The Buildings of Charleston: A Guide to the City’s Architecture by Jonathan Poston

Abstract

Book Review Association published This Is Charleston, one of the first comprehensive architectural surveys of a city in America. That guidebook consisted of exterior photographs of nearly six hundred structures that stood between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers at the southern end of the peninsula , noted their dates of construction, and ranked their relative architectural and historical significance. If its strength was the comprehensive catalogue of standing structures, its weaknesses emerged for those who wished to know something more than a date of construction . There were no plans detailing the arrangement of the typical single house and the service buildings arrayed along its back lot nor interior views depicting the range and degrees of ornamental elaboration. The absence ofany architectural analysis forced the persistent to look to more conventional monographs and portfolios of drawings produced by many of the guide's authors such as Albert Simons, Samuel Lapham, Beatrice Ravenel, and Samuel Stoney to find information about detailing, plans, and the architectural development of the city. Jonathan Poston, The Buildings ofCharleston: A Guide to the City's Anhitecture. Columbia: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1997. 714 pp; glossary, indices, 1,075 illustrations. $39.95 cloth. Jonathan Poston readily acknowledges the debt he owes to this earlier generation of Charleston historians and architects. The Buildings of Charleston: A Guide to the City 's ArchitecFor preservationists and architectural historians, Charleston, South Carolina, has long been seen as a ,,veilpreserved early southern city graced by many splendid colonial and antebellum buildings. Until the publication ofJonathan Poston's The Buildings of Charleston for the Historic Charleston Foundation, this specialized audience as well as an increasing number of visitors attracted by the city's genteel ambiance have had to rely upon the most cursory ofguidebooks to help them identify the staggering parade ofdwellings, public buildings, and commercial structures. In 1944 the Carolina Art 66 ARrus ture builds upon their work, but incorporates the research of recent scholars such as Bernie Herman, Bob Stockton, John Bivins, Ken Severens, Willie Graham , Maurie Mcinnis, Richard Marks, and Glenn Keyes who, among many more, have made the most of a rich cache of documentary sources and recent restorations to modify or overturn a number of traditional perspectives about the city's architectural development. Poston's achievement is the synthesis of so much information in a readable manner that rarely dulls and often sparkles with delightful insights. The book consists of a brief architectural overview with short essays on the city's iron- work byJohn Vlach, the single house by Bernie Herman, and burial grounds by the author. This introductory material is followed by a catalogue of956 entries accompanied by illustrations. Poston nicely blends modern and historical photographs, eighteenth-century plats, and measured drawings of plans and elevations to break up the tedium of an uninspired layout, which could have easily discouraged the casual browser. The inclusion of a number of plats and plans provides a spatial context for understanding the unusual way in which Charlestonians accommodated the conflicting demands for privacy , domestic economy, civic display, and commerce in a crowded city. Unlike its predecessor, which listed structures alphabetically by streets, this new guidebook divides the city into nine geographic areas. The catalogue opens with the "Walled City" and covers those buildings in the historic core where the town began in the late seventeenth century. This is followed by the "Civic Square," the area at the intersection of the two principal streetsBroad and Meeting Streets where the colonial statehouse , St. Michael's Church, and City Hall expressed the public aspirations of Charleston in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The third section is devoted to the eighteenth-century filling in of the city across the peninsula. The author next considers the "Lower Western Peninsula" along the Ashley River. The area had been bypassed for building in the earlier periods because much of it was marshlands. Filled and built upon in the late nineteenth century, the streets in this section of town contain dwellings that eschewed local design precedents for national styles common to most American cities of the period. A mixture ofQueen Anne mansions, Italianate commercial structures, and Colonial Revival dwellings built by Simons and Lapham, the lower western peninsula...