Libraries Launch Digital Exhibit About Vol Walker, Architecture School

“Students studying, 1956.” From Fine Lines and Late Nights. Image Collection 1389.

“Architecture students at a drawing board.” University Relations Photographs

“Vol Walker Memorial Library Main Reading Room.” Image Collection 1388a.

Architecture students” Edgar A. Albin Papers (MC 623 Box 17 File 6 Image 29).

“Night view of Vol Walker Library ca. 1940.” (MC 634, Box 13, Image 22).

Photo Submitted

“Night view of the front (east) of the illuminated Vol Walker Library.” Austin-Vincenheller-Byroade Family Papers

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. –The University Libraries’ special collections has launched a digital exhibit, “Fine Lines and Late Nights”,  available online, that explores the converging histories of Vol Walker Hall and the Fay Jones School of Architecture. The digital exhibit coincides with a physical exhibit,   “The Most Beautiful Building in Arkansas: Vol Walker Memorial Library 1935-1968” celebrates Vol Walker as the University’s library, complete with original card catalog cards to the pneumatic tube carrier used to deliver book requests. The exhibit is on display through January 2014 located near the circulation desk in Mullins Library.

Both exhibits celebrate the completion of the Vol Walker Hall renovation and the addition of the Steven L. Anderson Design Center. These changes allowed the architecture, landscape architecture and interior design departments to be housed under the same roof for the first time.

Vol Walker Memorial Library opened in 1935 and was named after James Volney Walker, an early graduate of the university and a prominent Fayetteville attorney. The library was built with Federal Public Works Administration funding, and the imposing Classical Revival edifice with its Georgian front has occupied a central location on the changing campus ever since. The grand marble staircases, the hushed reserve room and the imposing reading room were central focus of students’ academic life until the completion of the Mullins Library in 1968.

Meanwhile, the department of architecture was founded in 1946, under the stewardship of John G. Williams. For most of its initial two decades, the department, and later the school, was housed primarily in the Edward Durell Stone-designed Fine Arts Center, a decidedly modern and unpretentious building. Despite the undeniable architectural contrast between their old home in Fine Arts and their new home in Vol Walker, architecture school faculty and students embraced the formidable building during the 1970s and made it their own, reinventing the spaces, extending the hours and, on occasion, sliding down the bronze bannister of the grand staircases.

The Libraries’ digital exhibit contains photographs, mostly informal, of the faculty and staff of the architecture school at work and at play. It includes the architect’s drawing of the Vol Walker Memorial Library from 1932, a photograph of its dedication in 1935 by Senator Joe. T. Robinson, and a formal portrait of its namesake, James Volney Walker. Pre-1962 images show Vol Walker in use as the university library. The photographs selected show studio design classes, visiting lecturers, project reviews and some student-built, large-scale models and projects on campus. The images represent students and faculty from the architecture, landscape architecture and interior design programs ranging in date from the 1950s to 2011. Photographs depict students dancing, soapbox racing, and one even shows an architecture student sliding down the bannister of the grand marble staircase, an image that appeared in the 1971 Razorback. The collection is available online through the Libraries’ website.

In addition, an exhibit titled “Fay Jones: An Homage” opens this week in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery, on the west side of Vol Walker Hall in the Steven L. Anderson Design Center addition. The show will feature selected photographs, primarily black and white, from the Fay Jones collection in the Arkansas Architectural Archives in Special Collections of University Libraries. The images represent private residential and religious institutional work spanning from 1955 through the 1980s. In addition, Marlon Blackwell Architect will display the scale model for the newly renovated Vol Walker Hall and the Steven L. Anderson Design Center addition.

This exhibit will be open after the Vol Walker dedication ceremony until 7 p.m. It will remain on display through the end of September. Additional information and hours are available by calling the Fay Jones School at 479-575-4945.