HPCP 199: Introduction to 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. Mills, whose career spanned the period 1810 to 1855, was a colleague of James Hoban, architect of the White House, and Thomas Jefferson, designer of Monticello and the University of Virginia. He trained with Benjamin Henry Latrobe, designer of the Virginia State Capitol and the Bank of Pennsylvania. With this circle of friends, Mills was instrumental in creating the physical design of the new republic. Robert Mills: America's First Architect 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. Author John Bryan, a best-selling historian and wonderful storyteller, 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. Accomplished landscape architect and award-winning garden historian James R. Cothran provides the most complete portrait to date of Briggs, his continuing impact on the iconic gardens of Charleston, and his legacy in the complex historical tapestry of the lowcountry. 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 completed an impressive array of private and public landscape projects, including Mepkin, McLeod, Mulberry, and Rice Hope plantations; Charleston's Gateway Walk; the William Gibbes house garden; and the South Carolina Memorial Garden, but he is best known for his designs of many small Charleston gardens. He is credited with designing more than one hundred private gardens in Charleston's historic district alone. In these plans Briggs drew on his remarkable sense of scale, harmony, and tradition to work wonders in limited urban spaces. Featuring a distinctive emphasis on "outdoor rooms," some of these gardens survive today while others have been lost over time to natural causes, redesign, or neglect. Today Charleston is in danger of losing one of its most enviable but fragile assets--its legacy of Briggs' gardens. Cothran's comprehensive work champions a renewed appreciation of the contributions Briggs made to Charleston's landscape tradition and serves as a timely call to action to preserve Briggs' gardens and legacy. The book also provides an inventory of Briggs' projects found in Charleston archives as a resource for further research, exploration, and documentation.

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.'