P R OF I L E
RAY HUFF AS TOLD TO The Urban Electric Co.
PROFILE
R
RAY HUFF IS A NATURAL STORYTELLER. HE SETS THE SCENE, INTRODUCES THE PRIMARY CHARACTERS, LAYERS IN THE SUPPORTING DETAILS GENEROUSLY AND WITH GREAT
CARE AND THEN LETS THE ACTION UNFOLD AS HE CONNECTS THE MANY DOTS ALONG THE WAY. THE RESULT IS AN EXPERIENCE, AND REFLECTS RAY’S INNATE GIFT FOR GIVING FORM AND STRUCTURE TO THE CONCEPTUAL.
As a longtime architect and educator, Ray has applied that same thoughtful approach to his work over the past five decades. During nearly forty years in private practice, he took on projects in the public and private sectors and began his teaching career as a professor at the Clemson Architectural Center, an independent floating campus affiliated with Clemson University’s School of Architecture. Later, when he assumed the role of director and emeritus professor at the school and its sister institution, the Charleston Design Center, Ray pushed to broaden student offerings and connect more deeply to the city itself as a learning tool. All the while, he has remained engaged with civic and community organizations such as the Lowcountry Lowline, a planned linear park connecting downtown communities through the adaptive reuse of an old rail line, which have benefited enormously from his knowledge of and experience with public projects.
As a native Charlestonian, Ray also brings his deep knowledge of the city’s history and evolution to bear, recasting local history and the legacies of the past as a real-time model for confronting universally applicable issues, such as monument building and preservation guidelines, and innovating the kind of responses that will shape future projects. That ability to view Charleston’s complicated reality as a catalyst for thought and learning among a broader audience is what sets Ray apart. His story is one defined by connection, reflection and imagination—the kind of story, in other words, he tells best.
130
T H E C U R R E N T, V O L . 3
RAY HUFF AS TOLD TO
The Urban Electric Co.
/ ARCHITECTURE
R
Ray at home near Hampton Park.
B U I L D I N G B LO C K S Scenes from the Charleston Design Center, one of two related architectural institutions where Ray has spent the last few decades educating tomorrow’s visionaries.
“AT NIGHT, I WOULD FALL ASLEEP TO THE ROAR OF LIONS FROM THE ZOO AND THE MELODIES FLOATING IN FROM THE JAZZ XYLOPHONIST WHO LIVED NEXT DOOR.”
I
RAY HUFF in his own words...
interior designers in town during my junior or senior year of high school. She lived in the Jenkins Mikell
grew up in what is now called the Hampton Park Terrace neighborhood of Charleston, but
it didn’t have a name back then. We rented part of a house, and I remember it being really large. My room was converted from what was initially the piazza, so the floor sloped. I vividly remember taking my little model cars and letting them just roll down one side of the bedroom floor to the opposite wall. My mother was a school teacher and things weren’t easy or convenient for her at all. We didn’t have hot water—no one really did back then, which was around 1952—so we had to plan ahead for baths and that kind of thing. Same with air conditioning. It just wasn’t common in Charleston at the time. And the absence of those types of conveniences, coupled with a different approach to childhood, enabled more freedom and access to move around in the world around us. Later, I moved a few blocks away but it was the same type of experience, only closer to the border where different factions of the neighborhood met. (Where people live and why and how they arrived there is a fascinating history unto itself and I’ve always been intrigued by it.) There was a vibrant Greek community and a Jewish community and obviously a Black community—all of which reflected the patterns of settlement that prevailed at the time. And at the center of it was Hampton Park and, more interestingly for me as a youth, the zoo that used to be there. There was an aviary and there were lions and all sorts of exotic animals, and I’d walk past it on my way home from my sixth or seventh grade job as a delivery boy for a pharmacy that used to operate on Rutledge Avenue. At night, I’d open the windows to let the air circulate and fall asleep to the roar of lions from the zoo and, in the other direction, the melodies floating in from the jazz xylophonist who lived next door. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me. It was just life. It also taught me to look to the world around
House at the time, and opened me up to a broader understanding of our historic collection of architecture, something about which she was very passionate. I studied architecture at Clemson University, but the emphasis wasn’t as much on critical thinking and holistic value as it is today, something that came through in my private practice. My partner and I ran it for 40 years, and we both admit we were focused a bit too much on critical thinking and developing projects with a lasting societal impact. All good for the soul and mind, obviously, but not so lucrative in the commercial sense. But even then, I was teaching and engaging with the next generation of architects and designers, something which helped a lot when I took over as director of the Clemson Architectural Center. Fifty or so years ago, when the School of Architecture at Clemson University created its first floating campus in Genoa, Italy, to train citizen architects, I never imagined that Charleston would eventually become the third site for that program [the school also operates a location in Spain]. At the time, Europe was the destination for technical and conceptual thinking when it came to building design and a semester there was the best way to absorb that knowledge and have a real awakening. Architecture in America just wasn’t viewed on the same level in terms of “worldliness.” Today, that’s different, and a campus in Charleston (with some of the oldest and best preserved structures in the country) says so much about the way the field is evolving to focus on preservation and built environments here in the US. My hope is that it’s a model not just for education but also critical thinking and discussions around present-day issues. Young Ray would have benefited enormously from the program that exists here today.
me for stimulation and entertainment. And, because segregation was still in place functionally if not legally,
In the end, I’m just really privileged to be in academia
I walked everywhere and my experience of Charleston
and be able to develop programming and experiences
and sphere of influence was hyper-localized.
for young people that will ignite passions, encourage original thinking and stoke curiosity. I’m highly
It wasn’t until I got older and began to drive that I saw
conscious of each and every student—especially in
Charleston through a wider frame and found myself
today’s complicated learning situation—and want to
leaning toward architecture. Not that I knew anything
ensure that they get the support and instruction they
about architecture, or had any exposure to professional
need personally and professionally as their career paths
architects. I did, however, learn a great deal from an
begin to take shape. If I leave any kind of legacy, I hope
experience I had chauffeuring one of the original iconic
it’s that—a story that keeps going after I’ve gone.
T H E C U R R E N T, V O L . 3
/ ARCHITECTURE
133
OLD SOUL H A M P T O N PA R K M O N D AY, A U G U S T 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 11:13AM