CNU Architectural Ages: Age One (1964 – 1976)

Christopher Newport Hall
Courtesy of the CNU Archives

Christopher Newport Hall (1964)

Gosnold Hall (1965)

Captain John Smith Library / Smith Hall (1967)

Ratcliffe Gym (1967)

Wingfield Hall (1970)

Cazares Greenhouse (1972)

Campus Center (1973)

“I used to say that if you just see one corner of a building in a picture, you know it’s Christopher Newport College. Now, you go to Mary-Washington or to Longwood, some of those others, even the new campus at William & Mary, and you don’t even know where you are if you’re plopped down in the middle of campus. But Christopher Newport—it’s absolutely unique.”

                - James Windsor, 1986[1]

Christopher Newport College (CNC) started out as a branch of the College of William & Mary. The two-year junior college was created to serve the Newport News/Peninsula area, composed predominantly of blue-collar working-class families. It quickly earned a reputation as a quality educational facility, leading to it becoming a four-year college in 1971.[2]

The first three years of Christopher Newport College took place in the 1914 John W. Daniel School building in Downtown Newport News, Virginia. This was only a temporary home while a permanent campus was sought out. The site ultimately chosen was a 72-acre tract along Shoe Lane. In 1964, with the opening of the site’s first building, Christopher Newport Hall, the first official architectural age of the college began![3]

Newport Hall concept painting
Painted for Forrest Colie and Associates and CNC
From CNC's 1964 Trident yearbook

CNC’s Age One buildings and master plan were designed by architectural firm Forrest Coile & Associates. The main architect of the project was Forrest Colie, Jr. (whom the firm was not named after – it was named after his father, Forrest Coile, Sr.). Coile, Jr. called his unique style of the campus’ buildings “Contemporary Oriental.” As the name suggests, the buildings followed the contemporary building styles of the 1960’s, but with an Asian influence. The Asian design choices were mainly evident in the roofs, the general shapes of the buildings, and their bilateral symmetry. Everything else – the building materials, the interiors, the furniture – were of modern design. By creating its own architectural style, the idea was to give the campus its own distinct look and feel.[4]

Each first-floor exterior was made of brick, crowned by a smooth, white band of precast concrete. Groupings of windows varied from thin vertical strips to wide glass sheets. The exterior of the second floors was composed of mainly windows, which were recessed from the rest of the building. Each building featured a cantilevered slate roof design. Inside the buildings, cinder blocks and bricks were used for the walls. Floors were composed of polished slate, terrazzo, and linoleum tiles. All buildings had a simple layout, were cost-effective, and emphasized the horizontal.

Gosnold Hall concept painting
Painted for Forrest Colie and Associates and CNC
Courtesy of CNU OCPR

The academic buildings (Christopher Newport, Gosnold, & Wingfield) were all very similar to each other. Their roofs were dutch gables with a little curved flare towards the bottom of their overhanging rooflines. This flair and the roof’s separated massing from the rest of the building contributed to it resembling the rooflines of Asian pagoda buildings. The main variation between the academic buildings were their sizes. Newport and Wingfield Halls were each composed of one main rectangular building. Gosnold Hall had two main buildings joined together by covered walkways. Gosnold and Newport also featured two one-story square exterior pavilions, called blockhouses.[5] These were denoted with square cantilevered hipped roofs on top. The blockhouses were connected to the rest of their building via a breezeway.

Wingfield Hall c.1980's
Courtesy of the CNU Archives

Wingfield classroom, 2010-11

Wingfield Hallway, 2010-11

Wingfield staircase, 2010-11

2nd Floor corner classroom in Gosnold, 2011

The other three buildings of this Age were Ratcliffe Gym, the Captain John Smith Library, and the Campus Center. These all were mansard roofed structures, with unique building layouts to suit their specialized purposes. Ratcliffe was a single-story structure, with its square mansard roof devoted to creating extra height for its indoor gymnasium. It also featured an annex gym with a flat roof. Captain John Smith Library had a rectangular second floor bisecting the building in half. Attached to the side of the library was the one-story Smith Hall, where the administrative offices were located. The Campus Center featured three wings – a buffet cafeteria, a 400-seat theater with a thrust stage (the original Gaines Theater), and a square two-story main building with offices and lounge spaces. The offices were designed to be flexible so they could serve multiple different purposes.[6]

Captain John Smith Library & Smith Hall concept painting
Painted for Forrest Colie and Associates and CNC
Courtesy of CNU OCPR

Backside of the Captain John Smith Library
Courtesy of the CNU Archives

Buildings were small compared to the buildings of today’s campus. These were built for a junior college that only hit 2,000 student enrollments during the 1971-72 school year.

Ratcliffe Gym, courtesy of the CNU Archives

LANDSCAPING

The undeveloped Shoe Lane site was composed of grassy fields and woods. When the Age One buildings were constructed, they were mindful of preserving the site’s natural look. “Landscaping will consists [sic] of four basic categories under the terms of the master site plan,” The Times-Herald reported on the school in 1963, “These will include the keeping of the existing pine trees in place, keeping certain existing deciduous trees in place, transplanting pine trees primarily for landscaping parking areas and utilization of buffer trees composed of existing and transplanted pines and deciduous varieties at specific sites on the campus.”[7]

"A quiet place to study"
From CNC's 1968 Trident yearbook

Students walking towards Newport Hall
From CNC's 1966 Trident yearbook

Other than trees and grass, campus was described as “almost void of plants,” without any shrubs or flowers. In the early 1970’s, the Biology Club reached out to local garden clubs for plant donations to beautify campus. They also created a landscaping master plan, selecting plants that would grow well in the region, as well as ones that would be useful for the Horticulture students. The Horticulture Club took over the implementation of the plan, continuing to add plants to the grounds each year. During this time, “almost every plant under 15 feet tall was planted by either the members of the Biology or Horticulture Clubs,” said Dr. David Bankes, longtime professor of the Biology department.[8]

"You'd better like it here because we're not moving it again."
Members of the Biological Society planting a shrub
From CNC's 1971 Trident yearbook

Like most of the region, the land was fairly flat, which made it the perfect blank slate for any campus plan. This also led to certain areas having a tendency to flood easily. Reoccurring pools created from rain were given titles, such as Windsor Lake and Polis Pond (after President Windsor and Dean Polis). Students would sail toy boats and wade into the water, even ice-skate if it was cold enough. After a few hours, the pools would dry out, returning back to land.[9]

A major influence on the look and maintenance of the campus landscape was Mike Cazares, the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds from 1964 to 1975. Cazares was known as a jack-of-all-trades, able to repair anything on campus. He built many needed items throughout his tenure, including extra Smith Library bookshelves and Ratcliffe Gym’s first scoreboard. When laying out pathways for Gosnold, Cazares waited until the second or third week of school. By that time, he could see the worn-down grass paths students instinctively created moving from building to building, and follow them to lay the permanent concrete pathways. Pathways crisscrossed campus.[10]

Map of campus, from CNC's 1969 Trident yearbook
(Proposed Classroom site eventually became the site of the Administration Building)

Cazares’ most lasting impact on campus was designing and building CNC’s Greenhouse for the Biology Department. With the help of students and faculty, he constructed a brick, flat-roofed head house and a wooden-framed greenhouse with yellowish-green fiberglass panels.[11]

Greenhouse under construction
From CNC's 1972 Trident yearbook

NAMES

Buildings during this period were mainly named after the captains of the 1607 Jamestown Expedition. Only five of the seven captains’ names were used: Bartholomew Gosnold, Christopher Newport, Edward Wingfield, John Ratcliffe, and John Smith. The other two captains were John Martin and George Kendall. When the Campus Center’s name was being selected, there was a debate over what to name it. Captains Martin & Kendall both held notoriety that made naming the building after either of them undesirable. There was also a student petition to name the building after late history professor Robert Madison (Pat) Usry. Usry had been the first professor hired for CNC and had passed away from a heart attack in 1971. In the end, it was decided the building would be known simply as Campus Center and its board room would be named in honor of Usry.[12]

Concept painting of Campus Center
Painted for Forrest Colie and Associates and CNC
from the December 5, 1971 edition of The Captain's Log

EXTRAS

The total cost for all the buildings of this Age was $4.4 million.[13]

CNC buildings were all designed for air conditioning, but most of them were not initially built with it. Newport Hall’s computer center and one of Gosnold’s labs that held experiments that required consistent temperatures had air conditioning. While no air conditioning was not an issue in the wintertime, it mattered once CNC started offering summer classes. This was slowly rectified. Smith Library (1967) was the first building on campus built with air conditioning throughout. The first academic building with air conditioning throughout was Wingfield Hall (1970). All the other academic buildings finally received air conditioning between 1970 and 1972.[14]

Inside of Ratcliffe Gymnasium, c.1980's-1990's
Courtesy of Lou Serio

Prior to 2001, only some of the offices and rooms in Ratcliffe received air conditioning. The gyms and locker rooms did not, getting fresh air and cooling down from exhaust vents and fans. The vent openings were covered by concrete trapezoidal prisms on the first floor. The main gym's vent openings were in its flared mansard roof, giving its form a practical use. Birds would frequently fly into the roof through its openings.[15]

Except for the filing cabinets and bookcases, CNC’s original furniture was built by prisoners at the Richmond State Penitentiary. The State Penitentiary also provided the bricks used for the building exteriors.[16]

The audience from Gosnold’s dedication ceremony was not allowed into the building because the building was still being finished. Recalled CNC's first President H. Westcott Cunningham, “We were due to open school two days later, and at the time the dedication was going on, there were about thirty-five convicts, who were actually specialists and artisans who worked for the division of prison industries, in that building hooking up the labs, hooking up the gas jets and the water pipes and everything else. So obviously we did not parade through the building and inspect it that day.”[17]

The Campus Center was the first building on campus built with an elevator, thus could be entirely accessible for a person using a wheelchair. It’s worth mentioning all previous Age One buildings except Ratcliffe Gym had second floors, but even Ratcliffe had floor elevation changes necessitating stairs.[18]

For their design of Gosnold, Forrest Colie and Associates won a certificate of distinction in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ 1966 Virginia, Architects, Designers and Photographers Exhibition. This was the only certificate given for architecture that year. The judges included designer Edgar Kaufmann Jr., world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, and photographer Arthur d’Arazien.[19]

Gosnold Hall

Asbestos was used in construction for a long time due to its fire-resistant properties. It was eventually discovered that exposure to it caused certain forms of cancer. The EPA banned asbestos from schools in 1973 and from all new buildings in 1975. Asbestos was present in Age One buildings, but only in their boiler rooms. All public areas were free of it. Per a 1989 Captain’s Log article, the asbestos was slated to be removed “as soon as funds become available”.[20]

Some buildings’ placements were determined due to ground conditions. Wingfield’s original location (30 feet south of its final location) was not suitable because the ground would have required 70 foot pilings, costing an extra $40,000. Other buildings were determined by the landscape. For the Campus Center, Coile stated that “we actually surveyed every tree on the site, altered the shape of the buildings and made adjustments so as to save as many trees as possible. I’m confident we’ll save 90 per cent.”[21]

Men's Bathroom in Smith Library 
(Picture from 2011, this bathroom was demolished
during the Trible Library's 2018 renovation)

Next: CNU Architectural Ages: Age Two (1976 – 1996) 

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[1] Webb, Jane Carter, “1.8 D Interview Transcript: James C. Windsor,” SAIL - Smart Archiving for Institutional Learning, https://sail.cnu.edu/omeka/items/show/5564.
[2] Hamilton, Phillip, Serving the Old Dominion: A History of Christopher Newport University 1958-2011, First ed., University Press, 2011.
[3] Hamilton, Phillip, Serving the Old Dominion: A History of Christopher Newport University 1958-2011, First ed., University Press, 2011.
[4] N.a. “CNC center nearly ready,” The Times-Herald, 5 September 1973; N.a. “Work Is Starting On CNC Building,” Daily Press, 9 May 1969.
[5] N.a. “Second Step in a Ten Year Building Plan Now Underway,” The Captain’s Log, 16 December 1964.
[6] Holt, Jean “CNC Campus Center Plans Endorsed,” Daily Press, 12 August 1971.
[7] N.a. “Newport College Site Use Plans Get State Approval,” The Times-Herald, 13 June 1963.
[8] Edeburn, Melissa “Clubs plant birch in honor of Dean Polis, The Captain’s Log, 24 October 1978.
[9] Bauer, F. Samuel “Remembering Lake Windsor and Polis Pond,” Christopher Newport College First Decaders 1961 – 1971 (herein referred to as CNC First Decaders), n.d., http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/seconddecadehistory.html
[10] Blankenship, Dalton “Feedback RE: Mike Cazares Tribute series,” CNC First Decaders, http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/feedback.html; Chambers, A. Jane “Memories of CNC’s Super Superintendent: Mike Cazares,” CNC First Decaders, 7 March 2014, http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/firstdecadehistory.html.
[11] Chambers, A. Jane “Memories of CNC’s Super Superintendent: Mike Cazares,” CNC First Decaders, 7 March 2014, http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/firstdecadehistory.html
[12] Getchell, Halver “Name For Campus Center Expected.” Daily Press, 20 February 1973; Cones, Harold “Dr. E. Spencer Wise: Colleague, Mentor, Close Friend,” CNC First Decaders, 29 March 2013. http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/yourmemories.html
[13] Mangum, Marcia “Higher Enrollment Prompting Construction at CNC,” Daily Press, 11 June 1979.
[14] Hamilton, Phillip, Serving the Old Dominion: A History of Christopher Newport University 1958-2011, First ed., University Press, 2011; Chambers, Hubbard, Wood, Memories of Christopher Newport College the First Decade 1961 – 1971 in Words and Pictures, Hallmark Publishing Company, 2008.
[15] Serio, Lou, 18 January 2023, [tour of Ratcliffe].
[16] Chambers, A. Jane, “CNC’s First Shoe Lane Building: Christopher Newport Hall,” CNC First Decaders, 27 April 2018, http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/firstdecadehistory.html; Chambers, A. Jane, “Memories of CNC’s Super Superintendent: Mike Cazares,” CNC First Decaders, 7 March 2014, http://www.cncfirstdecaders6171.com/websitearchives/firstdecadehistory.html.
[17] University Archives Oral History Collection, “H. Westcott Cunningham Oral History,” Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/5463.
[18] N.a., “CNC center nearly ready,” The Times-Herald, 5 September 1973.
[19] Booth, Ed “Awards Announced In Museum Biennial,” Richmond Times-Dispatch. 2 February 1966; n.a. “Awards Is Given To Forrest Coile By Art Museum,” Daily Press, 28 February 1966.
[20] Delles, Keith “Asbestos at CNC limited to boiler rooms,” The Captain’s Log, 2 November 1989.
[21] Barnes, Myrtle “College Seeks Solid Spot,” The Times-Herald, 10 February 1969; N.a. “New Building Site Found By Newport,” The Times-Herald, 22 February 1969; Holt, Jean “CNC Campus Center Plans Endorsed,” Daily Press, 12 August 1971.