Grounds

A walk through Jefferson’s Academical Village.

…for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, 27 December 1820

Preparing the Grounds

An independent demonstration built from public sources. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Virginia.

What is sourced, what is a placeholder

An independent demonstration. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Virginia; tour text paraphrases the University’s public pages and links to them, and the official links on each stop open the University’s own sites.

What the visitor can do

Take the admission office’s own thirteen-stop walking tour from anywhere: the camera flies between stops and holds on each building, or the visitor walks it on foot with a light marking the way.
Hear each stop narrated by a recorded voice, in English or Spanish, or let the tour play itself; a link ending in #kiosk loops it on a screen at a college fair or in a lobby, and one ending in a stop’s name (for example #rotunda) opens there.
Follow each stop to the University’s own pages: schools, housing, the library, the memorial, visiting and applying.
Keep a postcard from every stop and see them together at the end of the tour.
Walk, bike, drive or fly anywhere on the mapped Grounds at four times of day, and read the sourced history behind places across the Grounds in the Codex.

This slice is built in feet. Anything on the sourced list traces to a published source or to OpenStreetMap. Everything on the placeholder list is schematic until real survey data is supplied.

Sourced

The Lawn is 192 feet wide, terraced in three tiers, with the Rotunda at the north end and ten pavilions along the sides (UVA Historic Structure Reports; The Cultural Landscape Foundation). OpenStreetMap measures the Lawn area at about 194 feet wide.
Pavilions are numbered I to X: odd on the west, even on the east, I and II nearest the Rotunda (UVA Historic Structure Reports). Each pavilion’s order follows Jefferson’s own drawing labels: I Doric, II Ionic, III Corinthian, IV Doric, V Ionic, VI Ionic, VII Doric, VIII Corinthian, IX Ionic, X Doric (UVA IATH drawing catalog; Clio; Encyclopedia Virginia).
The Rotunda is 77 feet in both diameter and height, half the Pantheon’s diameter, in native red brick (UVA IATH; Fletcher, Nexus Network Journal). The south portico has ten Corinthian capitals, the north portico six added by Stanford White; the south stairs came in 1832; the dome roof is copper painted white (Palladio Awards 2019; Berkel & Company; BD+C).
Pavilion I is Doric. II is Ionic after the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, with a high podium and four columns. V has a six-column Ionic portico spanning two stories. VII is Doric after Palladio, the oldest on the Lawn, with an arcaded first floor and a one-story portico above; it is the Colonnade Club. IX is small, with an exedra framed by two Ionic columns and two pilasters. X has slender Doric columns and a large parapet (Wikipedia, The Lawn; Bluffton University architecture notes; UVA Engagement; UVA IATH field methods).
The colonnades along the Lawn are Tuscan, of plastered brick with stone capitals, and the colonnade roofs carry a walkway for faculty (Wikipedia; UVA IATH; UVA Historic Structure Reports).
The south end was left open to the view south; Stanford White’s three buildings later closed it (The Cultural Landscape Foundation; Wikipedia).
All 38 Codex plaques: every date, name and number comes from the sources listed on that plaque, and facts the research could not verify were left out. Where sources disagreed (for example the Rotunda’s construction start, 1822 or 1823), the plaque says so.
From OpenStreetMap, pulled on 6 October 2026 through the Overpass API for latitude 38.0290 to 38.0445 and longitude −78.5140 to −78.4960: 1149 building footprints, 2418 street and path segments, 1138 mapped trees, 505 ground-cover areas (lawns, gardens, fields, parking), 260 walls, fences and hedges, benches, bike racks, and the names of buildings and shops, including the Corner. © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.
Materials and building types were matched to photographs: the YouVisit 360° tour of UVA, Historic American Buildings Survey photographs on Wikimedia Commons (the serpentine walls, the Ranges), and street photographs of the Corner, Newcomb Hall, Alderman Library and Rugby Road. Most of the Grounds is red brick in Flemish bond with white trim, white columned porticos and slate hip roofs. The University Chapel is rough-faced stone in Gothic Revival (UVA Library exhibit; SAH Archipedia). Memorial Gymnasium is red brick with classical ornament (Virginia DHR). The serpentine walls are ‘one brick thick’ and have no windows. The Ranges open onto round brick arcades. Beta Bridge carries Rugby Road over the C&O tracks (UVA Today).
Ground height, from the USGS 3D Elevation Program’s 1-metre lidar elevation model of Charlottesville (project VA ChesapeakeBaySouth 2015, flown November 2015 to March 2016), sampled on a grid every 0.0002° of latitude and 0.00025° of longitude (about 22 metres) through the USGS 3DEP elevation service. That is why the Rotunda stands above the plaza that falls to University Avenue, the East Range and its gardens lie 20 to 35 feet below the Lawn, and Scott Stadium and Lambeth Field sit in their real hollows. Buildings, streets, paths and trees take their height from it.
Scott Stadium and Lambeth Field. The stadium site, the field, the seating sections (with their numbers), Lambeth Field and the outline of its stands are OpenStreetMap shapes. Scott opened on 15 October 1931; its upper deck and the 500-level sections are drawn from the OpenStreetMap sections (Wikipedia; The Sabre). Lambeth’s curved stands with a tile-roofed colonnade on top and a small fieldhouse at each end follow the 1911–1913 description (UVA Today; The Sabre; Wikipedia).
Three landmarks are modelled one by one rather than from the generic profiles. Brooks Hall follows its National Register nomination (three storeys over a basement, three bays on the ends and six on the sides, paired windows under round arches, a stone band of scientists’ names, an arched entrance on granite columns, a dentilled cornice and a mansard with iron cresting). St. Paul’s Memorial Church follows photographs (a four-column portico under a pediment, a brick tower behind it rising to a white belfry and a green dome). Ezekiel’s Homer (1907) follows Clio’s description: Homer seated on a bench, his left hand on the head of a young guide, bronze on black marble, on the South Lawn.
Quest and journal text. The honor pledge (“I will not lie, cheat, or steal”, 1842), the societies’ founding years and marks, the Seven Society’s bells tolling in sevens every seven seconds and its letters left at Jefferson’s statue, the IMPs’ motto and the Aviator’s membership, the Raven Society keeping Poe’s room, the 54 Lawn rooms, the Corner restaurants’ dates, and Dr. Lambeth and the 1910 rules all come from the Codex entries and the sources listed on them.
Jefferson’s words on the title screen, in the Codex, in the journal and at the foot of this page are quoted exactly, with his own spelling and lower-case sentence openings, from the transcriptions on Founders Online (National Archives) and Monticello: to the Trustees of the Lottery for East Tennessee College, 6 May 1810; to John Adams, 10 June 1815; to William Roscoe, 27 December 1820; and his undated memorandum for the inscription on his gravestone.
The historical figures are costumed interpreters, as at a living-history museum. They speak only facts from the linked Codex entries, and the only direct quotation is Jefferson’s December 1820 letter (UVA, The Quotable University).
The Admission tour follows the thirteen stops of the Office of Undergraduate Admission’s Self-Guided Walking Tour (2023), in its order, and ends with the sheet’s “other areas of interest”. Each card paraphrases the sheet; where a card adds a fact it names the source: the 90-minute student-led tour starting at the front of Peabody Hall (the Office’s Visit page), Alderman Library reopening in January 2024 as the Edgar Shannon Library (UVA Library), and the memorial’s size and dedication date (Wikipedia; UVA Today, through the Codex). Hours, housing rules and tour times are as the 2023 sheet printed them. Where sources disagree on how many enslaved people labored at the University (the tour sheet says at least 5,000, the Codex entry more than 4,000 from Monticello), the card says so.
The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers stands at its published coordinates (38.035306 N, 78.5015 W), east of the Rotunda: a broken ring of granite about 80 feet across with a lower inner ring, completed in 2020 and dedicated on 10 April 2021 (Wikipedia; UVA Today).
Buildings that OpenStreetMap maps as multipolygons, among them Thornton Hall, James Monroe Hall, Shannon Library, the Barringer Wing and Alumni Hall, are drawn from their outer rings with their courtyards open.
The game is turned to the Lawn’s own axis. OpenStreetMap puts it at 203.04 degrees from true north, so the Lawn runs down toward the south-southwest. The map at top right therefore has the Lawn running down the page, and its N marks true north.
Where the pavilions stand along the Lawn (I and II about 90 to 95 feet from the Rotunda’s centre, IX and X about 620), where the Lawn ends, and where the six Hotels stand all come from OpenStreetMap footprints. OpenStreetMap’s Lawn area runs from 99 to 1022 feet from the Rotunda’s centre, which is longer than the 740 feet in the published figure. The game follows OpenStreetMap.

Placeholder for now

Heights of imported buildings. OpenStreetMap gives a storey count for 157 of the 1149 footprints; the game uses 12 feet per storey, and a default of 1 to 4 storeys by building type for the rest.
Facades and roofs. Building types (Georgian brick with porticos, mid-century brick, stone Gothic, storefronts) were chosen per building from photographs and descriptions. The details are generated: window patterns, porticos (placed on the face toward the nearest path), cupolas, hip-roof pitches, chimneys, awnings and their colours. The Chapel’s nave, transept and tower massing is read from its footprint, and its heights, spire and buttresses are placeholders. Which windows glow after dark is random.
The Lawn’s side walks, the lawn chairs, rocking chairs and woodpiles, and the planting in the ten gardens. The boxwood edging follows the mapped garden paths, but the beds, sundials, urns and fountains are decoration, not the Garden Club of Virginia’s restored layouts. The serpentine walls’ 7-foot height and coping are read from photographs.
Inferred paths. Sidewalks are added along streets where OpenStreetMap maps none, and a short walk joins each named building to its nearest path. These are not surveyed.
Pavilion VII as the Guides’ headquarters is a game conceit, not reality: Pavilion VII is the Colonnade Club. The room inside is schematic, styled after the Rotunda’s restored rooms. The historical figures’ positions are approximate, and Poe’s and Wilson’s room numbers are not located exactly. Corner signs hang at the OpenStreetMap shop points. The White Spot and Littlejohn’s markers are placed by street number.
Ground height simplifications. The lidar is read on a grid about 72 feet apart, so features narrower than that (the railroad cut under Beta Bridge, retaining walls, kerbs) are smoothed away. The Lawn’s terraces are drawn level at the lidar’s mean height for each (0, about −2.6 and −12.9 feet), though the third really slopes; the breaks sit between the pavilion pairs. Scott Stadium’s and Lambeth’s playing fields are levelled at their lidar height.
Stadium detail. Seats are a striped surface, not individual rows; the stands’ rake, the upper-deck slope, the perimeter wall and gate spacing, the colonnade’s column spacing (10 feet), height (13 feet) and roof are placeholders drawn to match photographs. The goalposts and yard lines follow the regulation field; the logos and paint are decoration.
Landmark detail. The heights of Brooks Hall, St. Paul’s and its tower, their trim and window sizes, the names on Brooks Hall’s band (drawn as lettering, not real names), and the pose and size of the Homer group are placeholders matched to photographs.
The game layer. Where the painted Zs, Sevens and IMP marks, the three ravens, the Corner stamps and the postcard viewpoints sit is a game decision, not a record of real marks. The Z and the Seven follow the published descriptions of their symbols; the IMP mark is drawn after the devil’s face on members’ rings, since its painted form is not described. The quests’ steps, the letters and the lit-up Lawn at the end are invented for play. The Lawn room you can unlock is schematic, not a particular room.
Street widths, by street class, unless OpenStreetMap gives a width. Wall heights (7 feet for garden walls, 4 for fences, 5 for hedges, 3 for retaining walls), and tree sizes, which are random within the 45 to 60-foot range the photographs show. About 900 to 1,500 trees beyond the 1,138 OpenStreetMap maps are planted to match the canopy in aerial photographs, along streets and around the edges of lawns; their positions are inferred, not surveyed. Foliage colours follow summer photographs with the first trees turning for early October. Leaf litter, tree shadows, birds and floating dust are decoration.
Overpasses. Where OpenStreetMap draws a building across a street (South Lawn’s span over Jefferson Park Avenue, the Health Sciences Library and the hospital’s skybridges), the part over the roadway is lifted to leave 16 feet of headroom. Two mapped shapes with no height that sit on a roadway are left out: an unnamed structure drawn where a street crosses a bridge, and a permit lot (E3) mapped as a building. The clearance, the deck depth and the flat roofs on the split parts are placeholders, not survey; where most of a building stands on one side (the President’s House over its drive) that side keeps its roof.
The memorial’s wall heights (8 feet outside, 2.6 inside), the width and bearing of its opening, the engraved-name texture and the granite’s tone are placeholders drawn after photographs; the names are not legible and are not real names.
The Admission tour’s viewpoints, camera flights and the buildings chosen to stand for a stop (the McCormick Road houses for First-Year Housing, Garrett Hall for the Batten School, the space between Shannon and Clemons for the Library) are game decisions, not part of the official tour.
Street lamps. OpenStreetMap lamp nodes were not pulled, so the lamps are spaced along the Lawn’s edge walks and the streets for the evening and night views.
The sun and moon. Their places in the sky are artistic, in the Lawn’s frame (morning in the east, afternoon and dusk to the west-southwest), not an ephemeris. The sky, clouds and stars are generated.
The Dome Room. The Rotunda’s interior is one schematic hall at the Rotunda’s scale; Jefferson’s Rotunda had three floors, and White’s rebuild two. The columns, bookcases, coffers, parquet, tables and chandelier are decoration; the plaques inside carry the sourced history.
The Ranges: massing between the Hotels, because OpenStreetMap does not map them as separate buildings. Pavilion fronts, columns and the colonnade rooms are hand-built at the OpenStreetMap positions. The back of each pavilion is its OpenStreetMap footprint at 24 feet. Old Cabell Hall is its footprint at 46 feet, with a hand-built portico. Pavilion IV, VI and VIII fronts are generic for their order.
Marker positions. Plaques on named OpenStreetMap places stand at those places. The markers for Poe’s room and the Corner are approximate, and the Poe marker does not locate room 13.
Student-room widths and counts; windows, doors, shutters, brick pattern and colours, chimneys and railings on the hand-built part.
People, traffic, weather and sound. The students walking the paths, the groups talking, the readers and frisbee games on the Lawn, the moving and parked cars and the buses are atmosphere: their numbers, routes, speeds and colours are invented. Cars follow the mapped streets, keep to the right, ease through junctions and stop for you, but there are no traffic lights. The crowd and traffic gather around wherever you are. The ambient sound is synthesized in your browser.
Surfaces and light. Every texture is drawn by the program, not photographed: brick, slate, paving and bark get relief from their own height maps, and window glass is glossy and mirrors the sky. The drifting cloud shadows, the haze that warms toward the sun, the mowing stripes on the Lawn, the shading inside tree crowns, the soft darkening where walls meet the ground and the soaring vultures are rendering choices for looks, not records of any particular day. So are the tree crown shapes and bark, the curtains and blinds in windows, the rooftop units on flat roofs, kerb heights, patched asphalt and parking-stall paint, the weathering streaks on walls, the dome's panel seams and step rings, and the far ranges of hills: plausible details, drawn by hand, not surveyed. On capable computers the picture also adds screen-space ambient occlusion, sun shafts through the trees and a field of grass blades on the Lawn (the occlusion and the shafts switch themselves off if the frame rate suffers), and the Corinthian leaves and volutes follow the classical type, not a measured drawing.
Sky and light. The sky, the colour and strength of the sun, the light the sky sheds on the buildings and the haze over distance all come from one model of sunlight scattered by air, haze and ozone, using the standard Earth coefficients from the computer-graphics literature (Bruneton and Neyret 2008; Hillaire 2020). The amount of haze, the allowance for light scattered more than once, the overall brightness and the sun’s height at each time of day are artistic choices, not a record of any day in Charlottesville. The picture is tone-mapped with AgX and graded for a photographic look.
Camera and lens. On capable computers, shadows soften with distance from what casts them, the eye adapts part of the way between shade and bright sky, and the tour’s camera uses a shallow depth of field and faint lens reflections. These are photographic effects, not data.
Rooms behind the windows. Windows show a room traced behind the glass: its depth, paint, floor, door or bookcase vary from window to window, and at night some rooms are lit. They are decoration; no building’s interior was surveyed.
Lights after dark. The nearest street lamps cast real light, and the Rotunda is washed by three floodlights. Their positions, colour and strength are artistic.
Tour postcards and narration. The tour keeps a frame from each stop for the album at the end; narration is a recorded neural voice: Kokoro-82M (open source, Apache-2.0), voices af_heart in English and ef_dora in Spanish, rendered offline from the same text as the cards (about six and seven minutes). The narrator is synthetic, not a University guide; where a recording cannot play, your device’s own speech voice reads instead. The official links open the University’s own pages.

Not built yet

Interiors other than the Dome Room, the guides’ room in Pavilion VII and one Lawn room; Scott Stadium’s concourses and press box; the parts of Charlottesville outside the pulled area. Shannon Library (formerly Alderman), Newcomb Hall and the rest of Central Grounds are real footprints dressed in the facade type their photographs show, not modeled building by building. The admission tour flies to them and describes them, but you cannot go inside.

Controls

Game tuning

Walking is 7 feet per second and the bike is 20; the roadster tops out near 45 mph and the helicopter near 75. All tuned for play, not measured. The helicopter and the roadster are game props: nothing like them is kept on the Lawn or the north plaza.

Graphics

High adds soft bloom, colour grading and 4x edge smoothing; Balanced skips them for phones. Keys: T time of day, C Codex, J journal, M sound.

Sources

Every Codex plaque lists its own sources, with links, at the foot of the plaque.

Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia

From Thomas Jefferson’s own memorandum for the inscription on his gravestone (Monticello)