The Rediscovered Drawings

Philip Mills Herrington (Grad ’07, ’12) is an architectural historian and associate professor of history at James Madison University. His book, The Law School at the University of Virginia: Architectural Expansion in the Realm of Thomas Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2017), is the definitive account of the buildings this exhibition explores and tells the story of how one of America’s oldest law schools used architecture to reconcile its desire for progress with a veneration for the past. Much of the book’s research was conducted at Law Special Collections. Herrington returned as a member of the First Drafts exhibit team, consulting on the exhibition’s design and interpretation.

At the heart of First Drafts are two drawings Herrington wrote about in his book but had never seen. When the University’s Architectural Commission produced its proposals for the Law School’s next home in the 1920s—a library wing added to Minor Hall and an ambitious, entirely new building—the proposed drawings were never donated to an archive. Herrington knew of their existence from other records at UVA, but when he wrote his history of the Law School, he could work only from written descriptions and conclude the drawings were lost. Recently, serendipity intervened: a UVA alum, Jeff Michel (College ’77), gifted the two drawings to Law Special Collections. In the 1970s, Michel was a student working for Dr. Robert Dolan in the environmental sciences department in Clark Hall. He noticed the drawings in a closet, and Dolan granted him permission to keep them. Fifty years later, Michel’s gift ensures the long-term preservation of the two drawings and brings them to light for the first time in decades.

These drawings give First Drafts its centerpiece. We asked Professor Herrington about the drawings, the scheme behind them, and what it was like to finally see them.

These are architectural drawings created by the University’s Architectural Commission (a committee of four architects) in 1929 at the behest of President Edwin A. Alderman and William Minor Lile, dean of the Law School. One drawing shows the addition of a library wing to the south side of the existing Law School building, Minor Hall. The other drawing presents a much more ambitious plan for a new Law School building. Dean Lile had a wealthy former law student, William Andrews Clark Jr. (1899), who was quite devoted to his former professor, and Lile hoped he would fund the construction — ideally the all-new building.

Alderman and Lile were quite clever: they knew Clark had access to millions and that he came from a family that built big (Clark’s father’s Fifth Avenue mansion was one of the largest private residences ever built in New York). They sent both drawings to Clark, assuming (correctly) that Clark would want his name on the grander plan.

It was so exciting to see the drawings! I wrote in the book that they were lost, and indeed they were at the time. The drawings are a great reminder that there are always new discoveries to be made, even when you think no stone is unturned. I am also relieved that the information I provided on the drawings in the book is consistent with what I see now looking at them.

First, they are beautifully drawn and tinted. This attention to presentation is consistent with the fact that they were meant to impress a potential donor. The sky, the foliage, the curling ribbon, the shadows in both drawings give these designs a romantic quality that I am guessing very much appealed to Clark, a lover of the arts. Second, it is always interesting to see how any proposed University of Virginia building references the past. The design for the new building reminds me of Memorial Gymnasium, but its primary inspiration was the Doremus Memorial Gymnasium at Washington & Lee University. The demi-lune (half-moon-shaped) windows, however, are a Jeffersonian motif, picked up from the Anatomical Theatre (demolished 1939) and other Jefferson-designed buildings. President Alderman and the Board of Visitors were unenthusiastic about this design, so even though it prompted the donation from Clark, it was largely discarded (along with its demi-lune windows). However, the side elevation is remarkably similar to the front of Clark Hall as constructed in 1931–1932.

Philip Mills Herrington’s The Law School at the University of Virginia: Architectural Expansion in the Realm of Thomas Jefferson is available from the University of Virginia Press, including a new paperback edition (January 2026). The rediscovered drawings appear in First Drafts at Stop 3: Clark Hall and in the exhibition introduction.