Architecture Review: VCU’s New STEM Building checks many boxes (Guest Commentary)

The six-story, 168,000-square-foot building was recently unveiled. (BizSense file photos)

Virtual college tours weren’t an option 55 years ago when William Darwin “Bo” Prillaman left Martinsville, Virginia, and arrived cold turkey at Virginia Commonwealth University. He recalled his first sight of the Monroe Park campus in his heartfelt and finely illustrated book, “Richmond in Watercolor: Dining out + Drinking in.” It’s a valentine to many of our city’s iconic restaurants that Prillaman, an artist and architect, published in 2021 to benefit local eateries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I first arrived in Richmond in the late 1960s,” Prillaman wrote. “RPI [Richmond Professional Institute] had just been rebranded as VCU where I was enrolled as a freshman. I had a great little Triumph TR4 convertible, a small suitcase and two or three golf clubs in the back. I was on my way to college!”

He continued: “I had a map of Virginia and a map for my new college. As I cruised down Franklin Street, I stopped in front of the Hibbs Building where I was very puzzled to be at the address where I was meant to begin my advanced academia. But there was certainly no college there.” He engaged a young man standing nearby: “‘Can you tell me where VCU/RPI is?’ His eyes were a bit glazed over. After a slow, 360 degree turn, his arms raised, his reply was, ‘It’s everywhere, man.'”

Bo, as you know, it’s even more everywhere now. VCU is the city’s largest employer and physically hugs East and West Broad Street with the medical and health campus perched above Shockoe Valley and the verdant Monroe Park campus abutting the Fan, Oregon Hill and Carver neighborhoods. Other VCU facilities are popping up downtown between these bookends. Recently, construction of a new performing arts building received the green light. It will occupy the entire south side of the 500 block of West Broad at Belvidere Street.

But despite the university’s transformative expansion since 1968, the 800 and 900 blocks of West Franklin Street (where VCU’s academic campus’ roots were permanently planted in 1924) have changed little architecturally. VCU has sensitively refurbished and repurposed this tight necklace of late 19th- and early 20th-century former residences (and a handful of century-old apartment buildings) to serve the educational juggernaut. This spring, however, an architectural interloper has been injected into the tightly configured streetscape at 817 W. Franklin St. (on the site of the former Franklin Street gym).

This much-heralded, six-story, 168,000-square-foot, $125 million STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Building was designed by two firms, Ballinger and Quinn Evans architects. Hourigan was the contractor. The excitement is understandable since the school has sorely lacked enough adequate teaching facilities since its founding, even basic classrooms. The new STEM building, with red brick walls and cream-colored trim, opens none too soon with the fall semester.

VCU held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new STEM building on April 26. (Photo courtesy of VCU)

The building’s interior delivers big time. First, for such a large building, the north-south and east-west cross-axial halls and passages make the various multipurpose spaces, lecture halls, labs, classrooms and offices conveniently readable and reachable. And there is light. On the second-floor lounges, reached from the Franklin Street entrance lobby via a grand, slightly curved stairway, large windows on the north and south sides of the structure provide views through the center of the building. The windows overlooking Franklin Street open onto a balcony. The windows on the opposite, south side of the building frame magnificent views of the towering dome of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart (foliage permitting; we’ll wait for winter for the full effect). On the upper floors, many inner walls are defined by floor-to-ceiling glass to encourage interaction. The furnishings throughout the building are comfortable, handsome and plentiful. Vivid colors in the décor make the common areas visually upbeat.

The School of Humanities and Sciences, whose programs populate this building, reportedly serves 60 percent of the Monroe Park undergraduate population. Next year, I’d bet on a spike in the flow of tuition checks from the pool of accepted students who will have visited the STEM facility in person.

The flap-like window overhangs begin above the main entrance.

But the exterior, sorry to say, is a clunker amid its domestic-sized Franklin Street neighbors – like an oversized cruise ship docked at a comparatively diminutive port, say Key West or Dubrovnik. True, the STEM building is necessarily massive and replaced the sprawling old gym that had no hint of distinction visually. But the architectural elements on the outside are maddening.

There are oversized windows, high contrasting light-hued trim and ill-proportioned faux classical trim. And what are those bizarre flap-like window overhangs that are attached, too high, above the upper floor windows? For crying out loud, this is the north side of the building! Why any need to block the light? The attempt at classical cornices on each of the building’s major front five bays looks flimsy. And while the rusticated brick pattern at the base of the main block of the building is well intentioned, the thickness of each grouped course of combined bricks isn’t bold enough for such a large structure.

What was the bold architectural concept? It’s clear that the architects pondered the tricky site, wedged as it is between Johnson Hall, a century-old high-rise dormitory, and the Ritter-Hickok house, a 19th-century farmhouse that now houses the admissions office. To mitigate the shock to the historic Franklin Street fabric from such a massive building, it’s obvious the architects did try to minimize the mass. First, they respected the adjacent high-rise dorm by setting the fifth bay back from the property line so that it almost acts as a hyphen to its neighbor. The corresponding, opposite bay on the Ritter-Hitchcock side of the STEM building, however, is mostly shorn of decorative gee-gaws and suggests the modern International Style. (Interestingly, this is the most successful segment of the front façade.) It serves as a transitional connector to a lower, four-story wing that is set back considerably from the city sidewalk in respect to the scale of Ritter-Hickok house. And suffice to say the open space between the new educational building and Ritter-Hickok, which connects pedestrian traffic with the dining hall on Park Avenue, is underwhelming.

Johnson Hall, a century-old high-rise dormitory, sits to the east of the STEM building. 

The architects were earnest. They checked most of the boxes to reach a contextual solution, but to little effect. Weirdly, the designers also may have been channeling the ghost of the Franklin Street gym itself in their thinking. That building’s main block, too, had a poorly articulated columned portico and an overwrought front staircase. The gym also had an International Style wing on its western end. But what do we make of what appears to be a last-minute addition, the modernistic, one-story, mostly dark glass, cube-like pavilion? Is this outlier paying homage to another mostly glass, but Edwardian age, folly on campus? That would be the Scott House at 909 West Franklin.

Despite the successful goings-on inside the new STEM building, its exterior is not clever. It’s schizophrenic.

The glassed western bay of the STEM building sits next to the Ritter-Hickok house, a 19th-century farmhouse that now houses the VCU admissions office.