Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City by Witold Rybczynski. Yale University Press, 256 pp., $21.
An artist, a developer, an airline pilot, a mandolin player, and a Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture scholar …no, this is not the setup for a bar joke. Featured in a new book by architect Witold Rybczynski, these protagonists form an improbable and informal collection of master builders in Charleston, South Carolina. With Charleston Fancy, Rybczynski adds to his ongoing investigations of varied architectural topics, which include a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, the construction of Villa Vizcaya in Miami, the evolution of the chair, the creation of the seven-day week, and the development of the screw (and screwdriver). Rybczynski assembles an entertaining series of intertwined vignettes; characters appear and recede throughout the chapters. He details a number of unique redevelopment and densification strategies in downtown Charleston, some suburban New Urbanist communities, a few Byzantine Revival churches, a single-family Palladian home, and an overview of Charleston’s complicated history of oppression, prosperity, decline, and resurgence. The downtown block redevelopments of Tully Alley and Catfiddle Street are high points within the meandering narrative; these tightly arranged single- and multi-family houses offer an alternative to the generic apartment blocks emblematic of developer driven-urbanism—ostensibly the only solution to providing dense urban housing. The ambling story suffers when the digressions artificially compress these central stories, leaving the reader hungry for more details and obscuring Rybczynski’s thesis. However, the title, Charleston Fancy, holds the key to the writer’s intent. Though fancy itself has myriad definitions, its sense of meaning as predilection seems to be the most fitting interpretation: a predilection for Palladio, for Russian Orthodox churches, for vernacular architecture, for medieval urbanism, for counterculture development. Thus, the builders’ passion was instrumental to the success of each project; ultimately, this passion binds the text together and keeps the reader engaged in this episodic journey through a small southern city