Visitors to Charleston, South Carolina, come for a taste of the old world in the new. This city’s Colonial, Georgian, Federal, and even Victorian architecture remains remarkably well-preserved and well-mimicked. Tourists wander through romantic cobblestone streets framed by palm trees and antebellum mansions. It’s easy to get lost in Charleston’s Southern charm and forget the stories these buildings tell.

For students and craftspeople at the American College of the Building Arts, these histories are never far from sight—nor mind.

“We’re living in a big preservation workshop,” says Markus Damwerth, a third-generation master carpenter trained in Germany’s rigorous craft apprenticeship system. Charleston is an open-air classroom, ripe with opportunities for research and hands-on work. “It’s a rewarding experience,” Damwerth says. “They can drive by a house, look at it, and say, you know those shutters up there? I made them.”

ACBA students are meaningfully connected to the landscape in which they live through the work of their own hands, understanding the relevance of history to their modern lives. It’s the type of work and philosophy they currently have on display at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as part of the program area Next Generation Artisans in the Traditional Building Trades. Here, Damwerth and several of his colleagues and students have brought a bit of Charleston to Washington, D.C.

Serving as the school’s chair of architectural carpentry, Damwerth brings a European approach to preservation, acknowledging and reckoning with Charleston’s complex history. 

“In Europe, we look at a building and ask, what story does that building tell us over time? Have any changes been made, and for what reason?” Damwerth asks. “We might keep those changes, even if they aren’t beautiful, because they are part of the story, the heritage.” History is not merely the stories of beautiful things, Damwerth asserts. “You want to tell the whole story… that’s what people can learn from for the future.” This synthesis of history and futurity encapsulates the mission and vision of ACBA.

Synthesizing liberal arts education with hands-on experience in architectural trades, ACBA strives to encourage the preservation, enrichment, and understanding of global architectural heritage. The school educates a new generation of artisans and craftspeople who can both preserve historic structures while creating long-lasting, beautiful buildings for the future. To the unknowing outsider, this may seem anachronistic: training contemporary students in historic construction methods, using paper, pencil, and hand tools in an age of machinery and computer programs. For students like Thomas Dezii, it was precisely this emphasis on handicraft which sparked his interest in the school.

“Learning things by hand first is definitely the way to go,” Dezii emphasizes. Though most architecture and design programs encourage the use of computational technologies throughout the drafting process, ACBA’s freshmen learn how to hand draw plans, blueprints, and designs. “You don’t know how the software works until you understand how the lines themselves work,” Dezii explains. As a student in the wood department, Dezii didn’t use a power tool until his second semester. His work in architectural carpentry began with hand tools, allowing him to build knowledge of and familiarity with the material crucial to his trade.

“When you’re cutting with hand tools, you have to focus a lot more on the way you’re treating the wood,” Dezii continues. “When you use machinery, you forget about the wood itself. You’re focused on the big scary machine spinning a blade.” When he encounters a problem using power tools, he remembers what he learned “doing it the hard way.” This material knowledge allows Dezii to focus on process, something he understands as key to “doing good work.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with using screws, but sometimes proper joinery is just better,” Dezii says. “Why would you just slap it together when you can really make something that will last?”

For architecture student Isabel Wood, this understanding of design and construction processes provides insight into the historical precedents from which contemporary construction practices emerge—vital context informing her work in classical architecture. Wood notes that ACBA has forced her to think more intentionally and consider the human scale of her designs.

“I’ve come here to learn architecture in this specific way,” she says. “Instead of having abstract ideas or very abstract models, ACBA asks you, how are people going to experience this?” Employing traditional craft methods of construction and design allows the resulting structures to retain a human touch as spaces made for living.

This interest in human scale, proportions, and use are vital to Wood, who sees these slower processes of drafting and design as countering the proliferation of technologies like artificial intelligence. “People skip over the process which gets you to that beautiful thing,” she says. “But these processes help us understand the world. Asking why something was built that way, how it was built, how that impacts the way you’re experiencing it—you gain a different perspective. It changes how people go about using buildings or using the product of a trade.”

Joseph Kincannon, ACBA’s chair and professor of heritage masonry and stone carving, underscores the importance of traditional methods as grounding and restorative for students. Stone carving and cutting, like every trade at ACBA, requires an impressive amount of focus and a willingness to slow down, concentrate.

“You can see it almost within the first semester,” Kincannon notes. “They’re not looking at their phones as much, slowing down to be more meditative. It’s very encouraging for me. There’s so much coming at these young students at all times of day, with social media and all the demands of life.”

Tatum Connor came to ACBA from Georgia Tech, where she studied computational media. Like so many young people, she started college during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her major’s focus on computer science and user interfaces meant she spent all day, every day, engrossed in her laptop screen. “I was craving human interaction and working with my hands,” Connor says. That craving brought her to ACBA and into Kincannon’s classroom, where she, too, discovered the beauty of slow working and process.

“I knew it was going to be a slow craft, and I was worried about getting bored,” she says. “At the time I had TikTok, and I was just literally scrolling all the time. Then your attention span goes down. I was like, how am I supposed to focus on this one thing for the whole semester?” Connor repaired her attention span through stonework; this renewed focus has impacted her work within and beyond ACBA. “It’s satisfying to work on something for a long time,” she explains. “You tend to be pretty proud of it.”

Connor sees her work and that of her peers as breaking down another barrier fostered by technology: loneliness. “I believe that creating beautiful places warms you up to human connection,” she says.

Wood agrees. “I feel like that’s missing a lot in today’s world,” she adds. “People don’t really like to talk to each other much anymore. What we have here—the collaboration, going back to antiques with classical architecture—it’s about the humanity and that connection between things.”

ACBA is a place of connection—between trades, maker and object, structure and inhabitant. With all the trades under one roof, the school is a hotbed of conversation and collaboration.

“Architecture students can come down and see their designs incorporated into wood detailing, or stone, or plaster,” Kincannon explains. “I think that’s the most important, most valuable aspect of the school: we all work together, students and staff. We all borrow from each other and it grows from there, rather than being isolated and competitive.”

Wood agrees, citing a conversation she had with another architecture student and two blacksmiths. “People will come into the forge and just start asking questions, like what are you doing? How? Why?” she says, describing the experience of her blacksmithing peers. “Those perspectives are incredibly valuable. If no one is asking you these questions except for the professors, you lose the knowledge.”

These workshop exchanges are common, with the experimental act of making serving as ACBA’s great equalizer. The classroom structure is more traditional: knowledge is passed from professors—masters of their craft who often possess robust professional experience—to students. However, Wood notes that students often take on mentorship roles. “The senior architecture students teach the junior architects, who teach the sophomores, who teach the freshmen. There’s a system and a bulk of knowledge that’s continuing to build as there are more students.”

Phillip Smith, ACBA’s professor of sustainable architecture and design, emphasizes the importance of material knowledge and an awareness of traditional building crafts as imbuing architecture with a sense of place. “There’s been a series of cultural and historic events leading to the development of a place, its buildings, culture, or even language,” Smith explains. “That’s why people go to Rome, to Greece. That’s why people love these traditional, beautiful, romantic places. Place and identity are connected.”

Charleston’s tourists are aware of this, even unconsciously. It’s what brings people to the city—the old structures lend it atmosphere, character, specificity. In the twenty-first century, most urban spaces are sites of near-constant development and redevelopment. But cities like Charleston, with beautiful and still functional buildings from the early eighteenth century, feel real, grounded.

Despite Charleston’s strong material connection to complex histories of racial oppression, Smith rebukes the myth of classical architecture’s inherent racism. “Is there a legacy of slavery and oppression that comes with classical, traditional architecture? Absolutely,” Smith affirms. “Every building in Charleston, from 1680 to 1865, was built, crafted, detailed by enslaved labor. But you can’t simply throw the building culture of a place, a people, away.” There’s something to learn from these buildings, these histories, which should not be suppressed or ignored.

Damwerth agrees. “When I tell people’s that a worker’s house or slave cabin is part of our national heritage, they often disagree. We might not like it, but it’s part of the story, and we can learn from it.”

For ACBA’s professors and students, the structures we are surrounded by—in Charleston and across the country—are tangible manifestations of people, of culture, of American life. To ignore, reject, and destroy them simply because they complicate our understanding of American history is to rob ourselves of valuable context which helps us understand our contemporary condition.

For Smith and his students, classical architecture is about more than aesthetics. “It’s all about the durability. What’s the point of designing a building that’s only going to last for thirty years, and then need to be rebuilt again?” The importance of these craft traditions is not limited to the educational opportunity they provide as living history. The methods of design and construction they employ can be used to resolve deeply relevant and current issues of sustainability.

“We are in an energy crisis, which contributes to our climate crisis,” Smith explains. “We’re going to have to start to decide how we build to counter this. There’s no reason to be building new homes out of wood every thirty years when we can just build them one time, like a Charleston single house that’s been around since 1830.” Students recognize and respond to these concerns in their own work through both historic preservation efforts and contemporary projects.

“Preserving our built environment is really important,” stresses Christina Butler, ACBA’s provost and chair of general education. “These are cultural entities. They tell a story. We lose them, we lose an entire chapter of American history.”

Despite serving as professor of historic preservation, Butler underscores the importance of applying traditional trades to forward-looking projects. “If we want to have buildings worth keeping to become the next chapter of American history, we have to build properly. We need to reincorporate traditional trades because a lot of these practices are really sustainable.”

Butler appreciates that students are looking to apply traditional methods to contemporary construction and has done so herself. Both she and her husband worked to build a modern home which resembles—and functions like—a construction project from the 1750s. “If my air conditioning goes out, I can open my windows for airflow because the form is identical to the historic version.”

Contrast this with new-build Charleston apartments whose windows don’t open. With blackouts and brownouts increasing, a Charleston summer where temperatures rise into triple digits turns these homes into stuffy furnaces. Historic Charleston designers and craftspeople lacked air conditioning and built homes which accommodated the heat. Butler expands upon Smith’s notion of place-based construction, explaining that “vernacular practices aren’t just about tradition for the sake of tradition. They respond to available material, cultural needs, climate.”

Butler emphasizes the importance of responding to environmental needs—“that’s how we should be building.” But with so much of American architecture being new—often less than thirty years old—we lose the specificity and context regional traditions provide. “You can’t learn how to build sustainable in a community where all of that has been erased,” Butler explains. ACBA’s students are lucky to live in one of the country’s rare cities which has maintained its historic structures, allowing students to learn from them.

At ACBA, students learn to sustain design and construction methods which invisibly shaped the lives we lead today. “Where would we be without the blacksmiths or the stone carvers who figured out how to do this in the first place?” Wood asks.

Students like Connor and Dezii affirm ACBA’s impact on their ways of seeing and understanding the world around them, returning to those ideas of slowness and focus. Since August, Connor has been working on a fountainhead featuring a large-scale female face. “When I was carving the eyes, and thinking of the depth in the corner of your eye, I was staring at people’s faces to study them,” she says. “It’s infiltrated my life in the weirdest way.”

ACBA also changed Dezii’s approach to woodworking and carpentry. His education encourages him to stop, think, and ask questions of his work. “What is the purpose? What am I doing, and how?” Dezii explains. “That little moment, even if it’s half a second, changes everything. It makes me work consciously.”

Connor agrees, emphasizing, “Intentionally is important. We’re making things that will last beyond my lifetime. I don’t want to be making something meaningless. I want it to have a purpose.”

Wood agrees. When asked why this pursuit is meaningful, she pauses. She thinks, rolling the question in her head—there’s the care ACBA cultivates. “You can’t take this away,” she finally says. “This work comes from my hands and heart, so it will always be there. It’s irreplaceable.”

Meet students and mentors at the American College of the Building Arts at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival this week through July 7.

Astrid Bridgwood is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a master’s candidate at the University of Edinburgh studying modern and contemporary art.