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 …