Louis Nelson

Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, and Associate Provost for Academic Outreach, Office of the Provost.

University of Virginia

Thursday, June 12, 2025 - 5:00 - 6:00 pm

Designing the Academical Village: Thomas Jefferson’s Drawings for UVA

Louis Nelson, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, and Associate Provost for Academic Outreach, Office of the Provost.

Jefferson’s design of UVA’s Academical Village was a lengthy process of trial and error, not a single inspired vision. Professor Louis Nelson will present rare drawings showcasing this evolution. The Academical Village at the University of Virginia is one of the most important architectural designs in early America and, together with Monticello, is rightly listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, we often think of this design complex as a project that sprung whole cloth from the mind of Jefferson, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Yet a close examination of Jefferson’s drawings reveals an exciting process of trial and error and changes in course by Jefferson over the many years he spent designing UVA.

Beatriz del Cueto,

PhD, FAIA

Pantel del Cueto & Associates, LLC – Puerto Rico

Friday, June 13, 2025 9:30-10:30 am

PURDY & HENDERSON IN CUBA – a design and construction revolution

At the dawn of the twentieth century, immediately following the Spanish-Cuban-American war, the first overseas branch of the United States’ engineering firm known as The Purdy & Henderson Company was established in Havana, Cuba. P&H used innovative building materials, and state-of-the-art means and methods which placed them at the forefront of the construction industry internationally. Emblematic buildings, include the Cuban Capitol and the Hotel Nacional in Havana, which represent some of their best-known projects. The Cuban branch (equally important as that in New York), continued consulting, building, and supervising major projects from 1899 to 1960. Little has been written about P&H’s significant Cuban work; wherein, the goal of this investigation was to better understand the degree of success of North American building processes and techniques brought to Cuba in the early 1900s as demonstrated in their projects. Research included investigating historical documents in and outside Cuba pertaining to P&H’s structures from 1900 through the 1950s, as well as the original buildings themselves.

Edward Ford,

PROFESSOR EMERITUS, ARCHITECTURE

University of Virginia

Saturday, June 14, 2025 9:30-10:30 am

Reflections on the Death of Structural Rationalism

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1819 that, “The conflict between gravity and rigidity is the sole aesthetic material of architecture,” thus laying one of the intellectual foundations for the work of the structural rationalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-Violet-le-Duc, Labrouste, Perret, and others. Yet few today would argue that gravity, or weight, is “the sole aesthetic material of architecture” and many would maintain that weight, or structure its largest sense, is not even a primary theme of the aesthetics of contemporary architecture. By the late twentieth century Ove Arup would write, “The idea that the correct functional, the correct structural and the best possible aesthetic solutions are one and the same thing must I am afraid be abandoned altogether.” Is structural rationalism an archaic concept that we are better off without, based on erroneous interpretations of history and lacking relevance in an age where the digital, the environmental and the sustainable are far more critical? Clearly the great architectural unities of form and structure described by Viollet-le-Duc and others, if they ever existed, are things of the past. An examination of the present condition, however, suggests that structural rationalism, in some form, is not only still very much with us, but that we are not prepared to readily dispense with it. Abandoning structure as a determinant of form and not just an accommodation of form, has led to a number of buildings neither sustainable nor even logical. Modern developments in neuroaesthetics have led to a revitalization of concepts from the rationalist era we thought we had left behind.