Jefferson did not call the place a campus. He called it an Academical Village, and the name still describes what he built: a community where students and professors lived together, where teaching happened in the same buildings as sleeping and eating, and where the architecture itself was supposed to teach. Ten Pavilions flank the Lawn, each rendered in a different classical style so that a student walking from end to end could read a survey of Western architecture. Behind the Pavilions sit walled gardens divided by serpentine brick walls - one brick thick, but strong because they wave back and forth in a sinusoidal curve. The Rotunda anchors the north end, half the height and width of the Pantheon in Rome. The south end Jefferson left open, looking out across cultivated land toward the mountains. The view to a Virginia of farms was the point.

After Echols's dynamite failed, the university hired Stanford White, the celebrity architect of the era, to rebuild. White did more than rebuild. He redesigned the Rotunda interior with two floors instead of three, added three new buildings to close off the south end of the Lawn, and erased Jefferson's open view of the countryside. For eight decades the Rotunda was White's Rotunda, not Jefferson's. Then in 1976, in concert with the Bicentennial, the university tore out White's changes and rebuilt the original three-story interior from Jefferson's sketches and historical photographs. The restored Rotunda opened on April 13, 1976 - Jefferson's birthday. Queen Elizabeth II walked the Lawn that year. The buildings White added at the south end still stand. The view to the mountains is still closed. The argument, in brick, continues.

Most universities of the period built around a chapel. Jefferson built around a library. The Rotunda's original purpose was to house the books, and Jefferson personally selected the founding collection and devised its catalog. The Rotunda served as the main library for over a century, until Alderman Library opened in 1937. In 2024 Alderman was renamed Shannon Library, after Edgar F. Shannon Jr., the university's fourth president. The system now holds more than five million volumes across roughly a dozen libraries. Shannon's stacks rise ten floors and shelter what is reportedly the most extensive Tibetan collection in the world. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library holds two copies of the Dunlap Broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence - the document Jefferson drafted, in the building he designed, on the grounds he laid out.

Fifty-four fourth-year undergraduates live on the Lawn each year, in single rooms tucked between the Pavilions. Ten faculty members live permanently in the Pavilions themselves, teaching where they sleep. The rooms have fireplaces. They do not have plumbing - residents walk to bathhouses, even in winter. The honor of a Lawn room is one of the university's oldest and most coveted traditions. Far from the historic core, the architecture argument continues in modern brick and glass. Williams Tsien's postmodern Hereford College opened in 1992. The Darden School of Business opened in 1996, dressed in unapologetic Jeffersonian red brick and white columns. The university kept building both ways. In 2001 billionaire John Kluge gave the school 7,379 acres south of town, including the 2,913-acre Morven Farm. Five Kluge farms were sold to the musician Dave Matthews for an organic project supporting his nearby Blenheim Vineyards.

Seen from the air, the Lawn is a long green rectangle running roughly north to south, with the white drum of the Rotunda at its head. The ten Pavilions step down the sides like punctuation. Beyond them, the serpentine walls curl through the gardens in shallow waves. The university now sprawls well past Jefferson's original lines - dormitories, hospitals, research parks, a stadium - but the Academical Village remains legible from above, distinct from the modern campus around it. UNESCO recognized it as a World Heritage Site in 1987, paired with Monticello a few miles to the southeast. It was the first World Heritage Site dedicated to collegiate architecture anywhere in the world.