A walk into New Cabell Hall is like a trip back in time. Passing through its worn wooden doors one is returned to an era when asbestos was acknowledged as an excellent insulator, students sat in perfectly straight rows of wooden desks bolted to the floor and the University's obsession with cutting costs on building projects led to architecturally uninspired buildings.
New Cabell Hall has not undergone a major renovation since its doors opened over 50 years ago in 1952 as an annex to famous architect Stanford White's Old Cabell Hall, completed in 1896.
Ironically, New Cabell, with its plethora of distinctively un-Jeffersonian architectural traits, was designed by the architectural firm Eggers and Higgins, the same firm responsible for the completion of the design for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., Architectural History Prof. Richard Guy Wilson said. Among its architectural pitfalls, of which Thomas Jefferson probably would not have approved, are a factory-like North facade consisting of glass block windows and drab interior cinderblock walls.
The same firm also designed the McCormick Road dormitories and Newcomb Hall.
Wilson said New Cabell's weak design, which he described as "gargantuan colonial revival," likely was spawned from architects not especially interested in their work.
"These were a group of probably elderly architects and it was just get the job done
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