Recent News and Events

GIS Workshop, February 13-15, 2012

Deidre McCarthy, historian and technical services specialist with the Heritage Documentation Program of the National Park Service, will conduct a three-day GIS workshop for First-Year MSHP students February 13-15, 2012. This workshop will review geographic information system (GIS) concepts combining spatial technologies and database management systems in the area of historic preservation. Participants will learn how to use GIS applications for identification, evaluation, protection, and preservation of cultural resources. Students will review how GIS can provide a better basis for planning and decision-making for the nation's heritage by assisting with inventories, mapping historic districts and battlefields, and mitigating the impact of disasters on historic areas.

APT Coming to Charleston, Sept 29 to Oct 4, 2012

The Association for Preservation Technology will hold its annual conference in Charleston between September 29 and October 4, 2012. For further information see the APT 2012 Conference website:

• APT International web site

11/1/2011 - MSHP Program Hosts SESAH

The Clemson University / College of Charleston Graduate Program in Historic Preservation served as host and organizer of the 2011 annual meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), a regional chapter of the national Society of Architectural Historians. MSHP faculty and staff planned all aspects of the meeting, from securing conference and lodging venues to organizing conference sessions to arranging a keynote address by well-known urban planner and architectural critic Witold Rybczynski. Now a member of the faculty of the program in urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, Rybczynski is the author of a more than a dozen books, among them a critique of American urban planning, Makeshift Metropolis. Rybczynski’s SESAH keynote explored the subject of his most recent book, The Biography of a Building: How Robert Sainsbury and Norman Foster Built a Great Museum. Held in historic Sottile Theater where, prior to the keynote, MSHP Adjunct Professors Frances Ford and Richard Marks presented a short history of the recent discovery and stabilization of large decorative wall paintings in the theater, Rybczynski’s lecture traced the long-term collaboration between Sainsbury and Foster that led to the construction and subsequent expansion of the innovative Center for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.

SESAH’s 2011 conference attracted 150 participants, making it both the organization’s largest gathering to date and a “stress test” of the MSHP program’s administrative and organization capabilities. Paper sessions filled the first two days of the conference. Specialized tours followed on Saturday with a tour of the neighborhoods below Broad Street led by adjunct professor Richard Marks, an afternoon tour of the city’s upper boroughs led by College of Charleston professor Robert Russell, and a late afternoon behind-the-scenes tour of Drayton Hall.

Founded in 1982 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to promote scholarship on architecture and related subjects and to serve as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and others involved in professions related to the built environment, SESAH draws its membership from twelve states - Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

10/1/2011 - MSHP Program Welcomes First Experts-In-Residence

The Clemson University / College of Charleston Graduate Program in Historic Preservation initiated a new program during the fall semester when it welcomed its first Historic Preservation Experts-in-Residence. Carl Lounsbury, senior architectural historian with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Willie Graham, Colonial Williamsburg’s Curator of Architecture, spent two days in October reviewing and commenting on research conducted by MSHP students at Fenwick Hall and conducting an on-site workshop for First-Year Students on the identification and interpretation of architectural change at the Aiken-Rhett House. In addition to shadowing and coaching MSHP students, Graham and Lounsbury also presented lectures, Graham on the evolution of timber framing in the Chesapeake and Lounsbury on regionalism in early American building.

Architectural conservator and paint analyst Susan Buck assumed her residency in early November. A conservator in private practice who specializes in the conservation and analysis of historic architectural wall finishes, Buck is an innovator in the application of paint analysis as an archaeological tool to identify and interpret changes over time to interior wall finishes. Her lecture summarized her recent work sponsored by the World Monuments Fund conserving the interior of an 18th-century theater in the Imperial City in Beijing. Following her lecture, Buck led MSHP Second-Year students in a conservation lab course through a workshop on historic methods of painting that began with hand grinding pigments.

9/13/2011 - Historic preservation graduate students win prestigious competition

Two historic South Carolina buildings are the subjects of architectural documentation drawings by Clemson University and College of Charleston students that won both first and second prizes in the Charles E. Peterson Prize competition.

The annual awards, co-sponsored by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the National Park Service, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the American Institute of Architects, recognize the best set of measured drawings prepared to Historic American Buildings Survey standards and donated to HABS by students.

Read full story in the Clemson Newsroom...

Historic Preservation Newsletter

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