Virginia Tech’s Buildings and Campus

From the introduction to my master’s thesis, 2020

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was founded in 1872 as Virginia’s Land Grant Institution. It’s located in Blacksburg, Virginia. Today, the school is known as Virginia Tech. As one of the United States’ six Senior Military Colleges, it has maintained an active Corps of Cadets since its inception, with participation required by all male students until 1964. Virginia Tech is the Commonwealth’s hub of agricultural education and innovation, and has always had an academic focus on engineering and other technical fields, as required by its Land Grant status. For the first quarter of Virginia Tech’s history, its Blacksburg campus consisted of a variegated array of economically constructed brick buildings, some decorated with simple brackets and mansarded towers in the Second Empire style, and others bearing only the most simplistic nods to classical ornamentation. In the early twentieth century, Virginia Tech’s president developed a personal relationship with the architect Ralph Adams Cram. Within a decade, Virginia Tech had adopted a version of the Collegiate Gothic style as the architectural identity of its campus. These buildings were the direct product of local, regional, and national ideologies, and represent Virginia Tech’s attempt to visually identify itself with the Commonwealth of Virginia, the South, and the United States.

Between 1914 and 1955, Virginia Tech employed Carneal and Johnston Architects to construct nearly two dozen Gothic buildings at the Blacksburg campus. Every one of these buildings is faced in dolomitic limestone, a traditional local building material that’s quarried on the campus. The rock is known as “Hokie Stone”, after the school’s “Hokie Bird” mascot. The idea of the stone has become a cultural symbol for the strength, resilience, and general identity of Virginia Tech.

Burruss Hall and War Memorial Hall, the standard-bearers of the school’s architectural identity, oppose each other on respective north-west and south-east sides of a 600-foot by 1500-foot oval of grass known as the Drillfield. Both buildings consist of square central masses of Hokie Stone rising through setbacks and engaged buttresses into four-part crenelated towers. The peaks of Burruss Hall’s six-story tower are divided by sections of geometric tracery in full cast stone. The central door and window are capped with cusped slit windows set under depressed arches, and the first two stories are clad in cast stone with simplified Gothic niches and representations of crenelated towers engaged with the facade. War Memorial Hall features a Hokie Stone tower of more squat proportions, with a lancet-arched entry topped by a crenelated central bay window, and a colossal Virginia Tech crest all in tan cast stone. Details such as rustication, simplified gargoyles, geometric quatrefoils, and other applied medallions are found sporadically in cast stone. The architecture is reminiscent of and undoubtedly related to the broader Collegiate Gothic style, but is notable in its frequent use of flat surfaces and stripped or artistically simplified ornamentation. The buildings are militaristic, masculine, and stark. They blatantly symbolize Virginia Tech to visitors, and are held as icons of pride in the hearts and minds of graduates.

Individual elements of the founding ideals, campus architecture, and student culture of American colleges and universities are often hoisted from the depths of history and flown as standards of school identity. Pride, tradition, and storytelling obscure reality, and emotions replace historical fact in the public image of a university’s origins. The cultural idea of Hokie Stone and the casual identification of Virginia Tech’s buildings as “Gothic” has subsumed the complexity of the school’s architectural history.

Architectural styles and building practices are not foregone conclusions at the moment of a school’s inception, but rather the direct result of economic, cultural, and political trends within a school’s leadership, and without in the public landscape. A school’s buildings and campus are a material reflection of the ideals and cultural image-making efforts of its leadership, and are therefore massively important relics that aid in deciphering a more accurate and culturally interconnected history of any college or university.

At Virginia Tech, the tradition of building with locally mined gray stone has become central to the image and culture of the school, yet the process been commercially shorn of its historical context and cultural significance on the regional and national scale. The supposed geologically-unique nature of what is colloquially called “Hokie Stone,” mined on Virginia Tech’s campus, is upheld in popular cultural knowledge as the singular value of the building material. Further, the type of Gothic architectural style employed at Virginia Tech has been reduced, even in the eyes of a number of architectural scholars, to a simple nod to Oxford, Cambridge, and the universities of the Old World. The mere reporting of factual tidbits, such as the chemical makeup of ​Virginia Tech’s famous stone, or the association of a given architecture firm with the school’s buildings, does not work to reveal any relevant or critical historical narrative about the origins of the school’s campus.

This thesis investigates a more richly interconnected history of Virginia Tech’s buildings and campus through the aggregation of information from a number of different sources. The known and documented building traditions of the Valley of Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains, in which Virginia Tech is located, are realized as both a contextual cultural landscape and as a direct influence on the school’s architecture and building technology. The archives of Virginia Tech’s Special Collections Library were mined for primary source data regarding architectural decision-making in the formative years of the school. The life narrative of the frequently studied and infrequently understood architect, Ralph Adams Cram, who had an influential association with Virginia Tech, is analyzed in search of what connective tissue may tie a Boston architect to Virginia and the American South. Further, the painful and vivid historical realities of the American South and the Commonwealth of Virginia are not forgotten in this study, but rather are employed for their necessary explanation of the motivations, desires, fixations, and choices of Virginia Tech’s founders, teachers, and students. The use of locally mined stone and the choice of a Collegiate Gothic style historically link Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus to the Shenandoah Valley building tradition, to the architecture of Ralph Adams Cram, and to the ideologies of the Old South. They reveal the campus to be deeply representative of the school’s Virginian, Southern, and American identities.