Carl Michell, assistant director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and architect Tiffany H. Armstrong confer with University of Virginia architecture students Henry Tenser and W. H. Lipscomb next to a model of downtown Richmond to prepare for the “Visionary Architecture” exhibition. (Photo by Don Pennell, Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, courtesy The Valentine)
The models of 21st-century Richmond depicted a “gleaming city of modernistic structures, functional and beautiful,” a report in the Richmond-Times-Dispatch enthused.
But the uncredited reporter took issue with the written placards accompanying The Valentine museum’s exhibition of ambitious designs by University of Virginia students and Richmond architects. The story’s headline pronounced: “Good Design, Atroshus Spelling.” The high-concept styles, noted the writer, lost some of their luster when accompanied by “facinating” questions of “conjestion,” “implimentation” and “eleavating problems” that might arise.
These descriptions received note in the newspaper’s Feb. 17, 1966, article on “The Architects’ Richmond: An Exhibition of Visionary Architecture.”
It’s a good thing the future developed spell check.
A trio of jurors selected the work: Washington, D.C., architect Kent Cooper, Richard Howland, chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s department of civil history, and Richard Vesely from Pittsburgh’s Flannery and Associates. (Cooper, who died at age 91 in 2018, managed the construction of Washington Dulles International Airport and became architect of record for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial).
A Jan. 1, 1966, article by Times-Dispatch writer Louise Ellyson makes clear, perhaps to alleviate potential heart palpitations in the Valentine galleries, that these weren’t commissioned works to further bust up downtown Richmond, “but presentations of what the men would like to see there.” (Women were a rarity in the field at the time, while now they make up about half of U.S. architecture students.)
A half-century later, Richmond is renewing its master plan by engaging in a series of public input meetings called Richmond 300: A Guide for Growth. The number is devised from the city’s 1737 charter. This is a different approach than the 1960s top-down method. The first order of business this time: parking studies.
The 1966 Valentine presentation underwhelmed Richmond News Leader critic Marie-Louise Pinckney. “There is nothing shocking, unreal or visionary at The Valentine,” she remarked. “It is a bit sad that our architects feel Richmond is so solid and reactionary that they can offer nothing more exciting than the reshuffling of a well-aired vocabulary.”
Vesely, one of the judges, puzzled aloud about why of a possible 100 entries from Richmond architects, the exhibition only received 10.
During the mid-1960s, as stresses and tensions beset cities nationwide, Richmond contended with its own particular intertwined divisions of race and class. The city was tearing itself inside out to accommodate community-destroying highways, leveling buildings for parking lots and razing old downtown residences to make way for high-rise apartments. Many structures lost then were as landmark-worthy as the survivors are today.
The burgeoning Richmond Professional Institute, springing up around Monroe Park, also required official attention as RPI flirted with moving to Chesterfield County.
In the Valentine exhibition, architectural firm partners Tiffany Armstrong, Richard Brown and Louis Salomonsky proposed for RPI a library in Monroe Park and a long mall between the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart and the Mosque (now Altria Theater), in addition to a field house and parking decks south of Main Street. As Pinckney described it, “The concept looks to a full-scale university, capable of housing 24,000 to 30,000 students by 1980.” Four years later, the Medical College of Virginia and RPI formed Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU’s 1980 enrollment was 19,670 — since then it’s climbed to more than 31,000.
The futuristic “Main to the James” plan from Marcellus Wright & Partners (Scan from Richmond News Leader clipping, 1966)
During the run of the Valentine exhibition, preservationists and residents battled with Richmond planners seeking to demolish the century-old Broad Street Methodist Church at 10th and Broad streets. The congregation left in 1960 and sold the building to the city for a civic center plaza. A proposal to make the church a visitors bureau stayed the wrecking ball’s sway until October 1968. The site, marked by a plaque, served as a parking lot until the 2012 construction of the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU. In the mid-1960s, a group of eminent residents also campaigned for reviving shelved 1798 plans by architect Benjamin Latrobe (of later White House and U.S. Capitol fame) for an impressive bow-front Palladian-style Richmond theater and entertainment center dedicated to “morals and mirth.” The proposed site, today, is a parking lot behind the John Marshall Courts Building.
Even The Valentine needed more room. In March 1966, City Council debated aiding museum expansion, but was then preoccupied by other property shuffling.
Pinckney, in her Feb. 5, 1966, essay, gave attention to the most wide-ranging concept, the “Main to the James” plan of Marcellus Wright & Partners. Steven Jones and Frederic H. Cox Jr. of the firm unveiled an almost unrecognizable picture of 21st-century Richmond.
In this view, most of Oregon Hill is cleared away for a park, and an artificial boating and fishing basin lies less than a mile from downtown. This vision also includes a riverfront transportation center, the replacement of tobacco factories with high-rise apartments and an industrial park on the south bank. The planners, Pinckney clarified, predicated their concept on “some form of Richmond-Henrico-Chesterfield consolidation.”
Barbara Green, for an April 1969 Richmond News Leader piece, interviewed architects Cox and William W. Moseley about their thoughts on “Richmond in 2020.” They envisioned a city in 50 years’ time bristling with soaring apartment buildings because, as Moseley foresaw, the exhaustion of suburban sprawl would result in people “returning to the central city.”
He expected that rising costs of materials, labor and mortgage interests would make home ownership available only to the wealthiest. The dwindling of available land would necessitate “megastructures” built from prefabricated materials housing vertical neighborhoods teeming with residents, retail and entertainment.
Cox — a modernist with a preservationist heart who died at 84 in 2018 — concluded: “Half of our national energy is spent in the logistics of moving from one place to another.” Private transportation, other than for pleasure, would be unnecessary, he asserted. Today there are driverless vehicles, tests of passenger-carrying drones, and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk devising a “hyperloop” to shoot riders between coasts.
Cox’s view from 1969: “People must create and preserve a total environment for living, working and playing, or go nuts.”
