plantation as monument Cultural geographer J B Jackson distinguishes between two types of monuments: hortatory and vernacular. 4 A hortatory monument, such as a war memorial, is an ‘echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual’ that reminds us of a shared obligation, ‘keep[ing] us on the beaten path, loyal to tradition’. These monuments are in places where there is a shared and ‘strong sense of religious or political past’ and a concern about origins. A vernacular monument, such as Colonial Williamsburg, is unconcerned with specific people or dates and recall how everyday life used to be , often as an evocation of an imagined golden age when things were better. Middleton Place has qualities of both a hortatory and a vernacular monument. It provides a sense of how life used to be for some living on the Ashley River in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the primary story being told is the Middleton family, their lives and accomplishments as central to the story of the region and the country. 5 The buildings of Middleton Place, including some slave quarters, workshops and barns, have been restored, preserved, conserved and maintained in a hortatory veneration: not re-purposed, but frozen in time — a present and actual echo of an elite antebellum South. 6 from Conde Nast’s Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours: Many travelers approach plantations, a cornerstone of tourism in the South, as they would parks, museums, or historical sites: a beautiful place to learn something about local history before having a cocktail or going out to dinner. But plantations need to be experienced differently. Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured and killed for hundreds of years on these lands. They are America’s concentration camps. Rather than shy away from the painful truth, plantations must expose it. They are a vital educational resource with which to combat modern-day racism. 7 4 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics . University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. 5 Hunt, Judith Lee. Beyond the Power of Fortune: The Middleton Family of South Carolina, 1784-1877 . University of Florida, Ph.D. dissertation, 2005. ufdcimages. uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/03/69/97/00001/beyondpoweroffor00hunt.pdf. 6 We should note that in 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the vast majority of Southern Whites did not enslave a single person, but were yeoman farmers, working their own or rented acreage. The institution of slavery was not primarily a question of economic viability, but of wealth creation by a relatively small number of families, an aristocracy. see also Doyle, Barbara, et al. Beyond the Fields: Slavery at Middleton Place . Middleton Place Foundation, 2008 7 Enelow-Snyder, Sarah. “An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours.” Condé Nast Traveler , 2021, cntraveler.com. Accessed 6/9/2023. see also Davis, Allison. “Please Don’t Get Married on a Plantation: After Charlottesville Can You Hear Me?” A Practical Wedding , 2018. apracticalwedding.com . Accessed 6/8/2023.
contingent architecture It is clear from W.G. Clark’s writings and Clark and Menefee’s body of work that their architecture is inextricable from the craft of building: that without building, there is no architecture. There is a clarity to the construction, a directness in the tectonic expression. The relationship to the ground is intentional. In the details, there is confidence without obsessiveness. The buildings are beautiful in their sufficiency. F irmitas, utilitas , and venustas are all at play. And the hope for a lasting architecture is central to Clark and Menefee’s thinking. Is it unfair to discuss the architecture and construction of the Middleton Inn within a framework that was so clearly not at issue in its design? The architecture of the inn seems to have been conceived apolitically and without explicit reference to Middleton Place, turning instead to a specific relationship between architecture and landscape, without obvious social concerns beyond accommodation of social occasion. But building sites are not neutral ground. Clark’s exquisite text ‘Replacement’ makes very clear that his values primarily regard architecture’s relationship to the natural world. The messy world of human relations, which can be so difficult to comprehend, much less interpret, makes architecture, more than any artistic discipline, contingent. Kenneth Frampton wrote that ‘behind our preoccupation with the autonomy of architecture lies an anxiety that derives in large measure from the fact that nothing could be less autonomous than architecture’. 8 One way in which architecture’s optimism for the future is expressed is in a building’s capacity to adapt to new realities. Buildings that last outlive their original programs and are maintained, and loved, for reasons that transcend use. Middleton Inn is surely one of those buildings. Its architecture is informed by, but not reliant on, the program for which it was designed. The inn’s longevity will require adaptation to new socio- political realities that will follow a different trajectory.
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8 Frampton, Kenneth. ‘Reflections on the Autonomy of Architecture: A Critique of Contemporary Production’. in Diane Ghirardo ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture . Bay Press, 1991. pp 7-26.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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