Egyptian Revival

One of Richmond’s most iconic buildings receives an interior overhaul

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Reassembling the Egyptian Building’s coffered and tiled ceiling was like putting together a puzzle — upside down and over 10 feet above the floor — according to artist partners Charles Ponticello and Marilyn Haskin, who finished restoring the surface earlier this year.

“None of the coffers [decorative sunken panels] and none of the tiles inside them were the same size,” Ponticello reflects with a chuckle that is part weary and part satisfied. Each needed to be properly measured to fit the irregular shapes. “Thankfully, Marilyn is the mathematician. The lines needed to be straight. Otherwise, it would’ve looked drunken,” he says.

“It was a relief when we got started,” Haskin adds. “We’d made the right decisions, and the math was correct.”

Situated within the warrens of the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center at 1200 E. Marshall St., the Egyptian Building, built in 1845, is one of Richmond’s most exotic antique structures. The rarity of the design earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.

The building’s concept came from Irish-born Philadelphia architect Thomas Somerville Stewart, who perhaps received the assignment because he was already in town finishing a commission for nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Egyptian Revival style was popular at the time, thanks to Napoleon’s late-18th-century exploits, and the temple-like building demonstrated Stewart’s architectural versatility.

Built to house the Medical Department of Hampden-Sydney College (later the Medical College of Virginia), the structure, at first called the “College Building” and later the “Old College Building,” held an auditorium, dissection laboratories and an infirmary. The Richmond firm of F.W. Barnes devised a distinctive cast-iron fence around the building that includes mummy case forms as supports.

The Egyptian homage incorporated both the sensibility of the period and medical history. “Egyptian imagery is common in the field of medicine, as the first physician in western history is often cited as Imhotep,” writes architect Don O’Keefe online for Architecture Richmond. “[He was] also the first recorded architect of the west. Egyptian forms had been adapted for funerary and medical buildings previously, but MCV’s Egyptian Building took this influence uncommonly far.”

Subsequent renovations created classrooms, offices and a lecture hall in the five-story building. In 1939, during college-wide improvements and a construction program funded in part by Depression-era federal works monies, the entire interior was remodeled by Richmond’s Baskervill & Son. Egyptian motifs remained popular thanks to events such as the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s, so the style was continued inside to the entrance hall with a coffered ceiling adorned by themed tiles and painted hieroglyphics. The “Egyptian Building” designation stuck from then on.

More than 80 years later, those details were showing their age. Fortunately, VCU and Glavé & Holmes architects — which undertook 1982 renovations at the building — knew whom to call. Susan Reed, a principal at Glavé & Holmes and the firm’s director of historic preservation, recalled Ponticello’s skillful work on the hexagonal terrace tiles of the grand Scott House on West Franklin Street. “They were historic Grueby tiles of copper oxide, and toxic,” she explains. “Nobody wanted to touch them.”

Reed figured the experience made Ponticello and Haskin perfect for the restoration of the Egyptian Building’s ceiling. “And we were lucky to get them for this project,” she says, “because this is their swan song.”

Ponticello is getting out of the restoration business to concentrate on his studio practice. (He’ll be exhibiting two pieces in the Hamptons in New York this fall.) The Egyptian Building, with its ancient connotations and mandate to update the 1939 renovations, was a good project to go out on.

The design phase began in June 2022, and construction commenced the following May. The project offered ample challenges, including color-matching the paints and adjusting work schedules around classes and lectures in the building. After a protracted search for a contemporary tile material, Ponticello chose a product made by the Danish company Skamol Group, adhering it with mastic, a high-strength, organic resin, rather than the scanty glue and support strips used for the 1939 tiles.

Then there was the extensive plasterwork carried out by the third team member, Rebekah Jamerson of All Things Plaster. She and her son Nathan use rare expertise to restore ornamental plaster. “Basically, we work on anything old,” she says. Their vitae includes the Branch House Museum of Architecture and Design, Monumental Church (an Egyptian Building neighbor) and Chesterfield County’s Eppington.

Before the new tiles could be adhered to the ceiling, the coffers required repair and replacement. “In one corner, there’d been a leak that rotted all the coffer molding,” Jamerson explains. To add to the challenge, every single one of the coffers was different. “It was unbelievable, trying to get them all lined up,” Jamerson says with a bit of a laugh. “Plus, [the building] was still open to students, so we made these plastic cocoons to keep the work safe.”

Meanwhile, Ponticello and Haskin were making 1,215 color-matched tiles and covering them with a thorough coat of adhesive rather than the splotches seen on the earlier versions. Then came the puzzle-like installation. “If you look at the old tiles with our new ones, you can’t tell the difference,” Ponticello says of the replacements. “We’re really proud of that.”

“We finished on the last day of January of this year,” Haskin recalls. She did a victory dance on the scaffolding after the last piece was put into place.

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