Steven Kurutz

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Witold Rybczynski, an architecture critic, author and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, was sitting in the lobby of a chain hotel here, trying to peg the elusive charm of this city. After all, as Rybczynski wrote in his new book, “Charleston Fancy” (Yale University Press), the city of 130,000 people has no world-famous buildings, no grand boulevards and few public squares of any attractiveness. And yet, nearly 7.2 million tourists visited last year.

“I think a big part of it is this preserved Colonial town,” Rybczynski said, noting that after the Civil War, Charleston and its beautiful old houses and buildings “just kind of went into mothballs.”

Later, the historic downtown was saved from the worst of urban renewal and real-estate speculation because Charlestonians were very conservative, Rybczynski said, and because the history of the city and the history of families is all mixed together.

“Saving an old building was really saving your family’s old building,” he said. “That’s why they were the first city to become aware of historic preservation and to have zoning based on history.”

But as Rybczynski, 76, stepped into the bright July sun wearing khaki pants and sensible walking shoes to lead a reporter on an architectural tour of Charleston, his first stop was a brand-new building designed by modern-day Manhattan architect Robert A.M. Stern.

Courier Square (Columbus and Meeting Streets) is a massive complex of residential lofts made to resemble an old brick factory, with an adjoining five-story office building made of white stucco and stone. It’s the sort of “luxury” development offering $2,000-per-month studios in a gentrifying neighborhood that would be very familiar to New Yorkers, but to some Charlestonians, its presence raises concerns about what will become of their city.

The building seemed to want to scream — this is the new Charleston!

Standing across the street, critiquing Stern’s design, Rybczynski said, “This has some character. He’s tried to reflect the local architecture. He’s made it look like two buildings just to get the mass down.”

But, he added, “it’s still an awfully big building. The scale of it is not Charleston.”

Rybczynski’s next stop was more representative. He walked a short distance to the Cannonborough neighborhood, to visit his friend George Holt, who also happens to be the hero of “Charleston Fancy.”

Rybczynski tells the story of how Holt and a group of amateur builders and developers, including an Air Force pilot and a bookstore manager, banded together beginning in the 1980s to buy, rehab and build houses in what was then a down-at-the-heels part of the city. In time, Holt and his friends came to redevelop much of a city block, and to stuff it with more than a dozen houses they rented or sold, an approach Rybczynski approvingly calls “locatecture.”

Holt, a night owl, wasn’t yet ready at 10 a.m., so Rybczynski stopped for a coffee break at Brown’s Court Bakery, at 199 St. Philip St. The cafe is in a converted single house, an architectural style wholly unique to Charleston.

Single houses are long, two-story houses with porches on one side, so instead of having front gardens, they have side gardens. They derive their name from the layout of the living quarters, which are a single room wide. It was Rybczynski’s curiosity about single houses that led him and his wife, Shirley Hallam, to visit Charleston for the first time back in the 1970s, road-tripping down from Canada, where he lived and taught at the time.

“Even in other South Carolina cities you don’t have it,” Rybczynski said. “It’s a kind of a mystery. Nobody is sure where it came from; nobody has copied it. It’s not like a ranch house that spread all over California.”

Now alert, Holt welcomed Rybczynski and a reporter to his little patch of the city, at Tully Alley and St. Philip Street, a “mixture of imagination and risk-taking and weirdness,” in Rybczynski’s description.

Several of the Tully Alley homes are less than 1,200 square feet, and one of them is remarkable in its setting — the Byzantine house that Holt built for himself in 1998 because he was so moved by seeing the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. It has an atrium swimming pool surrounded by an arched colonnade, a domed living room anchored by a fireplace, and floors made of marble that Holt rescued from the trash when a store downtown was being renovated.

Or, rather, had, because in 2015 the house was destroyed in a fire. Holt and Rybczynski now stood in what had been the domed living area, the roof open to the sky, the pool water murky, vines growing everywhere. The whole thing looked like an ancient Mediterranean ruin.

Holt, wearing a ballcap, noted how the deep colors of the walls weren’t part of the original house; the heat of the fire had made them.

“I want to keep all these reds,” when I rebuild, he said. “I know it sounds dumb. But the house burned. Why pretend it didn’t?”

Rybczynski said, “It’s amazing that it looks so nice in some ways. A frame building that burns looks terrible.”

Holt doubted he could create something like Tully Ally in the Charleston of today. It was a looser time. “So many houses were ruined then. Some were vacant,” he said. “We had far fewer city employees and a more relaxed attitude. Back when we did this, expensive engineering wasn’t required to build.”

Holt and Rybczynski made plans to have dinner that night, and then Rybczynski was off to his next stop — a civic building across town that “represents the end of classical architecture in this country,” he said.

The gymnasium at the College of Charleston, now part of the Silcox Center (24 George St.), was designed by architect Albert Simons and built in 1938, during the latter years of the Depression. It’s a square, handsome municipal building made of what looks like pinkish granite.

“It’s not stone,” Rybczynski corrected. “It’s built with brick, plastered and then inscribed with lines,” to make it appear like expensive stone blocks.

As he stood admiring the simplified yet elegant design, Rybczynski seemed to mourn an entire approach to building that had vanished in the decades since.

“Now, when we don’t have much money, we build a cheap piece of crap,” he said. “This was a different mindset. It was: We don’t have a lot of resources, but we can still do something interesting.”

Rybczynski’s last stops were in a neighborhood where many visitors begin: the Charleston Historic District. Other American cities have their history too, but here, there’s not a modern glass tower, not an ugly concrete parking garage, to ruin the transporting effect. Just block after block of preserved 18th- and 19th-century buildings and gorgeous tree-lined streets of Antebellum mansions and Federal and single houses.

“The big insight that Charleston people had was that it wasn’t about saving buildings,” Rybczynski said. “It was about saving neighborhoods and streets.”

Among the treasures were two more municipal buildings built in the classical style — Charleston City Hall and the Old Exchange &amp; Provost Dungeon — which, for Rybczynski, illustrated how “classicism is like an amplifier — you turn it up or down.”

By now, it was afternoon, and hot. It was time to rehydrate inside Millers All Day, a modern take on a Southern diner at 120 King St.

Back outside after lunch, Rybczynski headed down nearby Legare Street, in one of those neighborhoods lined with painstakingly and breathtakingly restored old homes and even grander estates.

The streets were virtually empty on this afternoon, a reminder that Charleston’s social life has traditionally been more internal than other cities, hidden behind walls, gates or landscaped hedges. In the Colonial era, this was a consequence of slavery, Rybczynski said. Charleston was the fourth-largest city in America, but fully half of its citizens were enslaved, and the slaveholders were fearful of a revolt.

In “Charleston Fancy,” Rybczynski quotes Frederick Law Olmsted, who visited the city in 1853 as a journalist and observed how its black citizens were “subject to arrest, imprisonment and barbarous punishment” if found on the street after a certain time of day.

Today, the streets felt deserted because many of these showcase homes have wealthy absentee owners who visit intermittently. Indeed, the only people Rybczynski encountered were landscapers and tradespeople engaged in the endless primping of these architectural beauties. Walking around, he seemed a little lost.

“I must confess I prefer the other neighborhood,” Rybczynski admitted. “These are beautiful. But I like the funkiness of George’s neighborhood, where people are trying things.”

He was happy to turn around and head back uptown.

This article originally appeared in

(Tour)

The Newish Charleston

The idea captured people’s imagination. Time magazine named Plus Pool one of the 25 best inventions of 2013. It became a minor obsession of the real estate and urban design blog Curbed.com. A Kickstarter campaign that year raised over $273,000 from more than 3,000 backers for the designers to test water filtration materials.

But nine years after it was first conceived, Plus Pool remains an intriguing idea with no firm date to be constructed or opened.

“It’s been incredibly difficult, painful and exhausting,” said Archie Lee Coates IV, a partner at the New York-based design firm Playlab and one of Plus Pool’s masterminds, of the process to make it a reality.

Plus Pool grew out of a 2010 brainstorming session between Coates and his design partner, Jeff Franklin, and their friends, Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stanescu, who at the time ran another design firm, Family New York. They lamented that New Yorkers are surrounded by water but live largely cut off from it.

“We suggested Plus Pool as a lark,” Coates said. “We had no idea about water quality, about how public parks were built, maintained and functioned.” (Perhaps he did not remember the famous scene in “Manhattan” when Woody Allen trails his hand in the water during a romantic boat ride and it comes out filthy.)

While Plus Pool may still be little more than a computer rendering, this past week its founders unveiled a sculpture in the East River, titled “Plus Pool Light.” The sculpture, funded by the National Endowment of the Arts, Heineken and the Howard Hughes Corp., will float for three months off Pier 17 in Manhattan’s Seaport District.

Made of aluminum and PVC and one-fourth the size of Plus Pool, the sculpture will change colors based on water conditions and animate based on other conditions, such as current direction and clarity. Teal means it’s safe to swim, pink means watch out for the sewage. The animating lights use data from sensors at the site and an algorithm developed by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“It’s about having people look at something beautiful and coming here if they want to learn more,” said Coates, looking out at the sculpture with Franklin one night earlier this week.

The saga of Plus Pool in many ways illustrates the difficulty of getting public design projects of any scale off the ground, given the prohibitive costs and red tape. It took more than a year working with the city simply to erect the sculpture. To build Plus Pool, the design team estimates a cost of $25 million, to be raised through a public-private partnership.

The project Plus Pool is most often compared to, the High Line, was officially conceived in 1999, and just completed its final leg this past June, 20 years later. Joshua David, a co-founder of Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit behind the elevated park, is on the board of Friends of Plus Pool (also a nonprofit) and believes it will “absolutely” happen.

“These are incredibly complex projects,” David said, adding that such creative reimagining of urban space “depends on political will. The speed at which you build that will can vary.”

Unlike the High Line, however, Plus Pool was conceived in the age of social media, which brought the project and its founders public attention before they were ready. “In 2011, people were going to the office address on our website thinking there was a pool there,” Coates recalled.

For the first several years, the team behind Plus Pool, with help from the engineering firm Arup and Columbia University scientists, tested water filtration systems to prove the idea was even feasible (they have filed patents for the filtration system itself and the hull of Plus Pool).

But the tide may be turning, so to speak. Last month, the city’s Economic Development Corp. issued a notice asking for proposals to be submitted by Nov. 1 for a floating self-filtering pool very much like the Plus Pool concept. The city said it was responding to interest from the community.

There was a time, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when New Yorkers enjoyed free public floating baths on the Hudson and East rivers, an activity that ended when the Parks Department closed the last bathhouses, around 1940, because of the increasingly polluted water. In several modern cities, the waterways have already been reclaimed for swimming, most notably on the Seine in Paris, which opened public pools in 2017.

Coates and his colleagues no longer give a completion date for Plus Pool. But, nine years in, they have not lost their enthusiasm to make a reality what they dreamed up on a whim.

“There’s no other option than to keep going,” Coates said.

New Yorkers Will Have to Wait for an East River Pool

NEW YORK — In 2011, media outlets began heralding a fantastical urban design project to be built in New York. A group of young designers and architects had dreamed up plans for a floating, self-filtering swimming pool on the East River, allowing New Yorkers to swim legally and safely in the polluted waterway for the first time in 70 years. The pool would be roughly Olympic size (164 by 164 feet) and shaped like a giant plus sign. It would be named Plus Pool, rendered as +POOL.

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Pulse Ghana is the most followed news and entertainment platform, informing and engaging young Ghanaians round the clock, providing updates by the hour.

Steven Kurutz

Articles written by the author

The Newish Charleston

New Yorkers Will Have to Wait for an East River Pool