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It is worth noting that I am neither an architect, nor a trained student of architecture, nor do I claim any authority on the subject. Beyond a basic understanding of what makes a Tudor home exceptional—or, conversely, what renders a modern Tudor build unfortunate—my only real credential is a lifelong obsession with beauty and those who create it.

Almost two years ago, during a previous phase of my career, I was working on a photo shoot in

a classic Tudor Revival home at 4300 Stuart Avenue.I can trace my love for the Tudor style back to the 1990s through my collection of David Winter Cottages. Inside the house remained a few furnishings from the former owner, an assortment of staging-company pieces more appropriate for a Pottery Barn Teen catalog than a 1930s Tudor, and tucked in a coat closet, an original set of blueprints labeled: “Drawn by Carl M. Lindner, State & City Bank Building, Richmond, Virginia.”

Who was Carl M. Lindner?

Several years passed, but the blueprints—and the house itself— remained rolled up in a corner of my obsessive mind. During that time, I worked independently, creating photo shoots for high-end fabric and wallpaper companies, all the while sensing that my season of self-employment was nearing its close. Countless hours spent job searching from the comfort of my armchair began to take a toll—particularly on my waistline. It became clear that some form of physical activity was in order. Living in Richmond’s Malvern Gardens—one of Lindner’s architectural playgrounds—I realized I had forgotten the exact location of the Tudor house from the photo shoot. Then, one day while on a walk, I turned the corner, and there it was.

Carl M. Lindner… Alright, Richard. You’ve got time on your hands. It’s now or never.

Thanks to the providence of the internet, I stumbled upon the Library of Virginia’s website, which includes an extensive archive of building permits from 1907 to 2000. Many Lindner-designed commercial and residential buildings are listed there by street address, with the greatest concentrations in the Museum District, Windsor Farms, Hampton Gardens, and, of course, Malvern Gardens and Colonial Place. More elusive were those permits labeled “Residence for Mr. and Mrs.” followed by subdivision names, offering no precise location. The search was on. I set out armed with a long list of Lindner addresses saved to my phone, all within walking distance from my non-Lindner-designed abode.

I began in Byrd Park, photographing two neighboring homes on Davis Avenue, followed by the Fountain Lake Condominiums and an apartment building on Rosewood Avenue. Early on, I noticed a defining feature of Lindner’s aesthetic: he was a man of symmetry and not a lover of shutters, with all four structures built in the Georgian or Colonial architectural styles. Satisfied with my findings, I returned home and checked Byrd Park—or so I thought—off my list. Later, I discovered Byrd Park Court, an adjacent row of townhouses on Meadow Street bordering the park, along with two modest Cape Cod-style homes nearby. Across the pond sits the magnificent Strause House on Westover Road, noted for its handsome Flemish bond brickwork. The Westover residence was commissioned by Leon Strause, with his son Philip hiring Lindner to design a story-and-a-half stone home at 3404 Monument Avenue (a favorite of my Instagram followers) with Tudor-styled design elements. 

Then fate intervened. Buildings I’d admired for decades—Penny Lane Pub, the Royall (Hummel) House, the Dietz Press, the gloomy elegance of the abandoned Dervishian & Dervishian law office at 600 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard, and the Barcode building on Grace Street—were all revealed to be Lindner work. My fascination deepened to the point that I could round a corner, glance up from the address on my phone and say with certainty, “That’s it.”

Carl Max Lindner Sr., a Richmond native born in 1895, learned his craft after serving in the Navy during World War I. After attending the Mechanical Institute, he trained under his uncle, Carl Rhuermund, best known for the Shenandoah Building on Allen Avenue—a commission from Ellen Kidd, whose fortune was built on a pickle empire (yes, pickles). Lindner collaborated not only with his uncle but also with his cousin Max Rhuermund. Another cousin, Charles Phillips, co-founded the firm Lindner & Phillips around 1917. Though the firm dissolved in 1924, Phillips—whose primary interest was real estate development—continued to provide many of the commissions Lindner executed following the partnership’s end. While designing individual homes, commercial buildings, and mass-market subdivisions for other developers besides Phillips, Lindner became known as a “builder’s architect,” a label that likely haunted him. Though his higher-end work stood alongside that of contemporaries like Duncan Lee and William Lawrence Bottomley, Lindner never gained the appreciation he deserved. For Richmond clients who admired the elegance of Lee and Bottomley but balked at their price tags, Lindner’s arrival was timely. His designs offered a comparable level of care and craftsmanship, but at a cost that made refined architecture accessible to a broader clientele. In many respects, Lindner opened the door for a wider audience to participate—perhaps unknowingly— in the architectural story of Richmond’s brick-and-mortar, proof that thoughtful design need not be reserved for the city’s wealthiest patrons. Lindner’s collaboration with landscape design legend Charles Gillette further illustrates his reach. I believe the two first worked together during the 1928 construction of paper manufacturer J.P. Hummel’s house, originally known as Hill Crest, at 5103 Cary Street Road and again at Wynandra, built for a tobacco baron on Ampthill Road. Collaborations in the 1930’s include Clovelly, a summer home in Windsor Farms on Clovelly Road, and Aquilla, the stately home built for John Wilson, developer of the Jefferson Hotel, at 4301 Monument Avenue.

Carl Lindner, his wife Mildred, and their son Carl Jr. lived briefly at 3129 Monument Avenue, with the Tudor home most likely serving more as an office to showcase Lindner’s craft and to attract new commissions following the completion of the 3100 block. The still-coveted row of obliquely facing cottages—two-story structures all designed by Lindner, save one at two-and-a-half stories, were constructed in 1926, and sold for $11,111 each—approximately $195,000 in today’s dollars. Spanning styles from Colonial to Georgian, Spanish, and Tudor—Lindner’s preferred idioms—the nine homes on Monument Avenue appear to have been conceived as open-air, visually distinct calling cards of his residential design vocabulary. At the end of the block, on a triangular lot, stands Lindner’s Lord Fairfax Apartments, an architectural feat given the irregularity of the site.

Grace Bailey Lindner, Carl’s educator daughter in law, once noted “Tudor was his favorite style,” as evidenced in Lindner’s next residence, the impressively meticulous Tudor Revival home at 4300 Stuart Avenue (where our story began), completed in 1926. Carl designed a charming Colonial home across the street at 4301 Stuart Avenue for his brother in 1927. The family made what I believe was their final move to their home in Windsor Farms at 3901 Exeter Road in 1949. A Windsor Farms address—one of the city’s most exclusive— signified that Lindner had arrived professionally and socially. Unlike their previous residences built in a Tudor mode, the Exeter Road house is an unassuming story-and-a-half brick cottage featuring dormer windows and details likely inspired by Colonial Williamsburg. One senses that Lindner, ever aware that architecture is fundamentally a service, believed his personal residence should never eclipse those of his clients.

Over the course of his prolific career, Lindner developed a remarkably broad portfolio. One early example is the apartment building at 3110 Patterson Avenue, completed in 1923, and described as a “three-story, brick apartment building designed in the Italian Renaissance Revival mode à la McKim, Mead & White,” the prominent New York firm of the Gilded Age (and noted in the television series of the same name). Though the specific sources of Lindner’s architectural inspiration remain unclear, in a collection of his papers—now held by the Library of Virginia—is a set of plans for the reconstructed Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, designed by the Boston firm Perry, Shaw & Hepburn. Lindner’s preferred materials and motifs reveal his affinity for craftsmanship and texture: irregular brick laid in fanciful patterns, jagged slate roofs (often supplied by Buckingham Slate), leaded and bottle-glass windows, ornamental newel posts, rectangular bas-reliefs, and Tudor half-timbering. On larger commissions, he allowed himself moments of decorative flourish—figural copper gutters and downspouts, carved-wood cornices, elaborate weathervanes, chimney braces, and the occasional curious galleon ship plaque, as seen on the stone Strause house at 3404 Monument Avenue, perhaps a nod to his seafaring years. Yet even in these instances, Lindner’s restraint prevailed. He knew when to stop—a Lindner façade welcomes: it does not overwhelm. 

Lindner spent his final years in a modest condominium, not of his design, at Mount Vernon on North Hamilton Street. He died in 1973, and his funeral was held at St. John’s United Church of Christ at Monument and Stuart Avenues—fittingly, one of his most lauded commissions, designed in partnership with architect Bascom Rowlett. He was laid to rest in Hollywood Cemetery beside his wife, in the family plot shared with their architect son, Carl Jr., and his daughter-in-law.

It is worth noting that I, too, reside in a nearly identical townhouse on North Hamilton Street.

In the end, I didn’t find Carl—he found me, so that I might carry on his legacy. Perfection, it turns out, doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it waits quietly, just around the corner, until someone finally looks up and sees it.

And once you do, you can’t stop.

Richard Stone

All photographs and imagery were provided by Richard Stone.

The Peeling Building, as it was known, was designed by New York-based practice SITE (Sculpture In The Environment), and commissioned by Sydney and Frances Lewis, the founders of Richmond-based retailer Best Products. SITE was established by a group of young artists and designers including Michelle Stone, Alison Sky, Emilio Sousa, James Wines, and Cynthia Eardley. Wines was a sculptor-turned-architect whose work the Lewises began collected in the late 1960s. The Peeling Building, conceived of by Cynthia Eardley, created a sensation, pushing SITE into the architectural limelight. The building kicked off a decade and a half of intense experimentation involving some of the leading architects, graphic designers, and artists of the era.

Now, a half-century later, this remarkable chapter in the history of 20th century American visual culture has come home to Richmond through a new exhibition at the Branch Museum of Design. “Imagining Best Products” highlights the works of architects and graphic designers including Venturi Scott Brown, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Michael Graves, Stanley Tigerman, Charles Moore, Bob Stern, Rob Carter, Tim Priddy, Ivan Chermayeff, and Tom Geismar. 

The exhibition covers the architecture and graphic design of Best, as well as unbuilt and speculative designs, including the entries to the 1979-80 “Buildings for Best Products” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Original drawings, models, graphics, photography, and film help illustrate this narrative – arguably Virginia’s most important contribution to the history of design since Thomas Jefferson. Students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design helped research and curate the exhibition. 

“Imagining Best Products” is dedicated to the memory of Frances Lewis (1922-2026) and Edwin Slipek (1950-2025). Both passed away during the planning of this exhibition. Frances Lewis co-founded Best Products in 1957. Active in the business community, civic organizations, and cultural institutions, she was a force for positive change in her adopted city of Richmond for decades. 

Edwin “Eddie” Slipek worked at Best Products from 1974 to 1984, rising to become assistant vice president for corporate communications. In that role, he helped lead many innovative initiatives at the intersection of art, business, design, graphics, and public engagement, including some of the projects displayed in the exhibition. Eddie’s years at Best Products were just one chapter in a life filled with love for art, architecture, cities, criticism, history, journalism, theater, travel, friends, family, and the landscapes, people, and stories of Richmond. He helped conceive this exhibition, and was actively involved until his passing.

Eddie was also a co-founder and editor of ArchitectureRichmond. Over nearly 14 years, he contributed more than 100 articles to this publication, illuminating Richmond’s history – architectural and otherwise. Those who would like to learn more about Eddie’s life and work can read this remembrance. 

The show runs through June 21st at the Branch Museum of Design. More information can be found on the Branch Museum website.

– ArchitectureRichmond

Photographs: O’Keefe & Associates

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The growth of North Highland Park was fueled by the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from abroad, notably from Germany, Poland, and Italy. The Italian community was particularly strong, with several hundred residents mostly from the Italian region of Tuscany. A plaque commemorating Highland Park’s Little Italy was installed in 2016 in the neighborhood’s central green space, Anne Hardy Plaza. It reads as follows:

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Italian immigrants were a small but cohesive segment of Richmond’s population by the 1850s. Local artist Ferruccio Legnaioli, who employed many Italian immigrant artisans, influenced the cityscape with his ornamental designs for the facades of prominent buildings early in the 20th century. In 1927 the Italian-American community gave the city a statue of Christopher Columbus, designed by Legnaioli and erected near Byrd Park. From the 1920s to the 1960s about 100 families, primarily from Tuscany, resided in a tight-knit “Little Italy” here in North Highland Park. Central to community life were restaurateur Umberto Balducci’s villa, the Italian Club, and St. Elizabeth Catholic Church.

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Retail businesses sprouted up along the route of the streetcar which once served the neighborhood, including along Milton Street and Meadowbridge Road. Now most of these spaces are shuttered. Like many other inner-ring suburban neighborhoods in Richmond, North Highland Park became a less walkable, and more purely residential neighborhood in the decades after World War II. Still, the area contains a rich mix of apartment houses and duplexes alongside single family homes, giving it a more urban feeling than contemporary suburban neighborhoods. Popular housing styles in the neighborhood include bungalows, foursquares, and Colonial Revival–style structures, with the occasional Tudor or Queen Anne.

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Urban divestment and white flight led many of North Highland Park’s southern and eastern European families out to the counties. In the post-war years, the area has become home to a large African American population. Anne Hardy Plaza remains a vital center of the community, with its park house, fountain, basketball courts, and recently renovated playground. The southern edge of Highland Park abuts Six Points commercial district – a town center of sorts for this area of North Richmond. Nearby are various churches, such as Tabernacle of Praise Temple, Fresh Anointing Cathedral, True Light Ministries, and New Kingdom Church. After decades of stasis, some new houses and apartments are being built in North Highland Park, mirroring the repopulation of other central Richmond neighborhoods.

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DOK

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For decades, Edwin “Eddie” Slipek documented, analyzed, encouraged, improved, entertained, and inspired his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. He was best known for his writing and lecturing on architecture, urban planning, and local history. He was the most joyful and enthusiastic person I have ever known, bringing light, energy, and wonder with him wherever he went. He passed away on December 15th after a brief illness.

As engrossed as he was in architecture, that interest was just one manifestation of Eddie’s boundless curiosity. Another was his life long interest in journalism. As a boy he established News of the Neighborhood, a newsletter he delivered to houses around his family’s home on Seminary Avenue in Ginter Park. He was the editor of Woodland Echoes, the newspaper at Nature Camp, a summer camp he attended yearly in Rockbridge County, Virginia. After graduating from John Marshall High School, Eddie attended Boston University in 1968-69 before transferring to Virginia Commonwealth University. There, of course, he became the editor of The Commonwealth Times, the student newspaper, publishing pieces such as an interview with the distinguished Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn.

When Eddie became the architecture critic for The Richmond Mercury in 1973, he was likely the first person ever to hold that title in Virginia. To this day, there are very few cities in the country that have a regularly published writer on architecture. That wasn’t the only way in which the Mercury broke the mold. The hard-hitting young publication set itself in contrast to the city’s conservative dailies, the Times-Dispatch and the News Leader, launching the careers of figures like Lynn Darling, Garrett Epps, Harry Stein, and New York Times theater critic Frank Rich.

From 1974-1984, Eddie entered the corporate world as Director of Communications for Best Products, the retailer founded by Sydney and Francis Lewis. Eddie contributed to the company’s legendary design initiatives, including commissioning graphic design studio Chermayeff & Geismar for its iconic red BEST logo. Other milestones of this era include working with architects James Wines / SITE  and Venturi Scott Brown on radical and unprecedented retail stores, commissioning New York firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer for the Best Products Headquarters, and helping create the 1979-80 exhibition “Buildings for Best Products” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This work was widely recognized in design media at the time and remains studied at schools of architecture globally.

This work, together with frequent travel from the late 70s though the 90s, brought Eddie into contact with luminaries such as Edward Albee, Gordon Bunshaft, Leo Castelli, Henry Cobb, Andres Duane, Frank Gehry, Ivan Karp, Spiro Kostov, Lewis Mumford, Laurinda Spear, Andy Warhol, and Tennessee Williams. But more amazing than his connections in the realm of high culture were the lasting bonds he formed with ordinary people in Richmond and beyond. While traveling together in Venice, close friend Sean Storey recounted that Eddie was leaning on a railing along the canal, describing a nearby facade, when a gondolier passed by below. Up from the waters came a cheerful “Eddie!” — a call familiar to all those who traveled with him.

After leaving Best Products, Eddie founded and edited the local culture publication Clue from 1982-83, resulting in a memorable cover story and interview with architect Philip Johnson. Beginning in 1992 he wrote for Style Weekly, and more recently for Richmond Biz-Sense, contributing stories on architecture, culture, history, society, and anything else that illuminated the people and character of Richmond. He also co-founded this publication, ArchitectureRichmond, in 2012, serving as co-editor and frequent contributor for more than 13 years.

His first piece for Style, published in 1992, titled “The Suburbanization of Downtown Richmond,” excoriated the sterile, office-park-like collection of corporate blocks just north of Brown’s Island. The piece continued a decades-long grudge match against the Downtown Expressway, which Eddie helped lead a grassroots campaign against in the early 1970s. Sadly, the effort failed and the highway tore through Richmond, fueling suburban sprawl and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses.

Since his passing, a host of tributes in local publications have demonstrated his far reaching impact on the city, and the astonishing diversity of his pursuits and interests. Bullet points may be the refuge of the lazy writer, but a full accounting would take volumes. Here are just some episodes in Eddie’s impossibly full life:

• Establishing public relations firm Slipek & Co. which planned the world’s largest croquet tournament as part of Monument Avenue’s centennial in 1990
• Running a mid-century furniture shop in Southside in the early 90s called “Mamie and Jackie” (after the First Ladies)
• Bringing the filming of the 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner with Andre to Richmond’s Jefferson Hotel
• Designing sets for 28 mainstage productions at the Firehouse Theater.
• Serving on boards of numerous local institutions including the Richmond Ballet and the Branch Museum of Design
• Refusing to use email (until pandemic office closures forced him to join the masses), own a television, or carry a cellphone
• Selling his car and relying on the bus for the last decades of his life after his high school students challenged his proclaimed commitment to public transportation
• Curating an exhibition on collegiate gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram, and subsequently authoring “Ralph Adams Cram, the University of Richmond, and the Gothic Style Today” (1997)

The list could go on…

The church was another important part of Eddie’s life. He was a long-time member of Second Presbyterian Church, where he helped those in need through homeless ministry, continuing a pattern of service that began with a mission trip to Mexico when he was just a teen. In 2025, he was elevated to the church vestry, an honor which was deeply meaningful to him.

Eddie considered a life in the ministry – and in politics – but decided against both in the 1960s in part because, as a gay man, he feared his sexuality could be used to destroy his career. During the 1980s and 90s, he lost many friends and his partner to AIDS. He helped stage the “Artists for Life” exhibition at the Milk Bottle Building (then abandoned) followed by a gala at the Empire Theater, with proceeds going toward AIDS-related charities. After all he lost, Eddie still found a way to be positive. He had “survivor’s responsibility,” rather than “survivor’s guilt,” he said. “A responsibility to give back, and to do what I wanted to do.” In later years, Eddie volunteered with ROSMY (now known as Side By Side) to help gay youth find acceptance and peace. He was a nurturing figure in the lives of many.

In fact, Eddie’s greatest impact on Richmond may be through his work as an educator. He lectured to adult audiences in many settings, including at events for the local preservation group Historic Richmond. He also taught courses on the history of art, architecture, and cities for years at Virginia Commonwealth University and Maggie Walker high school, inspiring the careers of many future architects, urban planners, historians, and journalists.

It was in this setting that I first met Eddie. When I arrived at high school, I was reunited with Mario Accordino, a friend from earlier in my childhood with whom I share a love of architecture. As freshmen, we decided to establish an architecture club, but were told we had to have a faculty advisor. As it happened, there was someone at the school who taught architecture to seniors: a Mr. Edwin Slipek. Those who know Eddie can imagine how excited he was when we approached him about our club.

Years later, Eddie joined Mario and me in co-founding ArchitectureRichmond, an online publication of architectural criticism and history. Over the past 13 years, Eddie co-edited the site and authored some 100 articles. Many of them were entries in our “Inventory,” a growing encyclopedia of notable buildings and spaces in Richmond. No matter how many we wrote, we always felt we were just scratching the surface. Among the many plans we have left to complete is a full redesign and relaunch of our website in 2026.

At the time of his death, he was at work on a book review, a neighborhood profile, and several other architectural history pieces for ArchitectureRichmond. Separate from this website, he was also engaged in book projects including a survey on Richmond’s Modern architecture and a biography of architect Duncan Lee (1884–1952) in collaboration with Historic Richmond.

In addition to his writing, Eddie joined me in my architecture practice, O’Keefe & Associates. We had several ongoing projects together, from small buildings to large, speculative visions for the future of Richmond.

Although Eddie was not a designer by training, and spent much of his time studying the past, the question that preoccupied him most was “what’s next?” This quality endeared him not just to Richmond’s historians, but to its journalists and architects.

No matter how unsparing his reviews may have been, architectural criticism rests on the assumption that architecture is important. Eddie sympathized deeply with designers, even if he sometimes subjected them to a public slap on the wrist. He encouraged many young people to enter the design professions, helping to launch the careers of architects and urban planners including Emma Fuller of New York-based Fuller/Overby Architecture, Chris Snowden of Richmond-based Christian Snowden Design, and many others. His guidance was also instrumental to a generation of Richmond journalists, including Rich Griset, a regular writer for Style Weekly now based in London whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Eddie was an irreplaceable mentor, as well as my closest collaborator and treasured friend over the last 19 years. We shared many joys together: art, theater, travel, reading, writing, working, dreaming, and most importantly, endless conversation and meandering walks around Richmond. We could finish each other’s sentences, but on occasion we’d argue late into the night (almost exclusively about architecture), with particularly heated discussions culminating in a tearful embrace. Sometimes our conversations followed a familiar format, with me (the younger architect) pushing him (the older critic) to accept some radical new idea. But just as often, the positions were reversed, with Eddie championing the new, the provocative, or the flat-out crazy.

One of our recurring disagreements was about street trees – Eddie felt there were too many of them in Richmond. I observed that Richmond was very hot in the summertime but Eddie countered that, with all the foliage, “you can’t even see the buildings!” Like any great aesthete, Eddie didn’t mind suffering for art. On several occasions, he gleefully threatened to prowl central Richmond in the dead of night with a chainsaw and cut down every tree on Broad Street.

Since the 1990s, Eddie called the Springhill neighborhood of Southside home, but he loved every corner of the city. He grew up as one of six children in Ginter Park. His father, a lawyer, took him on frequent visits to Carytown. His mother, an artist, connected him to family and friends in the West End (and elsewhere in Virginia including rural Blackstone County, where he spent many summers). He lived for years in Church Hill, and claimed to be the first person to live in a loft apartment on Broad Street in Monroe Ward.

I once asked Eddie where he would live if he had a million dollars to spend (at the time this was just enough to afford a home on Monument Avenue). After musing on the benefits of a Monument Avenue mansion, he announced his answer: divide the money and buy a $250,000 home in each of the city’s four quadrants: Northside, Southside, East End, and West End. “I’d move around between the places,” he explained. “Then I’d really know what’s going on.”

Although he traveled widely, lived in Boston in the late 60s, and spent part of his time in New York in the 1980s and 90s, Eddie was a creature of Richmond. His curiosity about the city was insatiable. How does it work? Why is it the way it is? And who made it that way? Eddie wanted to understand it all. I knew he would never truly leave the city, but a couple of years ago I asked him if he had considered doing a short stint away again – a year, perhaps?

“If I was going to live anywhere else, it’d probably be South Beach, or maybe West Hollywood,” he said, picking (I assume) the two most escapist destinations he could think of.

“So, would you? If an opportunity came, would you spend a year away?”

“No,” he said, smiling after a long pause. “I’m just beginning to figure this place out!”

Richmond was his muse. Just days before his passing, Eddie was still out exploring the city, physically and socially. He was a great connector of people and places, inviting us to step out of our everyday lives onto a higher, more contemplative plane. What really makes society tick, and how can we make it work better? How can we do the right thing, and have the time of our lives doing it?

Eddie isn’t with us to ask these questions any longer, but the questions stand. For me, and for many others, his memory will challenge and motivate us for years to come. Perhaps the best way to honor him is to step up onto the plane he invited us to and live as beautifully, joyfully, and fully as he did.

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Don O’Keefe

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With these changes come new challenges. The most visible of these is the shocking increase in the cost of housing. In the 10 years between 2014 and 2024, the cost of the average home in Richmond more than doubled. Equally shocking, but less visible to many, has been the ongoing destruction of vast swaths of forests and farmland in the surrounding counties for continued suburban development. In the past four years, 7 out of 8 newcomers to our region moved to homes outside the City of Richmond.

Other challenges we face include the unequal distribution of public resources (such as education), homelessness, the environmental impact of sprawl, insufficient investment in public transportation, and the dangers posed by automobile-centric planning to the environment, safety, and public health. Taken together, this is a daunting array of obstacles. But where there are obstacles, there are also opportunities. 

Richmond now has a once-in-a-generation chance to transform our city for the better, simultaneously combatting the housing crisis, climate change, and deeply entrenched social injustices. That opportunity is the Code Refresh now being crafted by City Hall. The Code Refresh aims to overhaul the city’s zoning policy to align with the Richmond 300 Masterplan. 

Why is this necessary? How will it help?

For starters, Richmond’s current zoning code is hopelessly out of date. Our codes are largely a product of the 1970s, when cities across the country were building urban expressways, incentivizing suburban subdivisions and shopping malls, and demolishing once-vital central neighborhoods. At that time, planners sought to separate the different functions of the city, such as housing and shops. This is why many of Richmond’s best-loved local businesses, like Joe’s Inn in the Fan or the Hill Cafe in Church Hill, would be illegal to create under current zoning. The absurdities don’t end there. Most of Richmond’s neighborhoods are zoned only for single family homes, so the rich mix of duplexes, carriage houses, and apartment buildings that exist there are also effectively illegal. (See the photos above for some examples.) These are precisely the forms of housing that can help us combat the affordability crisis and create more housing options for the next generation of Richmonders. 

The Code Refresh builds on the vision laid out in the Richmond 300 Masterplan, which was developed with robust public input from all parts of the city. The mandate of the masterplan was clear: create a more sustainable, transit-oriented, and inclusive city built around dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. The plan correctly identifies producing more housing as a key strategy for making Richmond more affordable overall. Code Refresh should deliver on these desires from the citizens. 

Building more walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods is one of the most important things we can do to make a safer and more sustainable Richmond. In 2020, as the Richmond 300 Masterplan was being debated, I wrote an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch providing a small sample of the wealth of data that support these claims: 

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In an era of increasing disregard for facts, we must take stock of the things we know for certain. According to the CDC, 1.35 million people died from automobile accidents globally in 2019. That’s more than have died from COVID-19 so far in 2020. Vehicle emissions in 2015 accounted for an additional 385,000 global deaths. Americans die in traffic accidents six times more frequently than Norwegians, according to the WHO [World Health Organization]. If we walked, biked, and used public transportation at the same rate that they do, over 30,000 American lives could have been saved in 2019 alone.

[ . . . ]

Cities built around cars are a crisis not only for humans, but for the natural world as well. Sprawl is a major contributor to both greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction. Denser development, like townhouses and apartments, are more efficient to heat and cool, too. When we increase urban density, CO2 emissions from both transportation and building energy-use drop dramatically. With rampant development and climate change threatening to drive 80% of the world’s species to extinction, the stakes couldn’t be higher. That’s why the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lists land-use reform as one of its most important action items.

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In the five years since that article was published, what has changed? The answer is: very little. Sprawl has continued unabated, and housing production in the city has not kept up with demand. Richmond today houses 20,000 fewer people than it did in 1970. In 2023, the City Council determined that we have a shortage of at least 23,000 homes. RVAgreen 2050, the city’s climate action plan, also calls for land use reform, and yet the zoning changes laid out in Richmond 300 have still not been formalized. 

Simply pretending the problem will go away will not work. Sooner or later, we will have to face the fact that urban planning in Greater Richmond since 1945 has been an abject failure. Worst of all, it is a failure so long, deep, and pervasive that we have spent our entire lives living inside of it. It is easy to assume that the way our city is now is natural and inevitable. It is not. I love Richmond and have spent the past 13 years chronicling its architectural history on this very website, arguing forcefully for architectural preservation when appropriate. But I also believe that Richmond’s best days are ahead of it, if we can give ourselves the freedom to imagine what a new and better Richmond might look like.

The time for change is now, and a broad coalition of voices are coming forward to support Code Refresh as a step in the right direction. One group supporting the zoning changes, called Homes for All Our Neighbors, has united many of the city’s leading advocates for affordable housing including the Partnership for Housing Affordability, Better Housing Coalition, Richmond Metro Habitat for Humanity, and the Community Climate Collaborative. It also includes Eden Village of Richmond, a group working to create a community of tiny homes for formerly unhoused people, for which I serve as a board member. We support the measure not only because housing unaffordability is one cause of homelessness, but because the very village we seek to build would be illegal under current zoning. 

I urge my fellow Richmonders, the Zoning Advisory Council, the City Council, and Mayor Avula to strongly support the rezoning effort. As the City prepares to release the second draft of Code Refresh, we must ensure that the rezoning effort supports the needs of the many, rather than being watered down because of the objections of a vocal few. If we fail, we will squander a golden opportunity to change Richmond for the better. If we succeed, we will open the door into a more affordable, sustainable, equitable, healthy, and vibrant future for all. 

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Don O’Keefe AIA AIJ CPIJ
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Don O’Keefe is a founding co-editor of ArchitectureRichmond. He is an architect, urban planner, and currently adjunct assistant professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. He is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Association, the Architectural Institute of Japan, and the City Planning Institute of Japan. He serves on the board of Eden Village of Richmond and the advisory board of the Branch Museum of Design.

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Note: This is an opinion piece. Pieces in our opinion section reflect the views of the author and may not reflect the views of other associated with ArchitectureRichmond or the organization as a whole.

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Long a center of commerce and culture, Jackson Ward has been home to prominent figures such as John Mitchell Jr. (the editor of the Richmond Planet), Bill Bojangles Robinson (a famous actor and tap dancer), and Maggie L. Walker (the first woman in the US to found a bank). Jackson Ward remains a center for Black business, art, and history in the region, hosting institutions like the Hippodrome Theater and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. “House to Highway” sheds light on the development of this lively and complex neighborhood, particularly as its population, wealth, and importance boomed after the Civil War and into the early 20th century. 

In the 1950s, Jackson Ward was targeted by city and regional officials for urban renewal. The construction of the Gilpin Court housing projects and the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike destroyed and displaced thousands of homes and businesses, and has left a deep scar in the neighborhood that persists to this day. As the exhibition makes clear, the destruction of large parts of Jackson Ward was justified in explicitly racist terms by the city’s white power structure. The exhibition uses maps, photographs, documents, and historical artifacts to illustrate these narratives. Portraits of notable Jackson Ward residents by artist Barry O’Keefe are also included.

Curated by Library of Virginia staff in collaboration with the JXN project, a local non-profit dedicated to the history of Jackson Ward, the exhibition is a thoughtful contribution to Richmond’s ongoing project of understanding and redressing historical wounds. It is also the beginning of a larger effort to reconstruct the Skipwith-Roper Cottage, the original home of Abraham Peyton Skipwith. For Sesha Joi Moon, a JXN project co-founder and one of the show’s curators, “Skipwith’s life, liberty, lineage, and legacy as the first known Black homeowner in Jackson Ward” is a lens through which to see the wider Black American experience. 

“House to Highway” is open on the Library of Virginia’s first floor galleries through February 28th, 2026. 

Don O’Keefe

Link: “House to Highway” exhibit at the Library of Virginia.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Dr. Sesha Joi Moon for assistance with this article.

John Moeser, a former professor at VCU’s Wilder School of Government, stated that “the story of Richmond is the story of America.” Similar statements have been made by other chroniclers of Richmond over the decades, from Virginius Dabney to Michael Paul Willaims (both Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalists for the Times-Dispatch). The city’s long history mirrors that of the nation, reflecting competing forces of idealism, invention, violence, and discrimination. These arguments often emphasize Richmond’s role in indigenous history, the revolutionary era, the slave trade, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow era. 

A new book by University of Richmond faculty Thad Williamson, Julian M. Hayter, and Amy L. Howard extends this line of reasoning to the present, examining Richmond’s fraught efforts to become an economically prosperous and racially just city of the New South. “The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, 1988-2016” focuses on the actions and inactions of city hall, arguing that the city “exemplifies the challenges facing American metropolitan areas in general, often in magnified form.” Local politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the book carefully positions Richmond’s decisions in the context of regional and state-level politics. 

Williamson, Hayter, and Howard are honest, fearless, and correct in placing a large part of the blame for this situation on the region’s deeply entrenched racism. The historical record is incontrovertible: for centuries, the city and state governments used every trick they could think of to disenfranchise the Black community. Richmond’s 1970 annexation of a large portion of Chesterfield County was, for a brief time, successful in maintaining a white majority in the city. But white flight ultimately forced the state legislature to change course. Cities were banned from further expansion, isolated, and marginalized as white residents flowed out to the counties. The book provides rock-solid explanations for why and how the segregated and unjust structure of city-county relations came to be. 

As a nation, we suddenly find ourselves in a moment when issues of racial justice and government-led discrimination are suppressed or denied, but that doesn’t make them any less real. The region will never overcome its troubles without a clear-eyed understanding of its own history. Intended or not, this book is a timely response to the moment.

“The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond” will be read mostly by students and scholars looking for a straightforward summary of recent city and regional politics. The doggedly organized book seems, at times, like the longest-ever Richmond Times-Dispatch article. A concluding section, titled “Toward a Just Twenty-First-Century Richmond,” provides a more holistic analysis of the city’s politics and prospects, but it would have been helpful to have a narrative form throughout the book. One has to reach page 185 to read the statement: “we see cities as potential sites for enacting democracy and social justice,” which might have been better placed in the first chapter (or even the first sentence).

The book also could have used aggressive sentence-level editing. Take this example: “Indeed, Monument Avenue itself, we know now, was a naked real estate deal under the guise of a City Beautiful initiative.” Setting aside the inaccurate implication that the City Beautiful movement was incompatible with real estate deals, a thing simply cannot be both naked and in a guise. Here’s another: “The agenda sketched above might be ambitious, but with political will and the means to follow through on that will, it is also plausible.” What would be lost in reducing this sentence to:  “This agenda, though ambitious, is possible.” ?

Oh well. Not every work of political history has to be a literary phenomenon. And what the book lacks in prose, it makes up for in purpose. Richmond is lucky to have scholars like Williamson, Hayter, and Howard paying such close attention to the workings of city government. 

The book advances two general truths about regional governance in the period it covers. First, on issues like inequality, poverty, and sustainability, there has been a bending of the moral arc toward justice, even in the once-intransigent surrounding counties. Second, this improvement in priorities has not always resulted in better outcomes. In order for the machine to run properly, city leadership must have both worthy goals and effective methods of achieving them.

The disconnect between political aspirations and concrete improvements is largely due to the region’s dysfunctional political structure, especially the segregated school system and the unequal distribution of resources between city and county. As the authors write, “Richmond policy makers have been placed in a chronically disadvantageous situation by factors outside their control.”  

This doesn’t mean that the authors let city leaders off easy; each administration is carefully scrutinized. But unlike some of the city’s most vocal (and lazy) critics, they insist on historical and political context. “Stronger internal governance might improve the functioning of Richmond’s city government,” the authors write in their conclusion, “but from a larger perspective, this still amounts to making the most of a bad hand.” To really turn the tables, they suggest, the region needs to be open to bold reforms like a unified school district or even a full merger of Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. 

For Williamson, Hayter, and Howard, whatever decisions city leaders make must be “conscious but not constrained by the layers of history and complexity” that produced contemporary Richmond. “The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond” is a valuable tool in understanding that complexity, and in beginning to overcome it.

DOK

Gates is one of America’s most prolific contemporary artists, and one of its most eclectic. His work includes more familiar fine art media like painting and sculpture, as well as installations and social efforts including a long-running community revitalization project in the South Side of his native Chicago. Gates continues to live and work in Chicago, though he also spent formative years in the 90s working in Tokoname, a small city in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, famous for its ceramic workshops. His engagement with the Japanese ceramic tradition, as well as the larger movement surrounding Japanese folk art known as “mingei,” led Gates to create a body of work he calls “afro-mingei.” His sculptures, merging the artistic and craft cultures of West Africa, Black America, and Japan, were recently exhibited in a solo-show at the Mori Museum of Art in Tokyo. 

A portion of this body of work is on display at the VMFA. Some of the ceramic objects on display are vessels, others recall the human body or animal forms. Wooden blocks and crates are scattered through this composition, evoking a workshop or studio scene, rather than a traditional gallery environment. Viewers can circumnavigate this single grouping of sculptures, elevated and framed by a steel prism. The shifting views of the objects within recall how scenes unfold sequentially as one moves through a city, with buildings, trees, and monuments, and open spaces shifting in and out of view. 

The exhibit, entitled “Wonder Working Power,” is small, but well worth the time for those interested in the rich intersection of art and architecture. And, like most things at the VMFA, it doesn’t hurt that it’s free and open to the public seven days a week.

Don O’Keefe

Exhibition Info:

Theaster Gates: Wonder Working Power

January 27, 2024 – March 9, 2025

Lewis Focus Gallery

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 

200 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard

Richmond, VA 23220

Link to additional information on the VFMA website.

The state of public transit in Richmond may not be strong, but we are more fortunate than many US cities of our size to be served by the Greater Richmond Transit Company, or GRTC. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, GRTC has outperformed many other systems, in part because of the “Zero Fare” policy instituted during the pandemic, and in part because of a clever and successful redesign of the bus routes in the years before it. The centerpiece of the redesigned system is the Pulse, a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) line that runs down Broad Street. The Pulse has exceeded ridership expectations and changed the way many people view the system. (As a regular rider myself, I am grateful for this transformative change.)

More recently, as ridership has grown and buses have become crowded at peak times, GRTC announced their intention to add articulated buses to their fleet. Articulated buses are longer than typical buses, and therefore hold more passengers. If demand is high, increase supply: it’s an intuitive idea. But is it the best solution to this very real problem? No. 

There are two principal ways to increase the number of riders on a transit route. The first is to increase the capacity of the vehicle – the number of people that can ride on each bus, train, or boat. This can be done by increasing the size of the vehicle, or by changing the interior organization of the vehicle. In subways, for example, there are a mixture of seated and standing areas. Standing areas can contain a larger density of people than seated areas. GRTC is seeking to increase the capacity on the Pulse by increasing the size of their buses.

The second way of increasing the number of riders is to increase the frequency of service. For example, to carry 100 people in an hour, you could have one bus that carries 100 people once an hour, or four buses that carry 25 people once every 15 minutes. 

Which is better? Generally, and in the case of the Pulse, its increased frequency. That’s because increased frequency improves the experience of riders every day – it makes transit better. The more frequent the bus service, the less planning riders have to do to catch a bus, and less time they waste waiting for buses to arrive. Increased frequency makes the experience of catching a bus more pleasant and convenient. Everyday, thousands of people think to themselves “I wish the bus was coming sooner.” No one has ever thought “I wish this bus was longer.”

On top of that, articulated buses have a number of well-known problems. Although they have three doors as opposed to two for a typical 40-foot bus, boarding can take longer. Due to their size, they don’t make sharp turns as well, and they cannot fit on as many streets as shorter buses, making them less flexible and harder to re-deploy as transit needs change. Longer buses also require longer stations, and the cost of upgrading the existing Pulse stations on Broad Street is considerable.

Articulated buses are also more accident prone. In London, articulated buses were found to be five times more likely to be involved in an accident than other buses in their fleet. The large buses are more difficult to control, causing stress for the drivers and putting pedestrians in danger. In addition to these safety issues, many riders simply displiked the experience of riding these buses. Articulated buses were ultimately eliminated from London’s fleet, and replaced entirely with conventional buses. Articulated buses may be the best solution in highly crowded routes where frequency is already very high – every 5 minutes or better, for example – but the Pulse isn’t even near that mark yet.

GRTC is making a mistake in transitioning the Pulse to articulated buses while frequency remains low, by the standards of rapid transit systems. For inspiration, we need only look back to GRTC’s 2018 system redesign, which has been successful precisely because it prioritized frequency above all. Admittedly, hiring new drivers has been difficult given the nation-wide labor crunch. But will making the job of drivers harder by giving them a bulkier and more dangerous vehicle to operate make it any easier to find new recruits?

Clearly, crowding on the Pulse is a problem, but it is also an opportunity. Let’s solve it in a way that improves the experience of transit riders every day, rather than investing millions in a technology that brings with it a whole new set of problems. Let’s increase frequency. 

Don O’Keefe

Photograph courtesy of Echo • Inshade Media, provided under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC 2.0.

Too few Richmonders know the name Amaza Lee Meredith (1895 – 1984). Thanks in part to an important and timely new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, that may soon change.

A pathbreaking architect and educator, Meredith is the first queer black woman known to practice as an architect in America. She designed and realized several important early American modernist structures in Virginia and New York. Active from the 1930s through the 70s, Meredith worked at a time when segregation was the law of the land and gates of profession were shut against most women and African Americans.

The ICA show, titled “Dear Mazie,” examines Meredith’s life and work through architectural drawings, archival photographs and writings, and newly commissioned works of art. Special attention is given to “Azurest South,” the architect’s own home adjacent to the campus of Virginia State University near Petersburg, Virginia. Here, she lived until her death in 1984 with her partner Dr. Edna Meade Colson. Meredith, an alumna of the university, founded the art department and taught there for decades. The house is now occupied by the school’s alumni association.

Curated by and designed in collaboration with AD-WO, an architectural practice in New York City, “Dear Mazie” presents the work of the architect and the commentary of the artists in parallel, creating a constructive dialogue between present and past. A large, perforated partition covered with an enormous drawing of the elevation of Azurest South, dividing the space lengthwise while giving some sense of the scale of the architect’s works. Clever use is also made of the ground floor gallery window at the ICA, which has been modified to approximate the view from the windows at Azurest South.

Sculptures, paintings, and large scale installation and video pieces were produced by artists include Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Practise (a partnership of artists James Goggin and Shan James), Tschabalala Self and Cauleen Smith. The collective known as The Black School, operated by Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters, contributed an interactive piece with furniture, a small library, and information about the group’s own public art and design education project underway in New Orleans–an echo of Meredith’s work decades in the past.

“Dear Mazie” is a strong, stimulating statement. It is also mandatory viewing for anyone concerned with the architectural history of greater Richmond. The exhibit is on view through March 9th, 2025.

DOK

Venue: VCU Institute of Contemporary Art

Dates: Sep 6, 2024 – Mar 9, 2025

Link: Dear Mazie at the ICA