A Hands on Education
An innovative college in Charleston, S.C., teaches the forgotten arts of preservation
John Paul Huguley won't be happy that this article begins with him.
He'll tell you that it's the students at the American College of the Building Arts who are the real story. But he was the one who started the Charleston, S.C., school 12 years ago—the first in the country with a four-year program teaching trades that seem to have vanished from the modern world. Timber framing. Stone carving. Ironworking. An entire curriculum aimed at equipping a generation of students with the skills needed to preserve America's historic heritage.
Huguley, 39, is as much an entrepreneur as he is a preservationist. In 2000, he purchased Charleston's 1802 jail—a 22,000-square-foot facility that sat vacant for more than half a century and was threatened with demolition—and turned it into the centerpiece of a fledgling school. Not only do students today attend classes in the jail, where Union troops were held during the Civil War, they are also using what they learn to help restore this neglected vestige of Charleston's history.
Related:
ACBA wants to build a new campus on McLeod Plantation, a 38-acre site on St. James Island in Charleston, and a team of 17 students from the Preservation Studio at the University of Miami School of Architecture has proposed how the college could occupy the site. In the New Urbanist tradition of their school (led by dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk), the students' plan marries adaptive reuse with historically sensitive new construction and a mixed-use urban village.
I'd like to go back to school. If they'd let me in.
