Over the last three years, students and professors from the School of Architecture have focused their talents and attention on imagining and shaping a more livable and beautiful Charlottesville community through the annual VORTEX Design Workshop. The previous week-long Design Workshops have focused on some of the region’s most hotly-debated issues and regions, including downtown’s Belmont Bridge, the Rivanna River and Route 29 North. This year more than 300 undergraduate and graduate students and 30 faculty members, along with Visiting Robertson Professor Sylvia Karrres of Karres and Brands of The Netherlands, focused on an issue closer to home, and essential to the future of the University – extending and strengthening U.Va.’s residential culture. The phrase, taken directly from the University’s Cornerstone Strategic Plan, is a call to action that encourages people to consider the effects of the University’s 150-year history of outsourcing student residential life after the first year. The phrase and the workshop were designed to make people reconsider Mr. Jefferson’s cherished notion of the Academical Village as a model for the 21st century to create new opportunities for more than a small percentage of students and faculty to experience a meaningful and shared residential life at U.Va.