University of Virginia | O'Hill Landscapes

For many first-years, UVA’s Alderman Road residence halls serve as their first experience of living away from family. The precinct was designed holistically to promote a sense of neighborhood, grounding the first-year experience in a series of concentric communities that respond to different scales of social identification: the room, the floor, the hall, the precinct, the University campus. While the precinct is only a ten-minute walk from Jefferson’s Academical Village, the historic core of campus, it offers many amenities and attractions making it functionally a self-contained campus-within-a-campus. The precinct’s landscape design provides different scales of gathering spaces from entry gardens and terraces at each hall to larger open spaces for localized recreation. A network of stormwater landscapes serves as sustainable, passive infrastructure for the precinct, collecting, storing and filtering runoff before it outlets into an adjacent stream or infiltrates into the soil. A particular achievement of the landscape design is the precinct’s accessible network of paths and communal spaces, which offers, in spite of dramatic topographic change, wheelchair access between the highest residence hall perched on Observatory Hill and low lying pedestrian connections back to the academic core.