

Here we see the groundwork being laid for the philosophical underpinnings of critical regionalism, many years prior to the Postmodern era. Yet, it was intuitive to Asplund and Lewerentz that, through magnifying the essence of place, the awareness of place could be heightened, and the site could engage both public and private memory.

One final typological example is Belvedere Gardens in Salem, Va., completed in 2004 (above). This project follows other contemporary European examples of cemetery design such as Fisterra Cemetery and Igualada Cemetery in Spain; and Srebrnice Cemetery in Slovenia. Formally, each is quite different, but all pass through the realm of the profane into that of the sacred. And each relies heavily on the cemetery as an extension of landscape to achieve this end.

Salem, Va., lies in the Shenandoah Valley between the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1928, Sherwood Memorial Park was founded and later expanded in the 1950s with a mausoleum. By the late 1990s, it was evident that another expansion was necessary to continue to serve the citizens of Salem. The architectural solution was to gently embed the project into the site, heighten awareness of the local and distant landscape and formally express the project’s use without overbearing nostalgia.

Overall, the mausoleum is composed of three gardens with each precinct separated from the other through transitional spaces as a way to keep the outside world from the sacred space within. In addition, these transitional spaces allow for compression of space which, during later moments when the landscape opens back up to the sky and mountains, encourages a new awareness of the local and extended site.

Materials used at Belvedere Gardens provide various visual, tactile and aural qualities that reinforce the experiential nature of the space. Curvilinear concrete mausoleum roofs inset with turf act as a metaphor for the mountains beyond, yet have a pragmatic rationale for mitigating topography.

Two types of stone are used on vertical surfaces: A rough field stone and a milled stone. The field stone pattern indicates boundary in the form of site and retaining walls, while the more refined milled stone wraps the crypt walls to provide a higher quality presentation for the deceased.

Water is used as a device to both add sound to the experience and to act as a literal and metaphorical threshold from the Sunken Garden, the most sacred part of the site, to the elevated grove. The ground plane is covered by hard and soft materials to provoke sounds that heighten the sense of self and thus the perception of life. Each of these moments allows for numerous ways to “create a meaningful ritual, architecture and landscape for the disposal of the dead,” in the words of Worpole.

But this project has also proven to be powerful outside of its essence as a cemetery landscape. Belvedere Gardens has truly become an addition to the cultural landscape of Southwest Virginia – one where people visit simply to be in a quiet and meditative space in which land and building are in harmony. This civic appeal leads one directly to remember the nature of Mount Auburn, Hollywood and other cemetery landscapes that are truly spaces for the living, places where people actually want to be. The result is a return to cemeteries as the keepers of our cultural heritage. This strategy will also help resolve the question regarding how to address the needs of the baby boomer generation in search of a landscape that articulates their vitality in life. Heidegger noted that death “is the shrine of nothingness and, at the same time, the shelter of being.”

Death is something we are all destined to realize, yet we need to provide this with an appropriate design solution. Humble and poetic cemetery landscapes will fill this need. The time has come to design the new American cemetery with this in mind.

Belvedere Gardens Images are by photographerJames West for SMBW and were used in the original magazine article.

Père Lachaise image from Original Article. Hollywood Cemetery image from website.

“The  Artisans Studio Tour was founded in 1994 by a group of Charlottesville area artisans to enhance the community’s awareness of professional artisans living and working in the region. This year, artists will again open their studios and collaborate to make a public showing of their work. All Tour artisans have gone through a rigorous approval process that ensures that the crafts are of the highest quality. This year’s 17th annual Tour will continue the tradition of showcasing Virginia’s most talented artisans. 

Craft lovers can expect to see displays of some of Virginia’s finest crafts including pottery, furniture, weaving, fabric design, jewelry, stained glass, clothing, baskets, wood turning, and more. There will be artisan demonstrations, opportunities to learn about the working processes in each studio, and some hands-on experience.  The Tour provides an excellent opportunity to purchase the work of talented area artisans as unique gifts or for your own collection. 

Each studio on the Tour also provides food and beverages from some of the area’s best establishments as well as artisan-prepared treats.”

http://www.artisanstudiotour.com/

WG Clark Architects

Along a winding road in bucolic Southern Albemarle County, a house designed by WG Clark is for sale. Built in 2005, the trademark concrete block, glass, and copper clad house is set in a forest clearing straddling the edge of a slope – a “found” site condition – and is a classic Clark design move. His houses always seem to occupy an edge or get bisected by a slot, a path, an entry, or a chimney – often all combined to emphasize a clear distinction between “public” and “private” space. Like other Clark houses, the living space is the primary room; two stories tall (and often as one quadrant of the plan) with bedrooms, kitchen/dining, and utility space occupying the rim. The slightly off of center entry is beautifully imperfect, intentionally shifted and recessed for protection, and allows room for a solid concrete block corbelled wall to anchor the visual mass of the chimney offset from the interior fireplace. Though he worked for Robert Venturi, Louis Kahn left a strong impression upon Clark in his formative years.

I’ve often wondered if WG Clark intentionally designs his houses to become beautiful ruins one day. Like Kahn, his work evokes both the ancient and the modern – one setting off the other.

The house in Schuyler, Virginia is currently offered for $699K (reduced from $740K), includes its mid-century modernist furnishings, and sits on a private 17 acre site.

Josh McCullar

Original Listing

WG Clark Architects

MLS Listing

at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

September 10, 2011  and runs through December 04, 2011.

New York native and painter, Wayne Dobson - Danvillian Gallery

Wayne Dobson and Sally Susan Popu were very active in the Brooklyn art community when they discovered Danville on a trip to Southern Virginia to look at old farmhouses available for restoration. There were no galleries in the city when they arrived. The couple purchased a building on Union Street, created a visible street level professional gallery, and maintain a personal collection there of over 200 pieces from several New York artists including Mark Zimmerman, Michael Bellamy, James Austin Murray, and Mary DeVincentis. Popu will maintain a photography studio on the second floor. Their new gallery will certainly prove to be a huge catalyst for reinvigorating the cultural pulse of the city’s beautiful and historic urban core which has spent a dark and quiet decade since the closing of the famous Dan River Mills. Danville itself, for the first time in decades, is on the cusp of a bright rebirth and the city has recently commissioned an important urban design study of its riverfront edge at the north end of downtown – a place that was once a dramatic and somewhat ceremonial entrance into the city from the Dan River bridges in the 19th century. I believe that in a few years, Danville will once again be the crown jewel of the Southern piedmont of Virginia with its very low cost of living and pro-business attitude, and the Danvillian Gallery will play a prominent role in the city’s new life.

Wayne and Sally will host monthly shows beginning with an opening reception of Dobson’s work marking eighteen years of painting Friday evening, September 9th at 6pm.

Richmond based David Spriggs was the structural engineer on the project.

The project is featured in an article today on Dezeen.

“The project is conceived as 3 parts: Ground Plane, Occupied Space, and Pavilion Roof. All component parts are based on a 10’ wide module to facilitate prefabrication and transportation to the site. At the scale of the town, the building reads as a seamless gesture. At the scale of the occupant, the details express the modular construction. A locust deck serves as the market floor. It folds up to allow the nesting of an office, storage room and toilet room. It extends beyond the market and into a sloped earth park to provide a stage and seating. A sculptural roof and ceiling of reclaimed heart-pine and galvanized sheet steel floats over-head.

This market pavilion is the modern expression of timeless agrarian sensibilities. “- Dezeen