The Charleston Singles Edition

On architecture, humidity, and designing for the surrounding environment

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI, director of strategy at ad agency McKinney in Los Angeles, and on the leadership team of Ladies Who Strategize. She writes her own newsletter on marketing and culture, which you can read here.

Anita here. I recently visited Charleston, South Carolina, one of those American cities that wears its history on its sleeve. Everything from the food to the architecture bears the stamp of a storied past. Built in the 1600s by loyalists to King Charles and populated by British colonizers coming up from the Caribbean, Charleston’s city center is practically a museum of residential housing styles with influences from everywhere. One of the more remarkable features of local architecture is a house called the Charleston single: a style that originated in the 1700s and was designed specifically for the South’s brutally humid weather.

As opposed to most homes, which are built parallel to the street, Charleston singles sit perpendicular. The side of the house faces the road, positioned below a two-story porch that Charlestonians call piazzas. The porches shade the house’s traditional front door and windows from the hot sun, and always face the south and the west to capture the breezes coming off the shores of the little peninsula. Some blocks with rows of these houses look gap-toothed, with the piazzas all lined up and facing the same direction. Others have piazzas facing large gated gardens full of shade trees and cooling greenery. A curious observer peeking through the gates might spot fountains or swimming pools in lush semi-tropical gardens or little groves of South Carolina’s signature palmettos.

A series of Charleston singles, where the side of the house hosts the main entrance shaded by a patio area.

If you were to have a friend at one of these homes, you shouldn’t pay a visit unless the door facing the street is open, inviting you in. Called the hospitality or privacy door, this sits at the juncture of the piazza and the rest of the world. Our colorful tour guide claimed that 18th-century dwellers, who in polite society dressed in wool suits and hoop skirts, would undress and sit on the piazzas in their skivvies, catching the cool air with the privacy door closed, and only open it to visitors when they were decent. 

The hospitality door facing the street, and the piazzas on the side of a Charleston single at the delightful Delaney Oyster Bar. 

Why is this interesting?

All of these architectural details are designed to mitigate the inescapably sticky Southern weather. Before air conditioning units and rotating fans, Charleston’s early architects used breeze direction, shade, and privacy to offer residents relief from the heat.

As we settle into a life with more extreme and unexpected turns of weather, architects are rethinking how buildings can adapt to these shifts. From Rethinking the Future:

With an approach from a genuinely sustainable perspective to create buildings that respond directly to their unique place, the process begins with climate data rather than architectural sketches. By addressing the questions such as “Determining the sun’s position in the sky at a given time and season?”, “How much rain falls on the site each season?” and “What effect will the wind have on the building keeping in mind the occupant’s comfort?” the building should be adaptive to changing environmental conditions to meet its functional requirement and to provide comfort.

In many ways, we’re coming full circle. Before our reliance on technology to heat and cool our homes, builders were much more cognizant of designing for the environment in which the home existed. Maybe we can borrow concepts of the past and build spaces that make better use of their surroundings rather than ones that are sealed off from the world in which they live. (ASVV)

Quick Links:

• First Street is a property risk assessment tool for heat, flood and other pending environmental doom (ASVV)

• Lumpers vs Splitters (NRB)

• Honeybees let out a ‘whoop’ when they bump into each other (NRB)

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Author Talks: Don’t skip the ‘soft stuff’. No more Ping-Pong breaks or office happy hours? No matter. Melissa Daimler shares how workplace culture can still thrive without an office. Read here.

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)

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