THE C-VILLE LINE

A PAVILION OF CONVERGENCE

Type: Masterplan and Pavilion Design

Location: Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

Year: 2018

Status: Design Competition Proposal; recognized as a "Critical Project" by the jury panel

Design Team: Armando Rigau & Ryan Glick

Description: A line is a powerful thing.

By definition, a line connects two points, or traces a moving point. A line can be physical or it can be implied. A line defines two sides, remaining neutral in the middle between the divide. A line can be a barrier, perhaps to create privacy or a distinction between two things. But a line does not need to be impartial, it can also have weight, favoring some things over others. A line can serve to guide a path. It can bring us down or thrust us forward. A line can be a zone that demarcates an axis of reflection and, even better, as a place of convergence.

While History progresses forward, some events are celebrated, some revisited, and others forgotten or ignored. Like a palimpsest, historical causes and effects become confounded in time. Some histories enforce each other, marking constructive events, while others erase traces of the past. Together, good and bad, they all give character to a place. Consequently, we propose to build a line that at once demarcates, crosses, challenges, summons, and welcomes multiple social perspectives to celebrate Cville’s legacy and unique identity.

Charlottesville, remembered as an unscathed city during the Civil War, has faced recent socio-political unrest, transforming an otherwise charming small town into ripe testing ground for confronting national tensions. Rather than providing another monument that biases a partial history, we propose an architectural incision that not only strengthens the current identity of the city, but that also revives people’s collective memory and encourages the possibility of future encounters. The project, extending from one end of the Mall to the other, offers myriad architectural settings that invite public engagement in varied ways. Some areas invite leisure and interaction, while others are for seclusion and reflection. At the competition’s designated site, the “Cville Line” culminates in a Pavilion of Convergence , a temporary art exhibition venue that can serve as a place to remember, revise, and/or project new histories into the city. The idea is for a productive design environment that creates an ever-changing monument that brings  people together. In the past, the Mall was lauded for bringing the “downtown back to life” and now, it can also bring history back to life and infuse future possibilities that can “bridge the great divide.”