The Lost Art of Crafting Great Urban Places
Professor Jack Duncan is a professor of architecture and preservation at the College of Charleston. His mission is to help students and communities understand and rediscover the human-scaled patterns that make places beautiful, legible, and lasting. Today, Jack joins Tiffany to discuss how this mission relates to architecture, urbanism, and craftsmanship.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:00
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. We don't talk much about architecture on this show, but architecture and urbanism are deeply connected. The way we build our places shapes how we experience them, how we care for them or not, and to what extent we participate in civic life. This summer, I got to be part of a program called City Makers Collective, a two week architectural intensive in Charleston, South Carolina. I had Will McCollum on the show a couple of episodes back, who's kind of the head organizer behind this so you should definitely go back and listen to my conversation with him. During my time there, I got to attend a few lectures by Professor Jack Duncan. He's a professor of architecture and preservation at the College of Charleston. Previously, he served for six years as the chair of classical architecture and design at the American College of the building arts in Charleston. He has a unique interest in exploring not just the relationship between urbanism and architecture, but also between craftsmanship and architecture, which I think is pretty interesting. His mission is to help students and communities understand and rediscover the human scale patterns that make places beautiful, legible and lasting. I walked away from his lectures with a renewed appreciation for how architecture shapes our experience of urbanism and for the importance of creating beautiful places. And I'm delighted to bring him on the show. Professor Duncan, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:32
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:33
Let's talk about your story a little bit. Your path to architecture, I would say, is not necessarily cut and dry. You didn't go to college right after high school, and you weren't exactly sure what you wanted to do when you got there. Can you share about kind of your story a little bit and how you came to discover architecture as a vocational path?
Jack Duncan 1:51
Sure, absolutely. So I must admit, I wasn't the greatest student kind of ever, if I'm being honest. I think I just had other interests. I was always artistically inclined, and I loved skateboarding and music and and just kind of felt like I was floating through my younger years. I graduated high school and realized I really didn't know what I wanted to do. So I worked for a few years under my grandfather's company, and we traveled a little bit. I got to see a lot of the eastern seaboard of the United States, and really became almost subconsciously interested in architecture and urbanism. Looking back, I really noticed beautiful architecture. I would just be like, "Oh, I like that building. Oh, look at those materials." And I didn't really know how to articulate that in any kind of collegial way, but I was always interested in it. But then I decided I wanted to go to school. I went to the College of Charleston, initially to study classics, and then realized shortly thereafter that I didn't want to teach, ironically. I started just taking courses that I was interested in, and after speaking with some mentors and advisors, it turned me toward historic preservation and art history, which I ended up double majoring in. I felt like that allowed me to unite the intellectual with the tangible and connect history to the living present.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:14
Was there a moment where it became a more specific interest in architecture and place and urbanism?
Jack Duncan 3:31
Yeah, absolutely. I was really fortunate to be in Charleston. I'm from South Carolina, but I'm from the Upstate, so my life growing up was a little more rural, rather than urban. And then I came here, and I lived downtown. I lived in a really cool neighborhood called the William instant homes, which is a kind of Richardsonian Romanesque neighborhood that was built as a way for older folks to gradually grow older with ease. And it was built in the late 19th century. So I was in that neighborhood. Architecture is all around us, so I think I loved the idea of living there. And then I had a course with a professor named David Payne who taught a design course called "new design and historic settings," and that was within the historic preservation and community planning department. And that was the first time it was like, "Oh, you're telling me that it's okay to build in the way that we look around," whereas the Venice charter and some of the other historic preservation documents almost eschew that. So we got the phrase that says "differentiated but compatible," where most modern preservation and architecture tends toward differentiated at the expense of the compatible. Dr David Payne, who now teaches at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, he said, "Well, it's okay actually, to build traditionally." That it's kind of outside of time, instead of it being this chronological march toward the inevitable future. He was like, "No, this is of its place." I think the last little piece that helped lock things in was I was very fortunate to work for two architects, Jenny Bevan and Christopher Liberato, whom I'm still friends with, as an intern in my last semester on Whitworth Street. And they were both graduates of Notre Dame, and really encouraged me to go to the summer studio at the Institute of classical architecture and art. And that really cemented that I'm obsessed with architecture and urbanism.
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:39
Always nice when you have a clarifying moment like that. "I think I'm obsessed with this." I think I've had a few of those myself, like "I think I might be low key obsessed with cities." I want to definitely continue to tell your story, but before we do, I want to ask you a question that I will admit is not originally on the list. One thing that I really appreciate from your lectures, I think I went to one or two where you were basically walking us through traditional urbanism. And then you took us on this global tour of traditional urbanism, which I found really interesting, because you were able to help us think outside of the typical associations we might have with that phrase, of it maybe being more Greco Roman and having this specific form. And I think it was so interesting that you were able to take that up a notch and articulate a vision of traditional urbanism that did have certain built elements to it, but it also had certain civic function, or even that they float downstream from maybe spiritual or mystical influences. Like there were other patterns that that allowed us to see that there's traditional urbanism all over the world, outside of what we might think of like the Greco Roman styles and stuff like that. Could you just give like, a summary of how you approach the idea of traditional urbanism? And I think what I'm most interested in is how it intersects with the life of the city. Like, how does it facilitate life in a community?
Jack Duncan 7:09
That's a great question. So that series, that was a two part lecture series that I gave that was called "cross cultural urban patterns." So we use that pretty broadly because sometimes it's rural, and I think that can sometimes be a little bit confusing. Some of these more rural settlements, villages and things like that, we still call urbanism, which may not be totally accurate but I do think that it's really important. I think that my goal in that lecture in particular was to show that the main thing is that we should always consider the human being. I think that we've forgotten that. Of course, we can't speak generally and kind of with a broad brush across all new developments, but it feels like oftentimes, that contemporary cities aren't made for us. So in order to figure out what's a way that we should build and make our places, let's think about what are the most humane things? What are the things that we feel like the city should do? How should it operate? So there's some fundamental principles, right? So firstly, it should bring people together. I think we've become so separated. You and I spoke about how we wake up in our house. We don't leave our house. We go into our garage, we get in our car, we drive to another garage, somewhere else, we get out of our car, we walk into a hallway, and we walk into our office, and then we reverse that to come back home. At no point in any of that, which is the typical kind of suburban existence, do we interact with human beings, and we don't even have a place in a lot of areas, especially in the suburbs, where we can gather with each other. So when we talk about the human being, we talk about the expression of it, and what the city can and ought to do. I talk about urbanism and architecture in the same voice, right? I don't think they should ever be separate. And so both are made up of two things. They're made up of form. What shapes are they, whether it's a piazza or it's the cornice molding on a house? Then, what are the materials? I find that traditional urbanism and architecture oftentimes expresses itself in organic materials. So in my previous institution, we worked in timber and wood. We worked in stone, we worked in plaster. We worked in materials of the earth. And I think we come from the earth. We, of course, know in Genesis, where we talk about how we were made, right? And so we were made of the earth. And so I think that's important. And then the form, it's kind of cliche and has been quoted ad nauseam at this point, but tradition, if we study it etymologically, comes from that Latin phrase to give across or to give over. And so I think that actually is what ties us together, not only with ourselves, with our ancestors. So great traditional urbanism, we see these patterns all over the place, great natural materials. Places for people to gather and to shelter each other and to create environments and places where we can all come together and be together and support each other in a community well.
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:10
And I think something else that you highlighted in your lectures was how traditional urbanism was also incremental and experimental and was happening over time, so it has this layered feeling to it. The place emerges, literally, in an emergent way. It emerges over time in response to the needs of the people. I thought this would be interesting to bring on the show because this is something that we talk a lot about at Strong Towns. Incrementalism, looking to the past, realizing we have something to learn from tradition. But I think also, a lot of the people that I bring on here, they're doing really practical projects. They're trying to improve bike infrastructure or housing codes. But I think at the end of the day, it's all united by this idea of looking at how people inhabit place and making our cities responsive to that, rather than requiring people to respond to these random codes and requirements and regulations for how we ought to function. And I think that's kind of where I saw an overlap. There's some other things you're doing that I thought were interesting, but your emphasis on paying attention to human beings, and what do human beings need to inhabit a shared community? And urbanism kind of comes out of that, I would say. Let's go back to your story. So you mentioned you did this summer program at Notre Dame. Can you pick up from there?
Jack Duncan 11:31
Yeah. So the summer program was actually, from my understanding, a kind of reinvigoration of an earlier series of summer studios that actually wasn't at Notre Dame was, but was actually with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in Manhattan. So it was a four or five week summer studio where I lived in Brooklyn and then commuted into Manhattan every day. It was just an absolutely amazing experience. I know there are folks that are in a little bit older generations than me that even were less supported in trying to figure this stuff out, whether it's traditional and classical architecture or even urbanism or even the arts. That was a moment where I think it was a kind of revamp. You know, some people call it the inaugural, but I know that ICA was doing summer studios before. But this was, for my generation, the inaugural, first year summer studio for the ICAA. And I went on the encouragement of Ginny Bevan and Christopher Liberato. And that was just a moment where it started to crystallize, because people say, "Oh, classical architecture, traditional urbanism, these are like the way you used to do old things, right? That's the way it used to be done." And it showed that actually, it was kind of outside time, that it was contemporary. I always like to tell my students, if I blindfolded you in the desert in Arizona and then dropped you in any suburb in the United States, you'd have no idea where you are. But if I did the same thing and dropped you off in the middle of the historic district of Charleston, you would immediately know where you are. That is comfortable for us. I mean, that goes all the way back to ancient times when we would live in forests and we would carve off pieces of trunk so we could remember what path we took to go get food or to whatever. So we've always been marking that way, and I think we've lost that in a certain sense. But that summer studio in particular was a moment where a bunch of young people from various backgrounds, some dealing with architecture and urbanism, some like me, dealing with historic preservation and art history. We all came together and we had this interest, and we were really fortunate to learn everything from sacred geometry from Steve Bass to watercolor rendering from David Ginther, and Michael Mesco leading the studio all around town, George Summers Smith, from Robert Adams office in New England, teaching us how to do measure drawings. It was awesome. That that is why I think the City Makers Collective and things like this is great, especially because of its focus on urbanism. These are important.
Tiffany Owens Reed 14:09
Yeah. So while in undergrad, you established a forum for discussing traditional urbanism, and I think, if I understand correctly, just from the conversations we had, that's when you started to also begin to develop this interest in craftsmanship. So I kind of want to ask you two questions at one time. First, can you tell us a little bit about that group and what you were hoping to achieve by creating this form? And then, can you articulate how you see the story around the emphasis on craftsmanship that you began to explore at this time?
Jack Duncan 14:43
Sure, yeah. We had a historic preservation and community planning club, which was really great. I felt like we got a lot of that, but I was starting to develop an interest in the city and why we liked going down Stoles Alley or Philadelphia Alley, or why the French Quarter was so beautiful, and we knew it intrinsically. We could look at it and say, "I feel good here." We started to really think more deeply about why that was. "Why do I feel good here and don't feel good there?" So it really was kind of put together. I forget exactly how it came about, but I do remember that I had an idea about doing this and a professor at the American College of the building arts, actually, when they were at Magazine Street in the Old City Jail, caught wind of this somehow. I think it might have been through Chris and Jenny. It was Patrick Webb who is now one of my greatest friends. I mean, we're still friends to this day, and we met this way. And I remember someone said, "Hey, Patrick Webb wants to meet you to talk about this C2 thing that you're talking about, and see if maybe there could be some collaboration between the American College of the building arts and the Historic Preservation Department at the College of Charles. I said, "Great." We met at Adelston Library. We immediately became fast friends. I thought he was cool because he was doing all this like beautiful classical moldings and plaster, and came from a long line of craftsmen. And so what we started to do is meet at the jail. Effectively, we were meeting at the jail, and we would hold symposia, and it would be once or twice a month on a Saturday. We would get wine and beer and cheese and fruit, and we would lay it out on a platter. And sometimes we would be drawing sacred geometry. Sometimes we would be discussing mathematics and geometry, and then sometimes we would draw the orders of architecture. Sometimes we talk about the city. It wasn't like this rigid structure, and we ended up having students from the Citadel Clemson University, College of Charleston, American College of the building arts, and then even just community members coming in. They heard about what we were doing, a bunch of ragtag folks hanging out in the jail on Saturday. So it became a moment where we could all come together and freely discuss, on accident almost, the things that make up the city, from the geometry of the urban realm and the architecture to the materials. And then craftsmen would drop in and tell us a little bit about what they did. So that's where I started to become obsessed with it. I just thought that craftsmen were cool. I thought they were doing something in the real world with real things, you know?
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:23
So to clarify, this is not an actual jail.
Jack Duncan 17:27
It's not an operating jail today, but it was originally.
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:33
That would add a layer of drama to this story.
Jack Duncan 17:36
Yeah. Well, the American College ended up leaving there shortly after I went to Notre Dame, because it turns out that jails are kind of made for one thing, and so they're kind of hard to adapt and reuse, especially for a growing college. So yeah, it's interesting.
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:54
Let's go to the second part of that question. Craftsmanship, architecture, urbanism. How do you see these three working together or not working together? What's relationship between these three?
Jack Duncan 18:12
I think probably most people understand it as in the context of scale, right? So kind of working from the macro to the micro, the macro being the urban scale. That's made up of architecture, which is like the middle scale. Then the craftsmanship is the detail scale and the materiality. When I came to to the American College to effectively write the curriculum for classical architecture, my great hope and dream was like, what does a world look like when craftsmen, architects, and urbanists not only work together, but are educated together from a young age, and they're having lunch together, and they're hanging out on the weekends together on the piazzas at Charleston and discussing city making and craftsmanship? What does a world look like when those students graduate a place like the American College of the building arts and start to build places? Maybe they start with a single house, and it turns into a pocket neighborhood, and then maybe a whole district, and then maybe a whole city. Almost like Venetian children. They just know how to swim, because they've never not done it. They grew up in the water. So it's like these students at a place like ACBA. What does that world look like? I think that's what most excited me. It felt like, when I was at Notre Dame, the missing piece was the craftsman, and I think that's what's been left out, and why I've taken such an interest in it. It was scholarly, but also, personally, many of my great friends, from Jordan Finch, who's an amazing timber framer in Virginia, to Nathan Hunt, who's originally from southern England but lives in California, one of the great stone carvers of the world. Rob Wozniak, a heritage Mason in Pennsylvania, Arno Lerozic, that lives down the street from me, a company on train timber framer. You know, these became my friends and I learned so much from them outside of a classroom. And I think that's just kind of natural for me, I guess is what I'm saying. In other words, it wasn't like I sat down andwas like, "Okay, I gotta pick a scholarly approach."
Tiffany Owens Reed 20:39
It seems to me that from the conversations we've had, that the emphasis on craftsmanship is pretty directly connected to the question of, what does it mean to be a human in this place? And sometimes there's a feeling that architecture can be a bit disconnected from that question. And you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like architecture tends to focus a lot on how can I create an interesting building? I think craftsmanship, it's about buildings, but I think it has a slight more emphasis on the fabric of the whole place and the human experience of the building in the place.
Jack Duncan 21:23
Yeah. I mean, the analogy, in the Christian sense, would be like God breathing life in Adam, right? Like craftsmanship is where beauty, durability and meaning are embedded into a building. So it can be a beautiful drawing on a piece of paper, or even a beautiful building, ostensibly made of Styrofoam. But you immediately know in the first storm that it's not what it seemed to be because it falls apart. Without craftsmanship, architecture becomes a facade. So it might look interesting, but it doesn't have that soul that comes only from skillful making, and that skillful making only comes from working hard at your craft and putting your 10,000 hours in. And so I think that craftsmanship is the difference. It actually might be the most important aspect of making, period.
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:15
I think it's also a way of explaining the state of our cities. I wanted to capture your thoughts on this. But when you're looking at American cities, and you're thinking about this bigger conversation of, how do we make our cities resilient, how do we make them lasting? How do we make them beautiful places, how do we care for them? I think more people recognize that there's been a serious loss of craft and a serious loss of true place making and city building. Not just planning and zoning and putting in building, putting the roads. Technically like there's plenty of stuff, but all the stuff we have hasn't translated into a sense of place. How do you explain what went wrong with American city design or city building? When you look at a place like Charleston, then you look at a place like, I don't know, Phoenix. I think we're hating on Arizona a little bit in this episode. Like, how do you tell the story about what happened there?
Jack Duncan 23:15
No, that's a great question. And I think I want to try to state this slowly, because I think it's important, right? So I think that effectively, we traded tradition and the accumulated wisdom for efficiency and novelty. We've preferenced hyper efficiency, which we can do really easily now, right? Especially with the onset of AI and all this stuff, efficiency will be at an all time high, and we preference novelty over that sense of tradition and that sense of being connected to our ancestors. I think that was compounded by industrialized construction, and then, of course, zoning, this idea that we're going to separate uses. That became the erosion of the human scale. I was talking earlier about the expression of the human being in material and form is often what we see oftentimes in traditional architecture. Whether it's in Mali or wherever in the world that we look, we often see a beautiful expression, that tends to be made by hand, that express the human being in its scale. So once you have industry glass and steel. Those are the two biggest culprits. You start to lose that sense of the human being. So we stopped building for people, and we started building for machines. Cars, effectively, and then short term profit. So now it's a race to the bottom. That's why we see individual track developments, right? And so, I think that that kind of race to the bottom for short term profit, that really removed the cultural value that was placed on skilled labor. I remember my grandmother still had the TV that was built into the piece of furniture. And she replaced that TV. I think it only had to be replaced once. But she didn't just throw that out, right? She replaced the TV, and it was this beautiful piece of furniture. I think without, without coming back around to not see everything as a commodity to be consumed, that we also have to place value on the act of making and be okay with it taking a little bit more time, in order to express both a scale and a character that connects us to being human beings. We've kind of lost that a little.
Tiffany Owens Reed 25:41
Yeah, just to add to that, when I look at the landscape of American urbanism, it seems to me that another thing that has happened is a oversimplification, like a flattening of life itself. Like, what are the most important activities? Being home, driving and buying stuff, or some type of entertainment, right? So there seems to have been this sort of flattening in the understanding of what activities make up a meaningful life. I think part of the conversation about building beautiful, resilient places has to do with recovering a more robust vision for what it means to be human. What does it mean to be human in the public realm? What are the activities that add meaning to existing in the public realm, outside of driving quickly from place to place and conducting various transactions?
Jack Duncan 26:33
I been thinking for such a long time. I think really, transportation is at the center of that. And I know that's not the point of this podcast. But I do think that we've already built this kind of sprawling urbanism or suburbanism, which is awful, but if we can somehow make it super convenient and almost preferable to travel some other way, either by rail line or some other way to get to a center. And then, of course, people have written tomes now on retrofitting suburbia, so actually creating mixed use places where I could walk from my suburban house to some sort of center that's been developed. I mean, I think, like anything else, it's going to take a few folks and developments to kind of put a focus on that and show that it can be done. And then that will be the way Americans do it, because we're, we're a little bit unique, but it's going to have to be a cultural shift. And Tiffany, you and I talked about this, and I think this was like an ongoing thing at City Makers. It's a cultural shift, everything we're talking about. It's not like, "All right, let me put the wrench and the screwdriver here, and we'll just tune that and all right, now we fixed it." It's actually going to have to be us molding the way the conversation about how we live.
Tiffany Owens Reed 27:48
Yeah, I think you're right. I think it is much bigger than adjusting a few things here and there. I think it's going to have to be much bigger than that, on a cultural level, on a values level, on an imagination level. Like, can we reimagine our places, and can we reimagine what it might look like to live in them? And what do we want to see? Like, what kinds of activities do we want to see? What is our vision for this place? I would like for you to share a little bit more about what you were working on at the American College of building art. I think when I first heard about that school, it seemed very interesting to me. It felt a little bit revolutionary, what y'all were trying to do there, kind of restoring craft again, or training students to be able to function as craftsmen. Can you talk a little bit about that work just in general? What is it like, finding young people and trying to restore this craft culture? Because I think that's a big part of the puzzle. It's one thing to recognize our places are not beautiful. It's another thing to want them to be more beautiful. It's another thing to find people who can make them more beautiful and really bring this holistic understanding of place back to our communities. Can you just share about your work as a professor there, like what you were working on, and even what you're doing now, and just kind of how you're trying to bring craft back in a way?
Jack Duncan 29:15
I think it's really exciting. I've very recently moved from the American College of the building office to the College of Charleston, but at my time at ACBA, I think it was really exciting to see these young folks that were not necessarily just chasing the dollar. They found a lot of value in working with their hands, about doing something meaningful in the world, especially in this world as we see it. My generation is the one under our parents, who are baby baby boomers, that were like, "go to college, go work in a cubicle, make a lot of money, and you'll be happy." Whereas these kids have seen how that's playing out a little bit. They're like, "I don't know how exciting that looks, but carving this or learning how to do scribe work with timber framing or running molding plaster in historic buildings or new buildings, that seems really exciting and fun." They're more interested in having a more fulfilled life outside of just financial gain. That, to me, is super inspiring. I felt like I got so much more out of being there than they ever got from me. So, selfishly, I loved that part. Also, the entire faculty are all still great friends of mine, and I cherish those relationships, because many craftsmen are philosophers, but they're very different. To be kind of typical, certain professions, like doctors, pilots, surgeons, architects, they tend toward the ego, a little bit kind of Type A's. Sometimes you kind of want that, right? I want my pilot to be very confident. I don't want him or her not to be that way. But, there's something quite refreshing, and there's also a little bit of humility there amongst a lot of craftsmen, not all of them but a lot of them, where it's like, architects are always giving each other awards. It's kind of funny and embarrassing sometimes. For craftsmen, that would be embarrassing. It's all about their craft. It's all about their master before them and before them. It's about the craft. And so that worldview can bring you back down to earth and kind of call to your attention the way you exist in the world. I thought it would be really fun to do the integration of an architecture program into a school of the building arts, which is what my thesis was about at Notre Dame. And then once I got there, how that manifested was a four elective sequence in the junior and senior year for our classical architecture students. They could take electives in blacksmithing, stone carving, plaster and carpentry. They couldn't do timber framing, because there's such a wealth of knowledge you need before you can even begin. But they could do the other four, which was incredible. And we had a lot of students that would actually create elements in collaboration with other students, and then be able to present them at the final critiques. So that, to me, was a full circle moment where I had this dream of seeing young architecture students collaborating with crafts people that were their friends, that they were living with or eating lunch with, and then them present that to critics and jurors. I think what my my colleague, Philip Smith, who's my other arm. He and I built that together. I mean, I was the chair and I wrote the curriculum, but I could not have done any of that without him. For me and him, I think that was a little bit bittersweet for us to leave, a couple of months ago, but it will live on and endure, and I'm really excited to see it. And so now I'm focusing a little bit more on historic preservation and community planning. And so that community planning aspect of the historic preservation really gets me excited.
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:15
What is it like working with students? Because I feel like maybe where you're at now, the College of Charleston, maybe they don't have quite as an emphasis on the craft and everything, as you found at American. What has it been like working with these students and trying to give them a vision for a different way of thinking about cities and a different way of thinking about craft and a different way of thinking about urbanism? What have you noticed and where do you see signs of hope?
Jack Duncan 33:41
Yeah. It's super exciting, actually. I mean, full disclosure, we just started this week, so I haven't had a ton of time.
Tiffany Owens Reed 33:49
You're still looking for those signs of hope.
Jack Duncan 33:51
Yeah. But it's my alma maters. So there's something really interesting you know about being back in 12 Bull Street at the Cameron house. Amazing 1850s double house right there in the heart.
Tiffany Owens Reed 34:05
The campus is so beautiful, I could barely handle it
Jack Duncan 34:16
It is something else to be in the middle of the historic district with the Cistern Yard right there. I mean, students are students, you know. I think that's why a lot of professors love teaching, because most of them come in with this hope. And they give you hope because they know they can make a difference. And I think something like historic preservation and community planning is more important now than ever. I think that we've got that transition of students that are that generation, that are like, "Hey, money's not the most important thing," which is a great place to be. They want to do something meaningful. And I think, in an age of hyper efficiency and industrialization and all that stuff, that these really beautiful places, whether it's the entire Piazza that you're standing in, to the street, to the gates, to the gardens, those things are worth preserving. I think Christopher Liberados, probably quoting Mahler, was kind of saying that Charleston doesn't have anything but a supply and demand problem. People are demanding more of it, and we're not building any more of it. That's why it's becoming inaccessible for the masses. So I think that will be the next thing. And I'd like to see a world in which, hopefully I can affect these young students in the historic preservation community planning to take a more design oriented approach, where maybe there's a course like the one I took that was "new design in historic settings." How do we add to an existing, built fabric, and not express our ego and our own intentions? How do we add to this as part of a beautiful fabric? I'm thinking of like a Middle Eastern rug. You don't go in and put a big white square on a beautiful Iranian Persian rug. You try to make it look like it belongs. So I hope that's what we can do.
Tiffany Owens Reed 36:08
But I think too, like you had in your bio, it's not just for the sake of it looking old and cool. It's for the sake of the way it dignifies the humans that are going to exist in that space. This will be my second to last question. You can kind of pick up on this note sometimes in the urbanism world, old for old's sake, but I think what you're getting at is it's not just about it being older and traditional. It's about recognizing that there's something there about these patterns of building or designing that correspond with some of our deepest needs as human beings. So before I ask you my last question, I'll ask you, how do you articulate that? How do you articulate why we should take these patterns seriously for people? Because I think people who are listening to this, they intuit that there is something about older patterns that work. And I think a lot of people who are advocating for better cities, in a lot of ways, what they're advocating for is a return to more intuitive, human oriented ways of designing and organizing our public places. So how do you articulate that the way a place is designed, and how we've approached our buildings and just like the quality of public life that's able to happen there?
Jack Duncan 37:34
I mean, I think we've kind of alluded to it, but the buildings are the setting for civic life. I think the purpose of the city is to bring people together, like we talked about earlier, for mutual benefit, whether it's economic or social or cultural. So if the buildings in the public spaces don't foster those connections, the city fails in its purpose. So the architecture of the city should serve its political and cultural life, providing those spaces that encourage trust, interaction, and a shared sense of belonging. It's why we always escape to nature. You know, whenever we're like an intense urban environment, we're like, "I need to get to the mountains, or I need to go to Italy, or I need to go to the Mediterranean, or I need to go to Northern Africa." I need to go back to nature, is what we're really saying, right? And so, back to what we said about urbanism and architecture. What is it? It's made of form, and it's made of material. And so that material ought to be organic, and the forms ought to come from time immemorial. It doesn't mean that it has to have a Corinthian column and a proper pediment. It just means that those forms take ourselves out of it for a moment. You know, architects are like, "show me something novel. Show me something I've never seen before. Express yourself." That's like, okay, that's fine, but that's can't be it, right? It's like jazz music, which is my favorite American art form. Those jazz musicians did the hard work of learning Bach and Mozart and Chopin. They knew classical symphonic, orchestral music. And then they started to create something amazing. So what I'm asking of architects, urbanists, craftsmen is do the hard work of learning where you came from, and then do something really cool. And that's where you get the renaissance right, or the lake Baroque, or whatever. You get jazz. You get this new interpretation of something that goes all the way back to us probably taking sticks and hitting on stretched animal skin on a wooden stump. That sinuous connection back to our ancestors, I think, is important, and we've forgotten that all in the search of novelty and industrialization.
Tiffany Owens Reed 39:58
Very well put. To wrap things up here, Professor Duncan, can you share with us a little bit about Charleston and a couple places you like to recommend people check out if they come to visit?
Jack Duncan 40:08
Absolutely. So my wife is from here. I am not. I'm from about three hours north in the Upstate, but I've been here for longer than anywhere else. So couple things. Always walk down the alleys. Philadelphia Alley is a great one. It's a planted alley. It's classic, beautiful. There's also Stoles Alley and Longitudinal Lane, which are amazing spaces, those kind of off the beaten path places. Catfield Street, which everyone has heard of, probably by now, is a really cool new infill urban development. And then lower Church Street is beautiful, and Legree Street is possibly the most beautiful. And then all the great new urbanists love Trad Street. So those are some streets you can really just jump on any part of it. Walk down them, and they're absolutely stunning. Don't forget about the gardens, though. Magnolia Cemetery downtown. Magnolia Gardens is out West Ashley, and then just peek over all the beautiful single houses. There's a gorgeous culture of piazza and gardens here in Charleston as well.
Tiffany Owens Reed 41:12
It was such a treat to be able to visit this summer, despite the humidity and the heat. What is your favorite coffee shop or favorite foodie place that you feel like embodies Charleston?
Jack Duncan 41:24
Okay, so favorite coffee shop. Are we talking for the coffee or for the like vibes? That's what we gotta see.
Unknown Speaker 41:31
This is a helpful distinction. I'm gonna have to say, for the coffee.
Jack Duncan 41:35
For the coffee. I'm going Second State, which is down south of campus. Great coffee. For the vibes, I am going Harken, which is on Queen Street. It's technically a single house, although you don't enter on the Piazza anymore. But it's on Queen. It's beautiful, and it kind of reveals all the brick and stucco on the inside, and they've restored some of the wooden windows. Immaculate, amazing pastries, which I should lay off on.
Tiffany Owens Reed 42:14
During my time in Charleston, I also rented a lime bike, which I like to recommend people do to get around. Even in the summer, it was actually really refreshing, and I was seven months pregnant. So if I can do it, anyone can do it. Professor Duncan, thank you so much for joining me on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm sure there's so much more we could talk about and share the relationship between architecture and craftsmanship and urbanism. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share just a sliver of your insight. To our audience, thank you so much for joining me for another episode. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 42:54
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a strong towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.
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Tiffany Owens is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.