Ray Huff: Learning on the job at the Clemson Architecture Center of Charleston

A shorter version of this story appeared in The Post and Courier on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011.

BY ADAM PARKER

Architecture can seem a stuffy, impenetrable profession, concerned mostly with compass-drawn angles, blueprints and balsa wood models.

It’s an intellectual profession dependent on refined aesthetic sensibilities, practical applications and jargon that some people find a little forbidding and impersonal, words like praxis, tectonic and spaciality.

Architects calculate. They must figure out how to integrate green space, how to obtain permits and conform to municipal rules, how to combine building elements into a pleasant and utilitarian whole.

But really, good architecture is all about people — that’s what builders and designers like to say.

It’s about making life better, providing services, enhancing culture, creating and beautifying the visual landscape. It’s about collaboration and vision, creative thinking and problem solving and, at its best, art.

In South Carolina, this conception of architecture is well represented by Clemson University’s Charleston Architecture Center and its director Ray Huff.

The center, which got its start in 1989 as way for Clemson to offer students an urban experience, had Huff as its first director.

An arm of Clemson’s School of Design and Building, the center is one of three city-based branches. The others are in Barcelona, Spain, and Genoa, Italy.

“The main idea is to provide our students with a vibrant urban experience that compliments their academic experience on the main campus, which is quite rural in nature,” said John Jacques, director of the Clemson Advancement Foundation, the school’s fundraising arm, and former architecture professor and chair of the faculty.

Jacques, a long-time friend of Huff (the two attended Clemson together as students in the late 1960s and early 1970s), helped establish the center. He said Huff had already distinguished himself as a practicing architect when he was made director of the center.

“He had received national attention by that time,” Jacques said. “And because of that, and because of his longstanding high regard within the community, the dean at the time (Jim Barker, now Clemson president) and I thought he would be a great choice.”

After running the center for its first decade, Huff committed himself to private practice (though he continued to teach), handing the reins to Rob Miller. Miller presided over the center until last year, when he was recruited by the University of Arizona to become chairman of its architecture department.

When Clemson launched a national search for a new director, Huff threw his hat in the ring and was selected. A new Huff era began last fall.

* * *

Huff was born in Orangeburg, in 1948, grew up in Charleston and attended Burke High School.

“I decided that, because I could draw, architecture sounded pretty good,” he said.

So he enrolled at Clemson University in the fall of 1966, a few months after Harvey Gantt, the Charleston native who desegregated the institution, left.

Of the university’s 5,500 students at the time, 5,000 were male and 12 were black, Huff said.

An artistic inclination prodded Huff in the direction of the counter culture, but his was not an activist’s youth. Huff was more interested in thinking about the civil rights movement and its implications, not in facing the water hoses, he said.

He became interested in transcendental mediation and communal living, in art and family, he said. But mostly, Huff was focused on architecture.

“Ray was and always has been a very thoughtful, personable and highly creative individual,” Jacques said of his friend. “He was not reluctant to weigh in on all sorts of discussions, conversations and debates that characterized that time period. And in all cases, he weighed in with an even-handed approach to the problems at hand. He was absolutely brilliant in his response to what was going on at the time.”

What was going on at the time was social unrest, a war in Vietnam, and the maturation of modernism as a dominant architectural style, one Huff embraced.

Across the street from the Ft. Lauderdale house he shared with a dozen others stood the firm of Donald Singer, a respected architect, and Huff, though he had a day job, offered to work for Singer for free in the evenings.

“It was remarkable,” Huff said. The untamed young apprentice got focused.

In 1972, he returned to Clemson, started Synergy Architects and soon began teaching. Six years later he was in Charleston, close to family, developing a new practice at the corner of Cumberland and East Bay streets. His career was on a roll.

In 1997, Mario Gooden joined the practice, and the two partners plotted their future. They had good name recognition thanks to a number of awards they’d won, articles they’d published and audiences they’d addressed. But the pair had never been driven by market demands, so they tended “to be the odd men out,” Huff said.

Their goals were to establish an international presence and to mesh architecture with culture, especially by pursuing public projects that impacted society. They hosted competitions, then started winning them. That improved their standing, and they decided a few years ago to open an office in New York City, which Gooden runs.

* * *

At the center, David Pastre, who oversees the design-build studio, shows off the inventive bathroom experiments: a sink made from a Chinese wok, window levelers that open and close thanks to a pulley device rigged to the sliding door, cast concrete panels that hide hand-fashioned plumbing, reused materials that once served entirely different purposes.

All of this the students made.

Throughout the building on Franklin Street, which once housed the Jenkins Orphanage, furniture is crafted to solve particular design problems. A small library must double as a conference room, so once of the center’s students designed mobile shelving and a mobile librarian desk that slides on casters to and from the wall.

There’s a 2,000-square-foot workshop now operational on Simons Street nearby, and Huff is starting to think about the day when the center can relocate to a larger, more comfortable building to be constructed on a George Street lot owned Clemson.

The students, who range from undergraduate juniors to first-year graduate students, spend dedicate a semester to living in Charleston and working on a project from conception to completion. The studio has a mix of students who specialize in architecture, landscape architecture, design, construction and now, thanks to a partnership with the College of Charleston, historic preservation.

The experience is “structured around the idea of bridging the gap between practice and academia,” Huff explained. Students, who pursue regular course work at the College, benefit from direct experience, working closely with people in the local design and architecture community and getting opportunities to test their ideas in the real world.

It’s called “service learning,” Pastre said.

Students at the Clemson Architecture Center have built bike storage for the Civic Design Center in front of the Gaillard. They have worked with the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on a public information kiosk and outdoor movie screen made for the 2010 “Bluesphere: Earth Art Expo,” and Richard McMahan’s Mini Museum, installed in the rotunda of the Addlestone Library in 2008.

They have worked with Charleston’s Parks Department to renovate green space. They have designed the Nkabom Centre for Skills Training and Formal Education for Project Okurase, a Lowcountry initiative that addresses the HIV/AIDS crisis in Ghana by working to regenerate communities and teach self-sufficiency.

And they’ve worked with the Medical University to assess how its campus could become more user-friendly, greener and comfortable — “a healing environment.”

“Higher education is very entrepreneurial these days,” Huff said. “You’ve got to respond to the needs not being met in the community.”

* * *

This semester, students in the design-build studio are working on an effort to improve Corinne Jones Park, a city playground, also called Hester Park, in the Wagner Terrace neighborhood.

They’ve performed an in-depth analysis of the site, evaluating current amenities, usage and traffic, and have come up with a detailed master plan. Currently, they are creating models and renderings in the studio, and working with community stakeholders to prepare for an imminent appearance before the city’s Design and Review Board, which must approve the project.

They hope to have the renovated park finished by Thanksgiving, Pastre said.

Matt Compton, deputy director of parks operations for the city of Charleston, said the longstanding relationship between the city and Clemson has born fruit many times over.

“We are happy to reap the benefits of their talents and energy,” Compton said. “They work with us on any number of things, from temporary displays to permanent installations. It’s always nice to work with the students because they aren’t jaded.”

The Parks Department also has worked with Huff + Gooden, especially when they need an “outside-of-the-box approach,” Compton said. The firm designed the Herbert Hassel Pool Building on Fishburne Street and came up with wonderful solution for a local firehouse that never got built, he said.
Some of the firm's other projects include the Malcolm C. Hursey and Mary Ford elementary schools in North Charleston and the Early Childhood Development Center on Wentworth Street.

* * *

The group dynamic in the studio is palpable.

“We stress collaborative learning here,” Huff says, unnecessarily.

Huff and Pastre are the two full-time professors on hand each day, but seven lecturers — professionals culled form the local community — cycle through on a regular basis, offering lessons rooted in experience.

And the exposure to working professionals is what sets the center apart, Jacques said.

“But what they cherish most about having the chance to work with him is that he’s treating them as fellow students,” Jacques said. “He lets them know he’s learning from them, too.”

Joseph Martin, a 25-year old graduate student, worked for a design-build firm in Indianapolis before enrolling at Clemson and joining the team at the center this semester.

“I haven’t slept much, so it’s going well,” he said. Part of a group of three working one aspect of the park project, Martin said the term started with a flurry of ideas that were narrowed down to three broad concepts and then refined further.

Barrett Armstrong, 22, a student of landscape architecture, said the relaxed environment belies a constant energy.

“To an outsider, it looks like we sit around doodling all the time,” Armstrong said. “But there’s a lot of thought that goes into it.”

Richard Chalupa, a 24-year-old landscape architecture student, said the studio experience at Clemson involves much more than theoretical learning.

“The best part of this studio is we’re going to build,” he said.