Modern Charleston

A comprehensive architectural survey of buildings built in the Charleston historic district from 2000 to 2015.

 
 
 
 

Welcome

Charleston, South Carolina is a city with an incredibly rich architectural, urban, social, religious and political history. With its cobblestone streets, wrought-iron gates, piazza-lined single houses, and church steeples towering over all: these are the images that come to mind when you think of Charleston's architecture.

The Modern Charleston project is a comprehensive architectural survey of twenty-eight buildings that have been built in the Charleston historic district between 2000 and 2015. In the past 15 years, a significant amount of new architecture has changed the landscape of the Charleston historic district. This survey takes a closer look at the most significant buildings that have been approved by Charleston’s Board of Architectural Review and ultimately have been built or are currently under construction.
 
If you are passionate about the architecture and historic urban districts of Charleston, then you have landed in the right place. We invite you to explore the project through the following ways – view the buildings, the 360 virtual tour, or the map.

 

Please choose one of the options below:

174-Meeting-Street

LEARN MORE

Read the background behind the architectural survey project.

Read More

360-Virtual-Tour

360 VIRTUAL TOUR

A photographic 360° virtual experience of the Modern Charleston project.

Explore Tour

Charleston-Map-Buildings

INTERACTIVE MAP

An interactive digital map of the new buildings in Charleston.

View Map

Charleston is a city that deserves the highest quality of architecture – instilled with strength, function, and beauty – and designed to last for over 100 years.

About

The goal of the Modern Charleston project is to explore what is happening today with Charleston’s architecture.

 
A lot of discussion has been generated over the past months and years regarding the new architecture being proposed or built in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina. (It has been written about here, here, and here.) (Or read even more: here, herehere, and here.)
 
 
Ugly, uninspired, and just not beautiful. These were some of the claims we heard about the new projects going up in Charleston. As visitors to the city and newcomers to the discussion, we (the authors behind this project) weren’t satisfied with just reading about the recent developments and going along with secondary source reports. So, we started asking questions:

  1. What did these new modern buildings in Charleston actually look like?
  2. Were they as “ugly” as some people led us to believe?
  3. And finally, why was everybody getting so up in arms about this issue?

 
We wanted to see for ourselves what everybody was talking about, and we wanted to know what actually has been built in the past 15 years in Charleston.
 
 

So, we launched this project to help discover what is going on.

 

A Closer Look

We took a closer, cross-comparative look at the 28 buildings surveyed and have created these diagrams in order to provide the opportunity for analysis and critique.

 
Modern-Charleston-Schedule-of-Parts-1500px
Modern-Charleston-Timeline-1500px