Myers Park and columns

I'm teaching this week at Queens University,  in the Myers Park neighborhood, in Charlotte NC. 

 It's a lush green campus in a prosperous neighborhood. The architecture is extraordinarily conservative--maybe not surprising for a banking town.

Myers Park looks like it was built as a garden suburb, I'd guess starting in the 1920s--though Queens U., which started as a women's college, was founded 1857, and there are a few 19th century houses around, including this beauty on Queens Road:

A lot of houses in the neighborhood, like this banker-Tudor (below), remind me of houses in Peter Taylor's short stories. Have you read Taylor's wonderful novel, A Summons to Memphis?

What really defines  architecture around here is the column thing. Columns everywhere. I guess they speak to a Southern reverence for tradition, even--or maybe especially--invented tradition.

 

You'll rarely see a house of any size in Myers Park without columns somewhere.  Heck, even the massive grocery store, Harris Tweeter, down the road--in a brand new building and clearly competing with Whole Foods--sports columns, columns, columns. 

The campus of Queens U. is very column-friendly. Doesn't matter the style or size of the building: they pretty much all get columns stapled on somewhere.  We're in red clay country (and termite country) here in North Carolina. so there's a lot of red brick in the domestic architecture, and on the campus. The local red brick is pleasing, kind of humble and elegant at the same time. This campus is verdant in early June, lots of shade trees, dappled lawns. But columns, columns everywhere, on buildings old and new.

The column thing gets a little aggressive. It certainly has swamped the Modernist moment, if there was one, in the South. The mosaic on the face of the library is one of the only modernist gestures on the Queens campus. It is a wonderful piece, I'd guess from the 1960s. But clearly it wasn't "traditional" enough, and quite recently a heavy new portico complete with--guess what--columns!-- has been slapped on the building.