Many of you may have already heard that our program will be moving from our current location at 292 Meeting Street to new quarters on the second floor of the Cigar Factory on East Bay Street. As we plan for relocation, we wanted to announce what we know about the building, our place in it, and when you can expect to hear about us packing and unpacking.
Built in the early 1880s as a textile mill, the Cigar Factory was damaged in the earthquake of 1886 and then repurposed as a factory for making cigars. At its busiest, the factory employed 1,400, many of the workers residing the neighborhood hugs the factory and spills toward Meeting Street (America Street is the principal north-south street in this neighborhood). A labor strike following WWII saw the protest song “We Shall Overcome” used for the first time there. Factory operations ceased in 1974 and a long period of vacancies alternating with failed schemes and partial use ended when an investment group took on rehabilitation of the building for office use, using rehabilitation tax credits as part of their funding mechanism. Long story made short: we will occupy a floor of an historic building that has an interesting back story.
Clemson will lease 24,000 square feet of usable space at the Cigar Factory. Our program, CAC.C (the school of architecture’s Charleston outpost, and a PhD program in Architecture&Health will move in this summer. There is also space for a proposed MS in urban design and for landscape architecture programs.
We’re now at work refining plans for the upfit of this space to meet our needs. MSHP space in the Cigar Factory will include two studios, faculty offices, seminar rooms, storage, AV/IT storage, and new shiny laboratories. Our small library will be melded with CAC.C’s and be housed in a small on-site library (which will be placed in the tower that once housed the factory’s elevator). A 100-seat classroom will give us a venue for lectures and other public programs. Display alcoves that face into our studios are being designed for our architectural fragments collection. We’ll post plans once they are approved.
Look for reports via Facebook as upfit proceeds!