Sometime this year, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors will get a look at a planning study that will inform how to implement an initiative to provide enough beds on Grounds to second year students.
In December, the BOV’s Buildings and Grounds Committee had a preliminary look at schematic designs to house students at the Darden School of Business, located in UVA’s North Grounds. UVA Architect Alice Raucher began with this geographical perspective.
“Central Grounds lies roughly equidistant from the Downtown Mall and North Grounds, so the work we’re doing to make Ivy Corridor and the athletic area more connected and pedestrian and bicycle friendly, along with all of the wonderful Darden projects will really serve to break down this perceived distance,” Raucher said.
Many of those projects are considered as part of a master plan for Darden adopted in 2017 and refreshed in 2022 by Robert A.M. Stern Architects. The new version was approved by the Buildings and Grounds Committee that September as I reported at the time.
Raucher said the updated plan included an addition to Saunders Hall to include an innovation hub, additions to improvements to faculty buildings to support Darden’s strategic vision goals, and the development of two areas for student housing.
“The development of student housing in two locations,” Raucher said. “South connected to existing Ivy Gardens by a new pedestrian crossing Leonard Sandridge Road, and north to surround the existing parking garage and it’s this north student housing that I’ll be presenting for your review today.”
The residential units would be constructed in two buildings oriented in an L-shape with one between the main parking garage and Abbot Center, and another to the west of that building. This is a deviation from the master plan, which had anticipated these buildings constructed along slopes to the north of the garage.
“The two buildings will house about 218 units of studio, and one, two, and three bedroom units with a total of approximately 350 beds,” Raucher said.
People parking in the garage to visit Darden would walk through two open breezeways in the larger structure.
One note from committee members was for planners to do what they can to limit the impact construction will have. BOV member Jim Murray wondered if the “user experience” had been taken into consideration when deciding the location, though he noted there was no floor plan available yet.
“It seems like a massive building,” Murray said to some mumbling from his colleagues. “It seems more like a prison or an undergraduate dormitory. I just think for graduate students and for people who might be out and about in the business world, and to be crammed together in a huge building like that, are they going to be happy?”
Raucher said she has worked with Robert A.M. Stern Architects to develop two new residential colleges and she said the design would work.
“They’re quite lovely, actually,” Raucher said.
Student housing would not be mandatory but would be optional.
“We do think and survey our students that there is a strong desire to have proximate housing,” said Scott Beardsley, the dean of the Darden School of Business. “That’s what we see in our peer business school landscape.”
There will be many stories on this topic over the course of the next 12 months. Stay tuned!
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