by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design and renovate university dormitories within a strictly defined Jeffersonian, Neo-Classical context?

Summary: Street Dixon Rick’s new and renovated Commons dormitories add classically detailed and sustainable housing for freshman students. These designs were based on the Neo-Classical buildings of the school’s Peabody campus, which was modeled after the University of Virginia campus.

For The Commons residential college additions and renovations at Vanderbilt University, architects Street Dixon Rick looked back to Thomas Jefferson’s quintessentially Neo-Classical American college campus—the University of Virginia in Charlottesville—just as Vanderbilt’s original campus architect Stanford White of McKim Mead and White did before them. The Peabody campus (then a separate college) was planned by White in 1905 and built between 1915 and 1930 with grand Federalist detailing and broad axial quad spaces in reference to the University of Virginia’s Rotunda and the Great Lawn that radiates from it.

The Peabody campus was absorbed by Vanderbilt in 1979, and while the main campus has incorporated other architectural styles, Peabody has remained faithful to its Beaux Arts, Neo-Classical pedigree. “We got a lot of direction from the campus planning department at Vanderbilt,” says Stephen Rick, AIA, a principal at Street Dixon Rick. “That’s what they wanted.”

To this established building plan and aesthetic approach, the architects of the Nashville-based firm added a few new concepts to their campus master plan, five new residence halls, and two renovated residence halls. The new residence halls are designed with contemporary notions of sustainability, and all the dormitories will be organized around a residential college model in which students are grouped in living situations by academic interest or age (in this case, all students at The Commons will be freshman) in the hopes of fostering a more community-oriented college experience.

New and old
Open to students this fall, Street Dixon Rick has completed 277,000 square feet of new construction and 61,000 square feet of renovated construction on a former parking lot site. Some 1,600 students will live there. The Commons includes Rick’s five new buildings, five renovated buildings (three of which Rick and his team did not design), and a campus dining hall and services center.

The new buildings are organized around a new quad that is perpendicular to another quad that contains the campus’s renovated buildings. These quads radiate out from the university’s main quad, similar to the plan of the University of Virginia.

For the renovated dormitories, Street Dixon Rick installed basic infrastructure upgrades and installed new programs consistent with the residential college model. This included faculty apartments and meeting and classroom spaces that will help to create a tighter relationship between the domestic and educational aspects of college life, with on-site professors and classrooms down the hall from dorm rooms.

Aesthetically and stylistically, “we were trying to take a lot of the cues from the old Peabody campus,” for the new buildings, Rick says. Like the renovated buildings, the new facilities are made of multi-hued red, modified Flemish bond brickwork with white stone Classical detailing. Stambaugh House faces its quad with a wide portico and pediment supported by six stone columns. The pediment gable is brick and is mostly unadorned, except for a single circular window. The portico fronts the main wing of the building with symmetrical smaller wings on each side. An elevated deck under the pediment offers students a shaded outdoor space to socialize and study. The rear of Stambaugh (as with façades of other renovated and new buildings) features mirror-image two-dimensional stone of long, white bars running the height of the buildings in between windows.

Vanderbilt greens up
Sustainability is a key aspect to The Commons and was encouraged by Vanderbilt and student groups. The university is in the middle of a campaign to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent. Street Dixon Rick was recognized by the 2008 Governor’s Environmental Stewardship award for The Commons as well.

The development is anchored by the LEED® Gold-certified Commons Center building, a campus life facility and dining hall by Massachusetts-based Bruner/Cott Architects and Planners. It collects cooking oil waste from the dining hall and turns it into biofuel for use in campus grounds keeping vehicles, and a system of food pulpers separates water from organic waste, which will be composted.

Though they were only targeting LEED Standard certification, two of Street Dixon Rick’s new buildings (Sutherland and Crawford) have attained LEED Silver status, mostly through the use of sustainable materials, and the remaining three are pending a LEED Silver rating. These buildings feature a shared, more efficient utilities plant; renewable cork and bamboo flooring; low-flow water fixtures; locally sourced brick; and recycled aluminum in the widow frames.

Timeless influence
Architects from Street Dixon Rick traveled to the University of Virginia (where firm principal Baird Dixon, AIA, went to architecture school) to study Jefferson’s plan, and to other universities that have adopted the residential college model. The reason Jefferson’s school has been such a timeless influence on university planning in this country and beyond, Rick says, is because of the strong sense of spatial organization it offers, which breeds a familiar sense of community. Its systems of town square-like quads and flanking buildings harken back to millennia-old, village-level urbanisms that exist in the collective memory of all, but have over time been rapidly discarded for new and (relatively) untested urban models. Bringing this ancestral urban plan back to a college setting, where young, unformed adults take some of their first brave steps toward professional adulthood, is a deserved common comfort.