Inn Tour
“Writings” by W.G. Clark
Architecture, whether as a town or a building, is the reconciliation of ourselves with the natural
land. At the necessary juncture or culture and place, architecture seeks not only the minimal ruin of
landscape but something more difficult: a replacement of what was lost with something that atones for
the loss. In the best architecture this replacement is through an intensification of the place, where it
emerges no worse for human intervention, where culture’s shaping of the land to specific use results in
a heightening of beauty and presence. In these places we seem worthy of existence.
There was a mill near my home town. It was a tall timber structure on a stone and concrete
base which held the water wheel and extended to form the dam. One did not regret its being there,
because it made more than itself; it made a millpond and a waterfall, creating at once stillness and
velocity; it made reflections and sound. There was an unforgettable alliance of land to pond to dam to
abutment to building. It was not a building simply imposed on a place; it became the place, and thereby
deserved its being—an elegant offering paid for the use of the stream. Its sureness made other
buildings look haphazard.
I cannot convince myself that settlement, even the most thoughtful, the most beautiful, is
better than wilderness. Even the mill is not better than no mill; but the mill is necessary for our
existence, and therefore worthwhile. It is an image that keeps returning, proof that use of the Earth
need not be destructive, and that architecture can be the ameliorative act by which, in thoughtfulness
and carefulness, we counter the destructive effect of construction. Nothing else is architecture; all the
rest is merely building.
The most important quality of architecture is the way it relates to, signifies, and dignifies a place
on earth. This is why the architecture we most admire—be it the product of individuals or civilizations—
is that which has been built with a sense of allegiance to the landscape.
Architecture is a disturbing art; it destroys places. Building sites always have the scent of
sacrifice, barely masked by the hopeful and exciting smell of new construction. It is our job to assuage
the sacrifice and make building an act of understanding and adoration of the place. So in our work we
concentrate on trying to achieve this difficult objective, in the hope that our buildings will seem part of
the place, rather than just being sited on it, and will gain strength and meaning from the alliance.
Every site contains three places: the physical place with its earth, sunlight, and view; a cultural
place, the locus of the traditions of human intervention; and a spiritual place, or that which we should
call an evocative presence, which stirs our imaginations and sends us in search of images, memories and
analogues. These three aspects of place roughly correspond to body, mind, and spirit.
We use these different aspects of a place when we design a building. Using the physical space
we try to draw the landscape into the composition, the architecture, or rather the building, playing a
part, but only a part. Sometimes this is achieved by contrasting building and setting, but often we
merge the two, even trying to blur the distinction between them to make them the same. We use the
cultural place as a source of patterns of habitation and associated architectural traditions, so that there
may be some sympathy of existence between neighbors, as well as times. We look to the spiritual or
evocative place for images that strengthen the architecture, making it memorable in the landscape.
Clark, W.G. “Writings” in Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 2000.
“Places Transcending Time” by Wilifried Wang
Nevertheless, myths of authenticity as projected in Laugier’s primitive hut and Thoreau’s
Walden find their reverberation in Clark and Menefee’s Reid and Croffead houses or in the of [sic] the
guest rooms at Middleton Inn. Being there, almost in unmediated contact with nature, merely screened
with fig-leaf-like adjustable wooden louvers, puts the inhabitant of the primary cell, as that comforting
euphemism of a primitive hut, into as close as a prime state of existence as possible in today’s spoilt
civilization…
The diagonal view across the guest room at Middleton Inn from the safety of the bed through
the screen, the window, the bosque of trees and down the embankment towards the reed-covered river
basin is, in our time, simultaneously engaging and disconnecting. Nothing quite captures Clark and
Menefee’s sense of melancholia better than this theme of framed engagement and viewed
disconnection, a kind of voyeurism conscious of the irretrievability of an ideal primacy.
The right-angled wall at the Middleton Inn, the principal unit, gives a clear view of the site’s
edge as well as harking back to the longing for the conceptual conquest of territory of the early settlers,
itself defines diagonals…
In the work of Clark and Menefee, security of ground, knowing where one stands while looking
beyond and the theme of the diagonal is founded on the affirmation of the constructed corner. There
are no “free corners” on exposed edges of any Clark and Menefee configurations. The modernist strife
for spatial extension is replaced by the primary definition of the space marked by a reentrant corner,
complete with the implied diagonal view. Extension, flow of space, continuity, transparency,--modernist
keywords identifying phenomenal qualities sought in compartments and configurations—are shown to
exist in the buildings by Clark and Menefee not by seemingly negating corners, but by truly opening
views across a diagonal. The L-shaped configuration is therefore an underlying configurational type in
Clark and Menefee’s compartments and configurations.
Middleton Inn and the Lucy Daniels Foundation create such a counterbalance between secure
grounds and deference to their surroundings by two-sided enclosures…
Real materials, the full corner, the precise frame, the laconic two-sided enclosure are a few of
the formal elements of Clark and Menefee’s architecture…
Wang, Wilifried. “Places Transcending Time” in Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press: New
York, 2000.
“Deep Landscapes” by Richard Jensen
Three projects by Clark and Menefee in and around Charleston reveal the breadth and the depth
of their struggle to make buildings that reconcile, albeit incompletely, our occupation with the complex
and never full understanding of place. Middleton Inn, the Croffead House, and the Reid House each
respond to their site in different ways. By gauging these differences, the local is exposed as a distinct
condition which embodies the near, the middle and the far; the particular and the universal; the
contingent and the ideal.
The third, and built, proposal for Middleton Inn establishes relationships in ways that are not
directly and exclusively visual. The inn, sited even further from the garden than the previous designs but
closer to the Ashley River, establishes, like Middleton Place, a strong compositional interdependence
with the local structure of its site. Middleton place connects land and water by reinforcing an axis
suggested by a rare straight run in the Ashley River. Middleton Inn aligns itself along this same line of
the river and establishes a boundary between the dense forest and a clearing overlooking the river and
its wetlands. The site, the remnants of an abandoned phosphate mine, was discovered by the
architects, as one would find a ruin or a stone wall in the woods. The form of the mine itself, a level
clearing framed by an L-shaped incision in the earth, suggested the shape of the building. The site
eliminated the need to cut the dense forest as the disturbed earth of the mine repelled encroachment
of the live oak forest and supported only pine trees in the clearing. The mine, like the terraces of
Middleton Place, reflects its violent origins: one shaped by industry, the other shaped by slavery.
A stucco-clad masonry wall reinforces the edge of the inn and establishes itself as boundary.
Approached through the thickness of the oaks, the inn first appears as a ruin, like its neighbor, set in the
darkness of the overgrown forest. Large openings in the wall frame views to the Ashley River, or are
infilled with wood, painted dark so to disappear at a distance and strengthen the reading of a found
ruin. The image of a ruin is reiterated at the Lodge where the wall erodes and is punctuated with the
free-standing chimney. From the terrace, the wall frames views back to the forest. Like the ruins of
Sheldon Church near Beaufort, South Carolina, this condition blurs the distinction between landscape
and building, and of inside and outside.
The L-configuration of the inn is a form that suggests but does not completely enclose the space
of the court. More importantly, the form defers to the landscape for its completion, as do the single
houses of Charleston. This association is not one of appearance, but of quality…The terrace at
Middleton Inn is lower than the surrounding forest, reinforcing its condition more as boundary than as
object. The single right angle of the wall suggests distention and presents the terrace as part of the
landscape.
The masonry wall, rising powerfully from the earth like the old live oaks, is rendered in gray
stucco, the color of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, and planted with ivy. Cradled between the wall and
the transverse piers, the wooden guest rooms sit more delicately in their site. Reveals drawn at their
edges and base confirm their temporal and somewhat foreign position in their place. The surface of the
rooms are taut like cabinetry and painted Charleston green, a black-green color typically used in
Charleston to protect iron wood and ironwork.
The guest room interiors reaffirm the distinction between the wall and the cabinets. The
masonry wall, rendered in a gray-coat of stucco like the exterior, is cool and solid. The form of the
ceiling, a half vault, recalls the stone groined chambers in Robert Mills’ County Records Office. Having
suffered a long history of natural violence in the form of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, and
floods, Charleston values building, and re-building, as an act of resistance confirming collective values…
The guest rooms are warmer, finished like cabinets in local cypress, pine, and oak, and unlike
the wall, are adjustable. A solid panel shutter at the entry is closed by the guest upon entering the room
as the first act of occupation, claiming place. Operable pine shutters along the window wall modulate
light and provide privacy. The different kinds of places suggested by the masonry wall and the wood
“cabinets,” one enduring and the other transitory, play to the essence of the program—a traveler, an
inn, and a place—and recall Thoreau in his pursuit of a genuine and unfettered existence.
Clark and Menefee extend the architectural legacy of the American South in their attempt to
construct places of physical, cultural, and spiritual significance. The architects have not simply
appropriated historical form. Rather, they have engaged it by adopting strategies of adaption and
transformation as a means of knitting contemporary culture, building practices, and patterns of living
with enduring local values and customs, specific climatic and topographic conditions, and analogs
evoking images and memories. If what differentiates postmodernism from modernism it is that
cynicism has replaced idealism. Clark and Menefee have taken an alternative path, that of inclusive
counterpoising: the historical with the modern, the universal with the particular, the ideal with the
empirical, the high with the low. It is not an architecture of commentary or critique. It is an architecture
of construction, in the fullest definition of the word.
Jensen, Richard. “Deep Landscapes” in Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press: New York,
2000.
Clark and Menefee by Richard Jansen
The Inn is adjacent to Middleton Place, a National Historic Landmark well known for its gardens,
fifteen miles from Charleston, South Carolina. The site is a wooded bluff overlooking the Ashley River
and its marshlands. An early phosphate mining operation left terraces cut into the bluff. The principal
building of the inn is sited along the L-shaped embankment of the uppermost terrace, stretched along
its length so as to reinforce its condition as boundary rather than object. As boundary it separates two
different landscapes: the forest on one side and a lawn overlooking the river on the other. A slightly
raised earth promenade connects the three-story guest room section with the lodge, which houses the
lobby and café/bar as well as a large suite.
The building has two main components: a stucco-covered masonry armature that acts as a
retaining wall and contains bathrooms and dressing rooms, and glazed wooden cabins containing
bedrooms that face the lawn. The quality of light and materials is very different within the two
components. In the bathroom/dressing rooms the materials are cool, with grey marble and white tiles
under low-vaulted stucco ceilings. Light is admitted only through canted vertical slits by the lavatories,
and through sandblasted glass block niches beside the baths. The bedrooms are much warmer, with
woven rugs on oak floors, cypress paneling, and pine shutters in front of the glass walls to modulate
light and provide privacy.
The bedrooms are separated by masonry piers which contain the fireplaces. The piers extend
onto the promenade to become buttress-like stairs. As the stairs cross through the main armature of
the building, the wooden doorways, set back behind large masonry openings, are revealed. Between
the pairs of rooms, large openings allow the stairs to lead down to the lawn, with glimpses of the view
towards the river landscape beyond. The wall of the main armature is planted with ivy, which should
eventually cover it completely, fostering an ambiguity between landscape and architecture.
Jensen, Richard. Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 2000.