The Higgins Medical Offices building stands out among the Museum District's traditional architecture. (Photo by Stephen Clatterbuck)
What: Higgins Medical Offices
Where: 3540 Floyd Ave. in the Museum District
Why it matters: A Richmond physician hired a forward-thinking Washington, D.C., architecture firm to create this one-of-a-kind medical arts building in 1954, a decade prior to Haigh Jamgochian’s round, aluminum-clad Markel Building near Willow Lawn.
The imposing, cross-motif concrete-block wall with its big wooden doors on Floyd and Thompson avenues in the Museum District conveys a sense of both security and mystery. The Frank Lloyd Wright- and Modernist-inspired design stands out in Georgian Revival-obsessed Richmond — and not in a bad way. The building’s age and surrounding greenery have actually improved the site, which can’t be said for all examples of this style of design. The espionage-lair exterior gives way to a softer, inviting interior with views of two garden courtyards.
Friendship, and a desire to make an impact, formed the background for the building’s origins. Physicians William H. Higgins and son William H. Higgins Jr. were among the first practicing internists in Richmond. By the mid-1950s, doctors were leaving downtown offices for newer West End spaces, which in those days meant just beyond present-day Carytown. The younger Higgins led the office’s move, along with medical partner Stuart Ragland Jr. The Higgins physicians, both graduates of Johns Hopkins University, taught at the Medical College of Virginia and shared a practice in the Medical Arts Building at Second and East Franklin streets (today’s Linden Tower apartments).
Higgins Jr. was a friend of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director Leslie Cheek. Today, his son, furniture maker Harrison Higgins, recalls that his father wanted to contribute to Richmond’s architectural legacy. Cheek suggested that Higgins approach David Norton Yerkes of Deigert & Yerkes & Associates of Washington, D.C.
“My father and David Yerkes became great friends,” Harrison says. “We visited each other and went on vacations together. I called him Uncle Dave. He was a wonderful man.”
Harrison visited his father in the building and did what kids will do. “I raced around the circular hall and took the stools with rollers and pushed my sister around,” he says, “basically being a nuisance.”
Higgins Jr. also enjoyed spending time in a woodshop. “It’s a round building, and when you went in the front door the waiting room had a fountain, and my father put in a curved bench and he built a curved coffee table that matched it,” Harrison explains. “He made his own desk for the back office.”
In the back, brick walls and wooden fences define a pair of courtyards whose pavement and planting areas make use of the building’s circular theme. “In contrast to the fortress-like public face of the structure,” says the Virginia Department of Historic Resources report on the building, “the consulting rooms where the doctors met with patients post-examination offered generous views into the private courtyard gardens, designed as a deliberate asset for the patients.”
In this way, the building let the outside in and gave patients a way to contemplate nature. Floor-to-ceiling windows occupy three-quarters of the walls of these spaces, with a pair of entrance doors in the fourth bay of each room.
Architect Yerkes (1911-2011), from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard and Yale, started out in the trade in Chicago and during World War II served with the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, he opened shop with another Yale alum, Robert Campbell Deigert (1908-1974). The firm’s notable work includes the Madeira School Theater and Student Building in Fairfax County and around Washington, D.C., the National Arboretum Headquarters, the Netherlands Chancery and the Voice of America Broadcasting Headquarters.
Deigert left the firm in 1967, but Yerkes continued working in Washington with partners Nicholas Pappas and John Parker, as David N. Yerkes and Associates, Architects, until his 1980 retirement.
The Virginia DHR report on the Floyd Avenue building notes that Emily Armistead Peyton Higgins, wife of Higgins Jr., was the named owner of the building for reasons of tax advantage. Doctors John S. Ashworth and Richard Gergoudis later practiced there.
“It’s not a particularly efficient building,” says Harrison, whose family retained the property until a few years ago, “but it was something we always loved. Some design wears you out and you grow tired of it. Some design just grows on you. And that’s the case with that building.”
The building is under renovation and will become the headquarters for the nearby Ellwood Thompson’s natural foods market this fall. The building's history is a natural fit for the organic grocer. “The legacy of health and wellness connects with our mission,” says spokesman Colin Beirne. In addition, ET co-founder Rick Hood is a trained architect. “He's ecstatic that this iconic building is available to use,” Beirne says.
