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W.G. Clark to design Clemson’s Charleston Architecture Center
By Sarah G. McC. Moise
Staff Writer
W.G. Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia, has been selected to design the future home of the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, an optimistic first step for a city where there is seldom common ground for communication between those diametrically in favor of or opposed to modern architecture.
Downtown Charleston has not had many opportunities to host design competitions on the scale of the Clemson Architecture Center. From 40 national and global applicants, four U.S. firms and one from Spain were selected to submit concept drawings and design options for the project. W.G. Clark Associates was chosen from an international field to design the $7 million project.
The five finalists’ proposals were the start of a design dialog, not intended to represent the final design. Now that the jury has chosen the winning team, the architects will meet with professors, Clemson representatives, the community and the city to begin the design process. The new home for the center will be constructed on George Street in a parking lot across from the headquarters of Spoleto Festival USA.
Robert Miller, director of the Charleston Architecture Center says, “Clark lived and practiced here for 20 years. He knows the community and climate, and the traditions and history of the city. His numerous national design awards indicate that the design community really respects this man’s work and what he’s about.”
Clark has designed the Middleton Inn, Croffead House and Reid House, all three of which earned him National Design Awards from the American Institute of Architects. After beginning his architecture career in Charleston in 1974, Clark now teaches at the University of Virginia and has a private firm in Charlottesville, Va.
Miller says he strongly believes that as a teacher of architecture, Clark is in a better position to understand what goes on in an architecture school and understand how much influence a building has on students.
“W.G.’s project is a very thoughtful and considerate response to the rigors of designing an architectural building—traditionally a very difficult building type—as well as a thoughtful response to building in Charleston,” adds Ray Huff, a professor of graduate design at the Clemson University School of Architecture at Charleston program and a principal of Huff and Gooden Architects.
He compares designing an architectural school to a surgeon designing an operating room for other surgeons. “The client is an authority on design, and everyone has an opinion. Because it’s an architectural school, and because of the architects’ relations to building, there is an opportunity and an obligation to do something extraordinary.”
The Civic Design Center has a strong working relationship with the architecture students, including internships, programmatic issues and the civic team’s teaching and studio work on urban design projects with the students. Michael Maher, director of the City of Charleston Civic Design Center, has been involved in the competition throughout the process, since the government office will share collaborative space with the center in the future.
“It is an institutional building, and the program for the building necessitates a large amount of square footage for the site. But Clark’s strategy of breaking the building into two pieces is both a good transition from the scale of Meeting Street to the scale of the neighborhood and helps fit the building into that site,” says Maher.
He particularly appreciates how Clark’s presentation showed how the orientation of this building respects the neighbors’ privacy and garden space.
“The sequence Clark uses in entering building is developed from the experience of a Charleston single home—you go through a certain procession, from the street to the piazza to the garden before you walk into the house,” explains Maher.
Sarah Moïse is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at smoise@crbj.com
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