Title: Ashley River Park Event Pavilion
Location of Proejct: Summerville, South Carolina
Project Completion Date: 2/28/2022
Firm Name: Liollio Architecture

Short Description: This 85-acre park stretches alongside the headwaters of the Ashley River. The site is a beautiful, but flood-prone, property in a riverine floodway, now home to the county’s first major investment in parks.

Several new buildings support the park’s operations, but the most public of these is an open-air event pavilion, oriented to overlook a festival lawn and a freshwater pond. The pavilion provides a much-needed setting for civic life in a growing, but still rural, part of the state. The pavilion is designed to be compatible with the region’s ecological needs, respectful of the landscape, while celebrating the vernacular.

Architect's Statement: This 85-acre park is situated along the headwaters of the Ashley, a tidal river once vital to transportation and agriculture in the South Carolina Lowcountry. After the decline of rice production in the mid 19th century, the site was strip-mined for phosphates and then left to return to woodlands. At the turn of this century, the property was slated for residential development with a suburban, cul-de-sac character. The property was cleared and utilities installed, but the work was abandoned during the 2008 downturn. The development would have been disastrous, however, as homeowners would have found their properties uninsurable against flood. Much of the site is in a FEMA regulatory floodway, which disallows construction that would impede the floodwaters and worsen flooding upstream.

The property lay fallow for a decade, while a citizen group advocated for the sale of land to the county parks commission. Citizens saw an opportunity to create the first large-scale public park for a growing, but still rural, part of the state, a use that could be made compatible with the ecological needs of a region beset with flooding.

That citizen effort led to a daring public investment in quality of life for the region. Today, the immensely popular park provides opportunities for free river access, for kayaking, canoeing, and fishing. Extensive playgrounds and splash pads entertain families, with plans to add climbing walls and other low-impact amenities in the future.

Several new buildings support the park’s operations, but none are sited to dominate the landscape or disrupt the floodway. The buildings also avoid a 100’ easement for the Edisto Tunnel, deep underground, which supplies drinking water to the City of Charleston 23 miles away. Each building sits on concrete Sonotube piers with open crawlspaces, acknowledging the flood risks.

The architectural palette is deliberately simple, of oiled cypress and corrugated metal. Structure is delineated clearly with steel and timber, and connections between them are imbued with celebratory detail. Deep eaves protect the cypress siding and provide shade. The most public of these structures is an open-air event pavilion, oriented to overlook a festival lawn, with a freshwater fishing pond in the distance. The pavilion provides a much-needed setting for weddings, birthday parties, family reunions, and community movie nights.

The pavilion design adopts a clear parti, careful orientation, simple materials, and a curious distortion of its vernacular, agricultural precedents. It adopts a sly abstraction of a vernacular form, through an arcing gable roof which raises toward the pond. The roof is clad in flat-seamed zinc panels which scale across the compound curvatures. The geometry forces the perspective and plays with the observer’s perception of the pavilion’s dimensions. The result is something playful, curious, unexpected, but not superficially garish or distracting. On a more practical level, the roof form is oriented to provide deeper shelter at the restroom doors and more midday shade at the covered picnic area.