Repairing the Fabric of a City: The Charleston Gaillard Center

Charleston’s Gaillard Center exemplifies why good design matters, and why engaging the public in the planning of a civic building is so important for the fabric of a city.

In November 2023, the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art hosted the national conference Enduring Places. For three days, 225 participants from around the country gathered in Charleston, South Carolina and engaged in a diverse offering of talks, panel discussions, working sessions, and tours focused on three themes: craftsmanship, preservation, and sustainability. Over eight hours of this rich programming are now freely available to the public.

About the Lecture:

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.

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.

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.