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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 the 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 Mr. Stern’s design, Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Rybczynski tells the story of how Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Rybczynski approvingly calls “locatecture.”
Mr. Holt, a night owl, wasn’t yet ready at 10 a.m., so Mr. Rybczynski stopped for a coffee break at Brown’s Court Bakery, at 199 St. Philip Street. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. Holt welcomed Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Holt and Mr. 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.
Mr. Holt, wearing a ball cap, 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?”
Mr. Rybczynski said, “It’s amazing that it looks so nice in some ways. A frame building that burns looks terrible.”
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Holt and Mr. Rybczynski made plans to have dinner that night, and then Mr. 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 Street), was designed by the 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. 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 mind-set. It was: We don’t have a lot of resources, but we can still do something interesting.”
Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 & Provost Dungeon — which, for Mr. 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 Street.
Back outside after lunch, Mr. 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.
