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A group of malcontents at the university's School of Architecture had published an open letter assailing the administration's effort to turn the campus into a "theme park of nostalgia": an assemblage of mediocre, slavishly neo-Classical buildings. On the other side, certain members of the board had nightmares of something big and boxy and glassy — something that looked, as one of them put it at the meeting, "industrial" — looming alongside Jefferson's sacred precinct. The debate had spilled over to the rest of the faculty — and, via Internet newsgroups and blogs, had even drawn in architects around the world.

Now the board was under pressure to make up its mind so that construction could begin in the autumn. "There are some very strong opinions on both sides of the aisle, but I have heard you all and heard you clearly," said the university's architectural coordinator, David Neuman, with just a hint of weariness in his voice. "Rest assured, we are going to make sure that what we're building is something we're all proud of."

Expanding on Jefferson
By ADAM GOODHEART

In the midsummer of 1817, the old man rode down from his mountaintop to the outskirts of the nearby village and worked at dreaming up colonnades and pavilions where none existed. Thomas Jefferson left no detailed description of his own labors in designing the University of Virginia, but he did leave a thin paperbound memorandum book, its pages crowded with rows of figures penned in a minute, almost delicate hand — calculating the exact slope of a terrace, the mathematical relationship between a cornice and an architrave and how many bricks it would take to build 16 dormitory rooms (precisely 298,978). That notebook is preserved today in the university's archives, and as you gingerly turn its pages, it is easy to imagine the founder and former president, tall and slightly stooped, striding purposefully around the fallow cornfield with his compass and theodolite — assisted by the 10 slaves he had brought down with him from Monticello.

Nearly two centuries later, I sat in a room at one end of that former cornfield in Charlottesville, Va., as another group of men (and, this time, a few women) tried to design another group of buildings. It was a task they were approaching with rather more diffidence — some might call it reverence — than their institution's founder had done. "This is consecrated ground," said one distinguished gray-haired man. "What we're doing is sort of like putting a wing on the Taj Mahal."

The university's board of visitors — what most schools would call their trustees, but for this, as for many other things, Virginia has its own quaint nomenclature — was gathered around an immense oval conference table, beneath an 1816 portrait of Jefferson in his study at Monticello. Blue suits and salmon pink ties were very much in evidence among this group, as were the lanky builds and equine features that were already recognized 200 years ago as hallmarks of a particularly Virginian physique. The matter at hand was the construction of a 110,000-square-foot $105 million annex, just south of the original Jeffersonian campus. The planned new complex, known as the South Lawn, was intended to house most classrooms and faculty offices for the university's traditional core: its College of Arts and Sciences. The project had been under discussion for the better part of a decade, the original architect had recently thrown up his hands and quit and the university's trustees were now about to evaluate yet another new set of renderings (perhaps the fourth; everyone had lost count).