In his classic history of the American preservation movement, Charles B. Hosmer Jr. wrote, “It might not be an exaggeration to say that the whole historic district of Charleston emerged as a grand design from the drawing board of Albert Simons.”¹ As an architect working in Charleston and almost exclusively in South Carolina, Simons designed “background buildings,” writes Ralph Muldrow, “understated yet fine designs in the traditional styles, mostly Colonial Revival … that still serve to create continuity with the buildings of the more distant past without offering unnecessary competition to the existing built environment.” Context and compatibility were the hallmarks of the architectural career of Albert Simons, but as significant, and directly related, were his contributions to historic preservation. As author Muldrow notes, “Simons played a key role in creating the first historic district in the United States, which became the model for hundreds of local historic districts across the country.” As an exemplary civil servant, Simons was willing “to serve on and with many national and local committees and organizations mak[ing] him an exemplar for architects in the service of their hometown.” In sum, writes Muldrow, Simons “saw the fields of architecture, preservation, planning, and art as inextricably linked,” and this breadth of view prompts the accolade that Albert Simons was a modern-day “Charleston Renaissance man.”

As Witold Rybezynski notes in his foreword, citing Robert Stern, Albert Simons was part of the “lost generation” of American architects whose Page 215 →traditional design inclinations “did not fit the evolutionary model espoused by historians of modernism.” It was an artistic generation who learned how to draw in beaux-arts schools and who illustrated the art of architecture with accomplished travel sketches, student studies, and finished renderings of medieval and classical buildings, then similarly rendered their own projects in beautiful watercolor, pen and ink, and pencil drawings. Indeed, one of the merits of Muldrow’s book is its color reproductions of Simons’s student drawings and professional etchings, paintings, and measured drawings of historical buildings preserved in the Special Collections at the College of Charleston and the South Carolina Historical Society. These drawings are reproduced as full-page and half-page illustrations in the large nine-inch by twelve-inch Simons monograph.

After studying one year (1906–7) at the College of Charleston, Simons entered the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he, like Atlanta’s Francis Palmer Smith before him, studied with beaux arts–trained Paul Philippe Cret. Cret’s focus for his students was the art of architecture, assigning exercises aimed at developing an eye for harmonious proportions, balanced scale, classical ornamental detail, and the preservation and reproduction of traditional stylistic forms and decoration. Indeed, in the respective archives of Albert Simons and Francis Smith are drawings of the same historical buildings such as the chapel at the Chateau of Amboise and the Chateau of Azay-le-Rideau, as well as ancient column capitals and other classical details, whose careful study was encouraged by Cret. Smith graduated in 1908 and carried Penn’s beaux-arts curriculum to Georgia Tech, where he was head of architecture from 1909 to 1922; Simons earned his bachelor of science degree in 1911 and his master of science degree in 1912, and after a year in Baltimore, he returned to Charleston in 1914 to begin a career as a beaux arts–trained architect in a traditionalist city whose citizens valued their architectural history. Both Cret students had major impacts on their respective communities. Initially, however, when he returned to Charleston, there was little work for Simons, so he spent twelve months measuring and drawing old houses in Charleston for the book by Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Daniel Elliott Huger Smith titled The Dwelling Houses of Charleston. It would be a significant postgraduate training ground for Charleston’s most noted restoration architect.

Charleston Renaissance Man: The Architectural Legacy of Albert Simons in the Holy City is organized in seven chapters. As one might expect of a Charleston study, chapter one establishes pedigree and describes the family roots of both Albert and his wife, Harriett Porcher Simons, as being Page 216 →“descended from old Charleston families.” Chapter two establishes young Albert’s initial exposure to beaux arts classical architecture evidenced at the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition (1902), whose staff (plaster) buildings styled in classical forms looked back to the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, and to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Muldrow then addresses Simons’ education at the College of Charleston and at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as his travels in Europe from 1912 to 1913. His emerging restrained classical design predilections were influenced not only by Cret but also by native South Carolina architect Robert Mills. A brief chapter describing Simons’s early professional experiences and activities during World War I is then followed by chapters five and six on the 1920s and 1930s, during which Simons’s reputation was made as a traditional Charleston architect, planner, and preservationist. The final chapter addresses Simons’s postwar encounter with modernism, when he designed his only genuinely modern building—Charleston’s airport terminal—and when he continued his leadership as a city planner in Charleston. Two appendices offer significant contributions in describing “Albert Simons’ Service to the American Institute of Architects” and in publishing a catalogue raisonné of the work of Simons and Lapham, including over a hundred projects in Charleston alone.

For preservationists, Albert Simons is best known for his pioneering work in the creation of Charleston’s Old and Historic District with distinct boundaries and a board of architectural review, which became models for countless other preservation strategies nationwide. His survey of historic homes on the peninsula, which ultimately led to the book This is Charleston (1944) by Samuel G. Stoney, established a list of criteria for judging the merits of historic buildings and a system repeated by subsequent preservationists. Each building was ranked in one of five categories: (1) national importance, (2) valuable to the city, (3) valuable, (4) notable, and (5) worthy of mention. Helen McCormick of the South Carolina Historical Society worked on the survey; and judges included Albert Simons, John Mead Howells, Alice Revenel Huger Smith, and Sam Stoney, author with Simons of Plantations of the Low Country (1938). John Mead Howells, a prominent architect (Chicago Tribune Building, 1922–25, and Daily News Building, NY, 1928–30), was also author of several noted books of architectural history: Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture (1931), The Architectural Heritage of the Piscataqua: Houses and Gardens of The Portsmouth District in Maine (1937), and The Architectural Heritage of the Merrimack: Early Homes and Gardens (1941). Howells was a New Englander who owned Charleston’s 1772 John Stuart House as a second Page 217 →home, and he became a longtime friend of Albert Simons. With Simons, Howells, Smith, and Stone, the survey of Charleston’s historic buildings had a formidable panel of judges who helped guide the city’s awareness of its past.

Although preservation is a significant subject and focus for a monograph on Simons, readers might rightfully expect a more thorough discussion of Simons’s original design work as a practicing architect and restoration architect. Muldrow provides information in text, drawings, and photographs on the saving of the Heyward Washington House, for which Simons provided restoration architectural drawings and specification, but few of Simons’s other works as an architect and/or restorationist are treated in detail. Several projects are mentioned with drawings and photographs published, but they lack in-depth analyses of the contextual merits of Simons’s original, but compatible, Colonial Revival designs. Also lacking are practical discussions of his transferable restoration and planning strategies beneficial to maintaining a town’s historic character and ambiance as a place (genius locii). Such critical assessment and discussion of the interaction of restoration and original design would serve two purposes. First, it would attract architect readers who struggle with similar issues of design compatibility and contextual sensitivity in today’s architectural practices. Second, it could beneficially inform planning efforts impacting historic towns and urban neighborhoods elsewhere. Nonetheless, Muldrow’s book is handsomely produced, rich in imagery, important as an introduction to the career of one of America’s most significant pioneer preservationists, and accessible to both professional and general readers.

Robert M. Craig, Georgia Institute of Technology