Historic Preservation Research : Find Background Info

Offering the present-day traveller a portable, street-by-street guide to the town of Charleston, this illustrated book focuses primarily on the architecture of this preserved cityscape. The guide divides the city into nine geographic areas, with an introductory essay, maps, and illustrations.

The first architect trained in America, Robert Mills is best known as the designer of many iconic buildings in our nation's capital: the Washington Monument, the Department of Treasury headquarters, the Patent Office Building (now National Portrait Gallery), and the Post Office Headquarters. Author John Bryan weaves the history of Mills's architectural designs and engineering inventions together with the lives of the individuals who most influenced him, and shows how he can rightly be called our founding father of architecture.

A beautiful book on the architecture of the famous Port City.

Charleston Gardens and the Landscape Legacy of Loutrel Briggs provides a fascinating account of the life and career of renowned landscape architect Loutrel Briggs (1893-1977), the individual most directly responsible for the development of Charleston's distinctive garden style.

This book is about how a consistently high standard of excellence was achieved in Charleston architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Regardless of what style Charleston's architects used—Greek or Roman, Gothic or Renaissance, Adamesque or Greek Revival—they were in agreement about what constituted excellence. Special emphasis is placed on the knowledge that was required to create Charleston's early architecture. An introduction discusses the writings and buildings of Andrea Palladio, Robert Adam, A. Welby Pugin, and other influential architects. Sources of inspiration for Charleston buildings have included specific buildings in Greece, Italy, England, France and Germany. Whenever possible, primary sources of information were used to determine how various types of Charleston buildings were designed and constructed. A dozen of the city's best-documented buildings are considered in detail as a basis for comparison:

This collection of images from the Historic American Buildings Survey, an effort to catalogue and document the architecture and building culture of America, captures the holiness and haunting beauty of over fifty sacred grounds in South Carolina. Through his selection of these photographs, William P. Baldwin attests to the awe that each site inspires and proves that ?as they evoke that better, that sober and gentler angel of ourselves, they are indeed sacred places.'