Unique S.C. artisans college to find new location BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press CHARLESTON — The American College of the Building Arts, the nations only liberal arts college that trains students in traditional building trades such as plastering, timber framing and masonry, has been operating out of Charlestons decrepit, 200-year-old city jail for more than a decade. Administrators appreciate the castle-like building as a laboratory where students can use their newfound skills for historic preservation, but they also acknowledge its downside: It doesnt have enough space to house the colleges iron working, stone and plastering, and timber-framing programs in one place. Now college officials are working with a developer to move the college to a location that does: an empty 1897 building across town that once was used as a barn for Charlestons street trolleys. The building will, for the first time, allow the college to have modern classrooms, offices and the library as well as its workshops in one location. An adjacent building will be renovated to provide the colleges first on-campus student housing. We have made the best out of the situation but now we have the opportunity to transform this college in the next few months, college President Colby Broadwater III said. The move will also help the college, which has 50 students this fall, reach its goal to increase the student body to about 200, he said. Broadwater says the move to the new campus could be completed in two years. Currently, offices and some craft classes are taught at the former jail, while ironwork and timber-framing instruction take place in a nondescript industrial building about 10 miles away. The idea for the college developed after Hurricane Hugo and its 135 mph winds smashed into historic Charleston a quarter century ago. Every building needed to be repaired, said Stephen Hanson, the director of special projects at the college. They had been so lovingly maintained and they realized we didnt have the craftsmen and the training on the scale we needed to put these buildings back together again. The goal of the college is to train artisans to preserve and restore the nations older and historic homes — and to apply traditional techniques to new construction. Modern techniques cant always be used to repair historic buildings. For instance, modern cement is much stronger than the mortar used in brickwork in centuries past. If you used modern materials for repairs, it would break the older, fragile stone. The first 10 students enrolled in the college in the fall of 2005 and the school graduated its fifth class last spring. There were some financial challenges in the early years, but the college has now operated in the black for the past two years and claims almost 50 graduates. This is the only place you can get a liberal arts degree that also works in the hands-on skills, Broadwater said. The unions can teach you to lay brick. But this is the only place where you can also get the art and science of the building arts. Most of the colleges students take 18 or 19 hours of classes a semester when the workshop work is included. They must take two semesters of drafting before they can move on to computer-aided design programs. The college has a library of about 5,000 volumes, some of them several hundred years old. The oldest is a 1725 volume on scientific construction instruments written by the man who was the engineer for King Louis XIV of France. With the help of a grant from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the college recently renovated a small special collections room for its oldest volumes. Sophomore Sam Friedman of Milton, Wis., fell in love with the college after taking a ghost tour through the jail; such tours are still offered regularly to Charleston visitors by a local tour company. When I came here and saw the previous students work, it really inspired me. I knew thats what I wanted to do, said Friedman, who wants to go into stone masonry. I want to go to England and work on restoring old cathedrals, primarily Lincoln Cathedral. It has its own preservation team, he said. Jordan Finch, a professor who teaches timber framing, said what is learned at the college applies not only to restoring the past, but building for the future as well. Builders and architectural historians say you want to build structures that are lovable and when you build a modern vinyl-clad home, there is not much there to love or care about, he said. If you come up with something that inspires people to do the maintenance, you can end up with something like in Europe where timber-framed houses have been inhabited for 600 or 700 years.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 12:12:47 +0000
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