Proposed master plan for the University of Virginia from Alumni Bulletin, 1913 Warren H. Manning, landscape designer (LH1 .V6 A4)

President Alderman hired Warren Manning, one of the nation’s leading landscape architects, to design master plans that reorganized the grounds and created new centers and spaces beyond McKim, Mead & White’s suggestions. Manning proposed a series of new walks, axes, lawns, roads, and quadrangles that optimized views and dramatized approaches, most of which were never built. His executed design for an “Italian” garden behind Pavilions VIII and X hints at the growing role of the Academical Village as a precious landscape.

Manning collaborated with U.Va. Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, athletics director, and self-trained architect and historian Dr. William Lambeth to write one of the first books on Thomas Jefferson’s architecture. At a time when most historians denied that an amateur like Jefferson could have designed the Lawn, Lambeth claimed that Jefferson was the “Godfather of the American Architect.” Manning chronicled Jefferson’s interest in landscape architecture and used the book as a venue for his master plans for the University.  His “Plan for Development” of 1913 is the final plate in the book.