Title: American College of the Building Arts
Location of Proejct: Charleston, SC
Project Completion Date: September 8, 2016
Firm Name: WGM Design

Short Description: The renovated 1897 Trolley Barn is now home to the American College of the Building Arts. The exterior was restored to meet the strict demands of the City of Charleston and State Historic Preservation Office requirements for historic structures, while the interior is now a modern teaching center for traditional building skills and trades. Budget constraints did not allow for upgrading the existing structure to meet current standards, so new spaces were designed to be completely freestanding with the second-floor platform framed up to the roof trusses and the third-floor Library built within trusses, forming a “building within a building.”

Architect's Statement: The Charleston, South Carolina Trolley Barn was built in 1897 by the Charleston City Railway Company as the Car House for their street car maintenance. In 1938, the trolley system was decommissioned, and the building was then used by the City as a bus fleet depot and maintenance shop. It was abandoned in the 1980s and fell into disrepair. In 2013, the Preservation Society of Charleston added the building to its “Seven to Save” list for recognizing at-risk sites that have historic and cultural significance and are considered in danger of being lost.

After Hurricane Hugo devastated many of Charleston’s historic structures in 1989, it took nearly ten years of rebuilding and restoration efforts to affect repairs. A large reason for this delay was due to a shortage of skilled artisans and trades people. In 1999, in response to this shortage, a group of local “movers and shakers” began to forge ahead with ideas that would lead to the founding of the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA).

Initially the College was housed in different facilities miles apart in Charleston. In 2014, after years of trying to develop a consolidated campus, the city sold the Trolley Barn to ACBA for $10 as part of a complicated land deal. The process and construction for stabilizing the 117-year-old structure began immediately to make the building shell sound and weather tight.

Since the property was within the Historic District, the building’s exterior shell went through a rigorous review process with Charleston’s Board of Architectural Review and the State Historic Preservation Office for tax credits. Of particular importance during the review were maintaining the period appearance of the early 1900s that included: cleaning and repointing the brick and removing graffiti; appropriate metal roof; matching the wood trim profile; replacing the badly deteriorated monitor windows that run the full length of both sides of the building; replacing windows that matched an original 16 over 16 single pane window that still existed; recreating original window and door openings along Meeting Street that had been modified; replacing missing original riveted steel column at the building entry; providing a tabby oyster shell concrete for the front driveway, parking and sidewalk that mimicked the loose fill entry from 1900 and includes stained concrete strips to mimic the original trolley tracks.

The new interior is now a modern, fully-accessible teaching center for traditional building skills and trades including Wood Trades (timber framing and architectural carpentry), Trowel Trades (masonry, stone carving and plaster) and Iron Trades (blacksmithing and welding), as well as classical architecture. The front portion of the building houses administrative offices, conference rooms, classrooms and a community room on the first floor. The second floor contains teachers’ offices and a student lounge. The third floor is home to the College’s Library, computer learning room and Special Collections. The rear portion houses the three Trades Shops. Due to budget constraints, the existing shell structure could not be brought up to current code standards if the new interiors were to tie into or use it for structural stability. This necessitated designing the new interiors as a “building within a building,” where the new walls adjacent to the exterior walls were held back three inches and braced with strapping for lateral loads. The second floor was platform-framed on top of the first floor, and the third floor was platform-framed on the second floor with the floor joists framed between the bottom chords of the roof trusses, with flooring bridging over the bottom chord. This created a completely freestanding interior “building” within the existing shell. The existing roof trusses are fully exposed in the Trades Shops and are an integral design element in the library.

Since its completion, the renovated Trolley Barn has received the 2016 Carolopolis Award for Adaptive Reuse from the Preservation Society of Charleston. The award is given to the current property owner that maintains the property. In 2017, the property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.