Enduring Places: Repairing the Fabric of a City: The Charleston Gaillard Center

with Michael T. Maher, Steve Knight, and Nathaniel Robert Walker

In November 2023, the ICAA hosted the national conference Enduring Places. For three days, 225 participants from around the country gathered in Charleston, South Carolina and engaged in a robust program of talks, panel discussions, working sessions, and tours focused on three themes: craftsmanship, preservation, and sustainability.

Construction of Charleston’s Gaillard Center began in the year 2012 and was complete by 2015. Designed by David M. Schwarz Architects of Washington, DC, this was an exceptionally complex project—combining a concert hall and large meeting rooms with municipal government offices, the massive structure rehabilitated an existing performance and convention center that had been unsympathetically dropped on an historic neighborhood in 1968. The new Gaillard Center brought healing to the fabric of Charleston by achieving several goals: softening the building’s impact on surrounding streets and open spaces, achieving a civic nobility of character, and adopting an eloquent ornamental program that valorizes the rich, diverse history of the site and the city at large. Beloved by the city’s citizens, the Gaillard Center has proven to be a beating heart of art and politics in Charleston, serving the public in ways that were even greater than initially imagined.

From April to June 2024, the ICAA will be releasing all of the recordings from Enduring Places. Parts I - VIII are available now. Sign up for the ICAA's biweekly newsletter, World of Classicism, to be notified when other installments are released in the coming weeks.

Michael T. Maher is the CEO of the WestEdge Foundation, Inc, the redevelopment entity that is building the WestEdge District. He is also an award-winning architect, city planner and educator. His leadership is bringing to reality the WestEdge District, Charleston’s 21st century commitment to progress and innovation in the art of making a vibrant and diverse city. With the completion of WestEdge’s first phase, the transformation has begun: $450M in private investment, $20M in new public infrastructure, a community anchor that has attracted new jobs, new residents and a new vitality to the west side of the Charleston peninsula. Prior to his role leading the redevelopment efforts for WestEdge, Michael was the founding Director of the Charleston Civic Design Center and lead representative for the City of Charleston on the Gaillard Center Arts Precinct. His professional and academic work has been widely published and exhibited in the United States, and he has lectured on his work and teaching in the U.S. and Europe. Mr. Maher, a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, received his Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and his Master of Architecture from Rice University.

Steve Knight is a Principal with David M. Schwarz Architects, Inc. He served as Project Architect for the design of Schermerhorn Symphony Center, The Palladium at the Center for the Performing Arts, the Gaillard Center, and most recently an 8,000-seat amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama. He is currently leading the office’s team on the design of a neighborhood center for Chevy Chase Lake in Maryland and the multi-phase Residential College project at Vanderbilt University.

Nathaniel Robert Walker is an Associate Professor of Architectural History in the School of Architecture & Planning at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. After earning his Ph.D. at Brown University, he taught at the College of Charleston for eight years. Nathaniel specializes in the history of urban form, public buildings, and shared spaces such as squares and streets, with a special focus on the ways in which people have used architecture to imagine and shape their dreams of a better world.

He wrote Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon and co-edited Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment with Elizabeth Darling. He has also published several chapters and essays in journals such as Buildings and Landscapes, Utopian Studies, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Arris. Nathaniel’s most recent project is Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions, co-edited with Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann; it offers Atlantic World case studies of how the legacies of slavery were woven into buildings, urbanism, and landscapes, and have then been either brought to light or hidden in the shadows.

Sponsors

The ICAA is very grateful to John F.W. Rogers for generously making this program possible along with our supporters:

Classical American Homes Preservation Trust

Historic Charleston Foundation

Oliveri Millworks

Traditional Building

Schafer Buccellato Architects

CONTRIBUTING SPONSORS

A Classical Studio, Inc.

Benedictine College

Gaston & Wyatt

Goodwin Classic Homes

Jared Goss

Historical Concepts

ICAA Northern California Chapter

Leeds Custom Design and Seabreeze Building

Anne Kriken Mann

John B. Murray & Elizabeth Brooke Murray

Poggenpohl

Reis Contracting

Skurman Architects

Peter J. Talty

Tucker & Marks

The Urban Electric Co.

Vallette & Russell Windham

LECTURE SPONSORS

Ankie & Fran Barnes

Stan Dixon

Marsha & David Dowler

Barbara Eberlein

Kirk Henckels

Jeff Allen Landscape Architecture, LLC

Anne Lazar

Marmi Stone

Suzanne R. Santry

Tammy Connor Interior Design

Urban Design Associates

Whitlock Builders

Bunny Williams

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Russell Windham, Chair

Ankie Barnes

Andrew Cogar

Richard Economakis

Ray Gindroz

Alexa Hampton

Thomas Lloyd

Michael Mesko

Eric Osth

Suzanne Santry

IN COLLABORATION WITH ICAA NATIONAL OFFICE STAFF

Peter Lyden, President

Caroline Slaten, Vice President, Development

Julia Sucher, Manager, Development & Special Events

Lexi Hoglund, Assistant, Development and Office of the President

Tags: enduring places