Reviews of Books

Charleston, South Carolina's most important colonial public building still stands at the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, but for most of its more than two-hundred-year history scholars have paid it little attention. From Statehouse to Courthouse by architectural historian Carl R. Lounsbury ends this neglect by uncovering a rich history of the building originally constructed as South Carolina's colonial Statehouse. Built in 1753, when Charleston had begun reaping the benefits of a slave-based staple economy, the Statehouse was home to all branches of the colonial government. It symbolized both the southern colony's cultural aspirations and the city of Charleston's political power. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, though, the building's civic prominence had begun to fade. The statehouse suffered a "disastrous fire" (p. 1) in 1788; state government moved to Columbia in the 1790s; extensive remodeling took place in 1883 and again in the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s. Finally, in 1989, Hurricane Hugo extensively damaged the building. As a result of these misadventures, the building Lounsbury describes as "perhaps the most ambitious civic structure erected in the American colonies in the eighteenth century" (p. 1) lost its colonial associations and its claim on devotees of Charleston's architecture. Not until the combined pressure of lobbying by preservation agencies and the need to assess the building's structural integrity in light of hurricane damage were the Charleston County commissioners prepared to undertake a serious investigation of the building's history and plan for its preservation and rehabilitation.	1
Lounsbury and a team of architects, historic preservationists, architectural historians, and archeologists systematically uncovered surviving original building fabric long thought lost in the course of successive rebuilding campaigns. Combined with extensive documentary research, this "building archeology" enabled Lounsbury and others to interpret the original exterior design of the building, its internal spatial arrangements, some of its decorative schemes, and its changes over time.	2
A fashionable and impressive two-story Palladian edifice, the Statehouse dominated Charleston's central civic square. It housed the colony's two legislative bodies, the Commons House of Assembly and the Governor and Council, as well as South Carolina's highly centralized court system. After the 1788 fire, which left just the walls standing, the structure was rebuilt (with an added third story) to house the Charleston county courts, the federal courts, the Medical Society of South Carolina, and a natural history museum. Changes in 1883 completely reconfigured the building's interior solely for the courts by turning the first floor into office space, the second floor into a single large courtroom, and the third floor into jury rooms. Alterations in the 1920s included a two-story rear wing that was replaced in 1941 by a three-story addition running the full width of the building.	. . .