MSHP 8090: Research Methods in Historic Preservation: Published Resources

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. This book is the first complete monograph on this pivotal architect--beautifully illustrated with never-before-published watercolors and renderings and new color photography commissioned for the book.

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. A native of New York and a graduate of Cornell University, Briggs first visited Charleston in 1927 to experience firsthand the city's incomparable springtime beauty and picturesque charm. He opened a seasonal office in Charleston in 1929 and for the next three decades divided his practice between his summer office in New York and his winter office in Charleston. Briggs became a permanent resident of Charleston in 1959. Briggs is credited with designing more than one hundred private gardens in Charleston's historic district alone.

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.'

The signs are there: our coastal cities are increasingly susceptible to flooding as the climate changes. Charleston, South Carolina, is no exception, and is one of the American cities most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Lowcountry at High Tide is the first book to deal with the topographic evolution of Charleston, its history of flooding from the seventeenth century to the present, and the efforts made to keep its populace high and dry, as well as safe and healthy. For centuries residents have made many attempts, both public and private, to manipulate the landscape of the low-lying peninsula on which Charleston sits, surrounded by wetlands, to maximize drainage, and thus buildable land and to facilitate sanitation. Christina Butler uses three hundred years of archival records to show not only the alterations to the landscape past and present, but also the impact those efforts have had on the residents at various socio-economic levels throughout its history. Wide-ranging and thorough, Lowcountry at High Tide goes beyond the documentation of reclamation and filling and offers a look into the life and the history of Charleston and how its people have been affected by its unique environment, as well as examining the responses of the city over time to the needs of the populace. Butler considers interdisciplinary topics from engineering to public health, infrastructure to class struggle, and urban planning to civic responsibility in a study that is not only invaluable to the people of Charleston, but for any coastal city grappling with environmental change.Illustrated with historical maps, plats, and photographs and organized chronologically and thematically within chapters, Lowcountry at High Tide offers a unique look at how Charleston has kept--and may continue to keep--the ocean at bay.