We have many interesting architectural features. Sherman burned Main Street (and did he ever! The pictures are really something else!) but we have other antebellum areas, along with some older buildings and charming early-20th-century bungalow neighborhoods.
Some highlights I’d reccommend:
South Carolina State House: There are people who say our State House would be the coolest in the land if the original plans, which included a square tower instead of a boring old cupola, had been followed. (These people tend to be from here, though.) The building was begun before the Civil War and was unfinished by the time Sherman showed up. You can see the stars on the wall and floors to mark the locations of the cannonball hits. It sustained a lot of damage in the fire but was fixed and finished in 1891. It has recently been restored and is a nice thing to visit. (Okay, and it has the damned flag in front of it still, but you don’t have to look at that.)
Robert Mills House: Robert Mills designed plenty of things you’ve heard of, including the Washington Monument. Other Robert Mills buildings in the area include the state mental hospital, which is a very lovely building that I’ve been told is carefully designed to have no windows through which you can see the full moon. His home is Classical Revival circa 1823 and in a little district of historical homes including the Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home, Hampton-Preston Mansion, and Mann-Simons Cottage. They are all well-preserved and very interesting.
University of South Carolina: While the modern USC buildings are ugly as homemade sin, the older buildings of the core campus are old and lovely. A walking tour of the Horseshoe in nice weather is reccommended. It includes the South Caroliniana Library, currently the home of the larger library’s large South Carolina collection, built in 1840, which was the first freestanding college library in America and has always been a library in one shape or form. It has also been recently restored.
We also have more industrial buildings from the 19th century, some of which have been restored in various ways. They’re trying to save the Olympia Mill, which I think is by far the loveliest cotton mill in the world, but nothing so far has worked out. There is another cotton mill near downtown that they’ve turned into the State Museum, and it’s a nice old building and a great museum. The Confederate printing factory decayed and decayed while people argued over plans to save it, and finally a Publix bought it and put a grocery store in it. I wish somebody had put something in it that would have kept it more in its original state, but Publix did do a decent job, considering.
We have many residential neighborhoods that have loads and loads of bungalows from building booms in the 20’s and right after World War II. They are lovely neighborhoods with big trees and all these darling little houses that, while they might have started out very similar to one another, have been renovated and added onto and personalized so much that they’re almost too charming for words. I know when most people talk about “architecture” they mean big old or new public buildings, or mansions, but I just love our old historic neighborhoods to death. (In fact, I just bought one of those cute little houses!)
Anyway, there’s a lot to see in Columbia, and not all of it’s Civil War-related - not by half! Although if you want attractive modern buildings you should probably look elsewhere, because most of our modern architecture here was hit with the ugly stick.
