Centennial Dome

Template:Wikify-date The Virginia Centennial Center, designed by Walter Dorwin Teague to serve as a focus for Virginia’s efforts to publicize Virginia’s Civil War history, is, ironically, one of the most modern structures ever built in Richmond. Built for the 1961 Civil War Centennial, it is now the Larrick Dining Center on the Medical College of Virginia campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. Along with pioneers like Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague and his father, also of the same name, spent the 20th century reinventing the basic industrial and consumer products, from the A.B. Dick Mimeograph to Cold War missiles like the Lark and Loki. He even built structures in the Soviet Union for the United States Information Agency. His firm’s Steinway Peace Piano, built for the 1939 World Fair, is at the Smithsonian. The firm’s design for the porcelain-clad Texaco station became an icon of post World War II America as much as their original Polaroid Land camera. Teague Associates’ product designs are in major museums around the world including the Wolfsonian and Cooper-Hewitt. In Virginia, Roanoke’s Art Museum of Western Virginia held an exhibition, sponsored by Norfolk Southern, that included the firm’s work.

Teague’s work at festivals and fairs was considerable; following the Civil War Centennial, Teague designed a handful of pavilions at the 1964 World’s Fair for companies like Ford Motor; the other famous design was their AMF monorail. The firm, which continues to this day, still does groundbreaking industrial design.

Teague died Sept. 26, 2004 at age 94. His obituary in The New York Times cited not only his designs, including the Marmot 16 automobile, but an item of interest to medical technology and VCU – the first fully reclining dental chair. Around the same time as his design for the Centennial dome, Teague won an award from the Industrial Designers Institute for that seemingly obvious idea for the chair, which allowed dentists to sit while working on patients.

The Centennial Center was part of a major national effort to commemorate the Civil War. Thematic issues surrounding the construction of the center including using the Civil War as a vehicle for rural land preservation, promoting tourism and healing the wounds of the Civil War across the U.S.

The hiring of Teague Associates for the centennial was a bold move for Richmond, which aimed to present itself as modern at the same time as it commemorated the Civil War. The construction began only a few years after the construction of the landmark modernist Reynolds Aluminum headquarters, listed on the National Register and recently renovated by Philip Morris. The Centennial effort was a time when Richmond attempted to be in the big league of design; the official hotel of the Civil War Centennial, the Hotel Richmond, hired the vanguard identity and branding firm Lippincott and Marguiles to design their restaurant.

The decision to hire Teague was encouraged by Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director Leslie Cheek, a proponent of modern design. Cheek, in his biography by Parke Rouse, felt that the structure was "useful, functional and quite handsome." However, the design caused controversy; one councilman called it a "grapefruit turned upside down over a doughnut."