14 minute read
the ethics of lasting
Middleton Inn revisited
James Moses
Settlement implies a benign and sympathetic occupation, the selection of a specific and favored place, and the engagement of that place to economical use; settlement is the establishment of home. Our growth is the opposite of settlement. We have forgotten the rule that the use of a place must not be separate from the abiding in it; we are intent on uses so disrespectful and unnecessary that the place becomes un-abidable.
— W G Clark, “Replacement”, 19911
To question architecture’s longevity in the climate crisis is critical as we come to terms with the fact that the carbon embodied in most of the planet’s existing buildings will linger in the atmosphere for three hundred to one thousand years. Extending the lives of buildings to amortise that carbon is increasingly obvious and urgent given the International Energy Agency’s forecast that global floor area will increase from 244 to 427 billion m2 by 2050, a trend that means a doubling of area by 2060, equivalent to building all five boroughs of New York City each month between now and then.2
While climate is the most pressing issue of our time, in the United States the interrelationship of race, power and democracy at the heart of both the mythology of the country’s founding and persistent conflict among its peoples, leads to the question of what should be done with buildings originally made to serve problematic, or worse, institutions. How should a building be re-purposed when the social conditions of the time in which it was built are abhorrent? As an opening to such conversations, consider the Middleton Inn in Charleston, South Carolina, designed by Clark and Menefee Architects between 1982 and 1985.1
When the Middleton Inn was published in the architectural press shortly after its completion, the images were bracing. The architecture seemed both fresh and timeless. Its tactility and grounding in the landscape softened the abstraction of its expression; the simplicity of forms and materiality seemed appropriate and allowed its site to play an equal, and at times dominant, role in the composition.
Forty years later, the architecture of the inn retains this sense, while merging even more fully with its site. Except for some interior finishes, the buildings feel like they could have been designed within the last five years. This does not imply that the project was ahead of its time, rather that it exists outside of time and that the influence of place is the driving force behind the architecture.
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1 Clark, W.G. ‘Replacement’ in Richard Jensen, Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. pp 10-13
see also
Boles, Daralice. “‘A Place Apart’. Progressive Architecture, May 1986, pp.83-91. Clark, W G and Charles Menefee. “A House and a Waterside Inn.” 9H: On Rigor, 1989. pp 104-109
McCarter, Robert. Place Matters: The Architecture of W.G. Clark. ORO Editions, 2019.
2 IEA, ‘Global buildings sector CO2 emissions and floor area in the Net Zero Scenario, 2020-2050’. International Energy Agency, 2022.mmmiea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-buildings-sector-co2-emissions-and-floorarea-in-the-net-zero-scenario-2020-2050. Accessed 6/25/2023
The inn contains fifty-five guest rooms in four buildings. The largest, the focus of most critical and journalistic interest over the years, contains twenty-four equal-sized guest rooms and a large, double-height common room. A bridal suite above the common room, the highest floor of the inn, has a view over the tree canopy to the Ashley River to the north. In plan, the building is configured as an L enclosing two sides of a lawn. The other sides are defined by thick understory shrubs, live oaks and cedars, making an outdoor room that accommodates overflow activity from the common room. The building perches on an escarpment. From the lawn, the land steps down to a swimming pool and its deck, and then down to the Ashley River.
The main building is actually made up of multiple smaller buildings. The twentyfour rooms are set within four identical individual modules separated at ground level by steps allowing passage from the upper level of the escarpment to the lawn below. The modules are connected by a continuous roof that makes the ensemble read as a singular building. A two-story version of this module is repeated in the three smaller buildings that are dispersed on the site, also organized as Ls, although with the timber and glass bays oriented outwardly, the opposite of the arrangement of the main building.
The buildings are Janus-faced, with the south and west sides, oriented to the dense woodland, being tawny stuccoed concrete masonry with a few small openings, rendering these sides almost mute. This heavy wall and continuous roof create an armature that anchors the rooms. Although the walls are two concrete block wythes thick and contain insulation and an air space, the expression is consistent with heavy, monolithic construction. More than that, the thermal mass provides protection from the hot south and west sun. Most of the rooms are accessed on this side of the building from a brick walk. The north and east sides, oriented to the river, are more open, with multiple panes of glass set in a timber grid, giving the appearance, if not the reality, of a multi-story curtain wall. All the exterior timber is painted a glossy black, masking its actual material nature, similar in effect to the stucco concealing the concrete masonry. The choice to conceal is deliberate and departs from the domestic work of Clark and Menefee, which tends to expose both block and timber. It is possible that this is related to differing programs: the inn is a public accommodation that may require a level of refinement, or politesse, that a house does not.
Organizational clarity extends to the rooms themselves. The plan is cellular and repetitive, mirrored about a chimney and a shared straight-run in situ concrete stair providing access to the upper level rooms. One enters each room from outside, unmediated by interior common space, passing across a clear threshold. The upper-level entry decks, each shared by two rooms, are sheltered under the joining roof, the soffit of which is painted haint blue, a common practice borrowed from the local Gullah tradition. The Gullah are AfricanAmericans of the lowcountry, descendents of enslaved persons who worked the rice and indigo plantations of the area. They have carefully preserved elements of their African traditions and language. The haint blue soffit was originally made with indigo pigment and was believed to ward off ghosts from a home.
One moves from space to space not through an interior network of corridors, but by moving through the landscape. In this way, the architecture aligns with Clark’s recognition that the harm human habitation causes the planet is a given. He argues for an architecture that can atone by intensifying our experience of the landscape, bringing us closer to nature and a greater sense of belonging.
a problematic landscape
The inn is sited in the exceptionally fertile riverine landscape of the Ashley River watershed in lowcountry South Carolina. It is not uncommon to see alligators, dolphins, otters, bald eagles, osprey and egrets. The natural world is very close. Ashley River Road, which leads to the inn, is lined by live oak and cypress hung with Spanish moss – these trees dominate the landscape, their ample shade providing relief from the heat, if not the humidity, of the lowcountry.
Indigenous Peoples, the Kiawah, lived here before they were removed by European settlers who established a plantation-based rice and indigo economy. The Ashley is a tidal river whose fresh- and salt-waters mix at Magnolia Plantation, about six miles downstream from Middleton Inn, and one of three plantation estates still existing on this stretch of the river, none of which operate as agricultural enterprises, but as tourist destinations.
The site’s history is as problematic as its physical qualities are beautiful. The Middleton Inn (or as it is known legally, The Inn at Middleton Place) sits adjacent to Middleton Place, one of nineteen plantations across fifty thousand acres (about seventy-eight square miles) once owned by the Middleton family. Having emigrated from Barbados, Edward Middleton settled in South Carolina in 1678, building The Oaks, a plantation at Goose Creek, about twenty miles north of Middleton Place. Henry Middleton acquired the land that became Middleton Place in 1741 as part of his wife Mary Williams’s dowry. Here he planned both buildings and gardens, built by the enslaved people he owned — some of the oldest non-Indigenous gardens in the country. The Middleton family occupy a key place in both American and Southern history and culture: among them were a President of the First Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Governor of South Carolina and Minister to Russia, and a signer of the Ordinances of Secession, which sparked the Civil War. Over generations, the Middletons enslaved at least 3500 people, the means for creating and accruing wealth enough to place the family in the 0.1% wealthiest Southern Whites by the start of the Civil War.3
The Middleton Inn owes its very existence to its relationship to Middleton Place. They are legally separate but interdependent, geographically adjacent and occupying the same territory. The agent of the corporation that owns the Inn is also the president of the non-profit entity that governs Middleton Place. One can move easily and without recognition of a line between the two properties. Middleton Place is a key aspect of the inn’s public profile online and in publication. The inn fosters Middleton Place as a tourist and event destination, not merely a protected historical artifact.
The relationship of these two entities brings into relief enormous questions that underlie much of American politics today; first and foremost, how do we square the values of democracy with the historical facts of colonisation, removal of Indigenous Peoples, manifest destiny and the institution of slavery? Sylvester Magee, who was born into bondage, was the last known enslaved person in the US. He died in 1971. The USA is only about two generations removed from the experience of (lawful) slavery.
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3 Ager, Philipp, et al. ‘The Intergenerational Effects of Large Wealth Shock : White Southerners After the Civil War’. American Economic Review 111 (11), 2021 pp 3767-3794
plantation as monument
Cultural geographer J B Jackson distinguishes between two types of monuments: hortatory and vernacular.4 A hortatory monument, such as a war memorial, is an ‘echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual’ that reminds us of a shared obligation, ‘keep[ing] us on the beaten path, loyal to tradition’. These monuments are in places where there is a shared and ‘strong sense of religious or political past’ and a concern about origins. A vernacular monument, such as Colonial Williamsburg, is unconcerned with specific people or dates and recall how everyday life used to be, often as an evocation of an imagined golden age when things were better.
Middleton Place has qualities of both a hortatory and a vernacular monument. It provides a sense of how life used to be for some living on the Ashley River in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the primary story being told is the Middleton family, their lives and accomplishments as central to the story of the region and the country.5 The buildings of Middleton Place, including some slave quarters, workshops and barns, have been restored, preserved, conserved and maintained in a hortatory veneration: not re-purposed, but frozen in time — a present and actual echo of an elite antebellum South.6
from Conde Nast’s Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours:
Many travelers approach plantations, a cornerstone of tourism in the South, as they would parks, museums, or historical sites: a beautiful place to learn something about local history before having a cocktail or going out to dinner. But plantations need to be experienced differently. Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured and killed for hundreds of years on these lands. They are America’s concentration camps. Rather than shy away from the painful truth, plantations must expose it. They are a vital educational resource with which to combat modern-day racism.7
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4 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
5 Hunt, Judith Lee. Beyond the Power of Fortune: The Middleton Family of South Carolina, 1784-1877. University of Florida, Ph.D. dissertation, 2005. ufdcimages. uflib.ufl.edu/AA/0%3/69/97/00001/beyondpoweroffor00hunt.pdf.
6 We should note that in 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the vast majority of Southern Whites did not enslave a single person, but were yeoman farmers, working their own or rented acreage. The institution of slavery was not primarily a question of economic viability, but of wealth creation by a relatively small number of families, an aristocracy.
see also Doyle, Barbara, et al. Beyond the Fields: Slavery at Middleton Place. Middleton Place Foundation, 2008
7 Enelow-Snyder, Sarah. “An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours.” Condé Nast Traveler, 2021, cntraveler.com. Accessed 6/9/2023.
see also Davis, Allison. “Please Don’t Get Married on a Plantation: After Charlottesville Can You Hear Me?” A Practical Wedding, 2018. apracticalwedding.com. Accessed 6/8/2023.
contingent architecture
It is clear from W.G. Clark’s writings and Clark and Menefee’s body of work that their architecture is inextricable from the craft of building: that without building, there is no architecture. There is a clarity to the construction, a directness in the tectonic expression. The relationship to the ground is intentional. In the details, there is confidence without obsessiveness. The buildings are beautiful in their sufficiency. Firmitas, utilitas, and venustas are all at play. And the hope for a lasting architecture is central to Clark and Menefee’s thinking.
Is it unfair to discuss the architecture and construction of the Middleton Inn within a framework that was so clearly not at issue in its design? The architecture of the inn seems to have been conceived apolitically and without explicit reference to Middleton Place, turning instead to a specific relationship between architecture and landscape, without obvious social concerns beyond accommodation of social occasion. But building sites are not neutral ground. Clark’s exquisite text ‘Replacement’ makes very clear that his values primarily regard architecture’s relationship to the natural world. The messy world of human relations, which can be so difficult to comprehend, much less interpret, makes architecture, more than any artistic discipline, contingent. Kenneth Frampton wrote that ‘behind our preoccupation with the autonomy of architecture lies an anxiety that derives in large measure from the fact that nothing could be less autonomous than architecture’.8
One way in which architecture’s optimism for the future is expressed is in a building’s capacity to adapt to new realities. Buildings that last outlive their original programs and are maintained, and loved, for reasons that transcend use. Middleton Inn is surely one of those buildings. Its architecture is informed by, but not reliant on, the program for which it was designed. The inn’s longevity will require adaptation to new sociopolitical realities that will follow a different trajectory.
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8 Frampton, Kenneth. ‘Reflections on the Autonomy of Architecture: A Critique of Contemporary Production’. in Diane Ghirardo ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture. Bay Press, 1991. pp 7-26.
Middleton Inn, embedded is earthworks and climbing fig vines, conveys a sense that it is locked into place, that it has been there for a long time and will remain for longer, joined to the land. It reads as a ruin in a landscape running free.
JAMES MOSES is an architect in Massachusetts, teaches graduate design studios at Roger Williams University, and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. James’s fourth great-grandfather Isaiah Moses, a German-born Jew, was a Charleston grocer and planter. He and his wife Rebecca Phillips purchased The Oaks from the Middleton family in 1814. The house burned in 1840, shortly after they failed to sell the property, including fifty enslaved persons.
