Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “What UVA’s Architecture Tells Us,” an exploration of Jefferson’s university as both embodiment of ideal and evidence of sin, with Louis Nelson, professor of architectural history and vice provost for academic outreach at the University of Virginia.
The University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson to be a visualization of his commitment to the political ideals of democracy and its necessary dependence on an educated citizenry. Its architecture is often rightly interpreted as the architecture of democracy.
At the same time, however, the University of Virginia also was a landscape of slavery, with just as many enslaved residents as students in its opening decades. Teams of enslaved laborers were told to lay its bricks, frame its roofing and plaster its interiors. Dozens of enslaved women washed, cooked, and cleaned to keep the university operational.
Gain a fuller understanding of this place as simultaneously ideal and real with the help of Professor Louis Nelson, a scholar of built environments of the early modern Atlantic world and a co-editor of both Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University and the digital series UVA and the History of Race.
He’ll describe just why the University of Virginia was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 for being “a masterpiece of human creative genius” and exhibiting “an important interchange of human values.” You’ll learn how its pavilions are among the most studied designs in early American architecture, largely due to the unusually articulate intentions of Jefferson as their designer. He called for them to be “models of chaste and correct architecture and of a variety of appearance,” with no two alike so they could serve “as specimens for the architectural lecturer.”
The university remains an essential subject of study in American architectural history courses not just on its own campus but across the country. Jefferson’s designs inspired American architects to turn to the classical tradition in designing public buildings across the country for more than a century.
Yet there is no denying how UVA’s architecture of democracy was built on slavery. Research over the past decades or more by architectural historians, intellectual historians, archaeologists, and others has uncovered an ocean of information about the realities of slavery at the university. A full reckoning for it remains underway.
Professor Nelson will donate his proceeds from the talk to the nonprofit organization Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia. (Tickets must be purchased in advance at $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. No door tickets are available. Doors open to talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk itself starts at 6 pm.)
Image: "View of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville & Monticello." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1856.