Summary: AIA Virginia on November 9 conferred the 2007 Architecture Medal for Virginia Service, on Tony P. Wrenn, Hon. AIA, of Danville, during the chapter’s Visions for Architecture Gala at the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. The Architecture Medal for Virginia Service, first awarded in 1984, is the chapter's most prestigious public award given to a non-architect for statewide efforts that serve as a model for other efforts and have statewide educational value. Only one Virginia Service medal is presented annually.

Wrenn's award cites his lifelong passion for architecture and appreciation for the built environment. The nomination recognizes, in particular, his contributions as an archivist, architectural historian, conservator, and photographer over the course of a 45-year career. As archivist for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and for the AIA, from which he retired in 1998, he worked not just to preserve the records of the organizations, preservationists, and architects, but also acted as an advisor on historic district legislation, the effects of historic preservation on real-estate values, the value of the built environment culturally and economically, and the history of the architecture profession.

A love for the Old Dominion
Among Wrenn’s most notable projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia were:

• The Dranesville Tavern, Dranesville, Va., which was moved and preserved after it was threatened by highway widening. Wrenn brought archaeologists, photographers, historians, and drafters to work on the vernacular structure. The archaeological program used high-school student volunteers in an innovative program later broadcast internationally by the Voice of America. The tavern was successfully moved, photographed, and drawn for the Historic American Buildings Survey, entered in the National Register of Historic Places, and designated a Virginia Historic Landmark.
• Woodlawn, Mt. Vernon, Va., a National Trust property, was established by Wrenn’s research not just as the architecturally significant home of Lawrence Lewis and Eleanor Parke Custis, but as an important political, literary, and civil rights site, stretching its importance from the era when George Washington gave the site to the Lewises as a wedding present in 1799, to the present. One occupant, Senator Oscar Underwood, appears in John Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, and the Baptists and Quakers who purchased the plantation from the Lewis family made the mansion a stop on the Underground Railroad. Wrenn believes it to have one of the longest, most diverse, and most important histories of any of the early Virginia mansions.
• Robert Russa Moton School, Farmville, Va., a school for black pupils built in 1939, gained national importance in 1951, after students there called a strike to demand better facilities. It was close to being demolished when the State Review Board in the Department of Historic Resources nominated it to the National Register at a level of National Importance by unanimous approval. When the State Historic Preservation officer, for policy reasons, would not forward the nomination to Washington, Wrenn, then chair of the review board, and the vice chair personally forwarded it, and it was quickly listed on the National Register. The 1951 strike led to a court case challenging Virginia's "Separate but Equal" laws. The court case became a part of Brown vs. Board of Education in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation. In the aftermath, Prince Edward County closed its schools, and an era of massive resistance began in the South. The academy movement to provide whites-only education also blossomed, both traceable to the Moton school building. The county planned in the 1980s to transfer the school to an owner who intended to demolish it, but promised to erect a marker noting its importance. Now preserved to serve as a Civil Rights Study Center, it is on the National Register and is a Virginia Landmark and a National Historic Landmark.

Wide-reaching talents and interests
Wrenn's interest and influence reaches to the more recent past as well. As early as 1967, he touted Saarinen’s Dulles Airport and the planned communities of Reston and Hollin Hills as Virginia landmarks. While employed by the AIA, Wrenn worked with students from the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia in a summer intern program in the AIA Archives and still works with the School of Architecture at Virginia Tech's International Archive of Women in Architecture, which has become internationally known and used as a source of information on and repository of records of women architects—long an under-recorded and under-recognized architectural resource.

Wrenn also worked for many years as a study leader for Smithsonian Institution tours in Virginia and writes a weekly column, "In a Virginia Garden," now in its 17th year, for the Free Lance-Star newspaper in Fredericksburg.

Although born and raised in North Carolina, Wrenn has made Virginia his home since 1963—first Alexandria, then Fredericksburg, and most recently Danville. An honorary member of both the AIA and AIA North Carolina, Wrenn continues to write about and lecture on architecture. Last year, he completed a monthly series for AIArchitect, presenting a decade-by-decade history of the Institute in celebration of its sesquicentennial.