By Ashley Perham
For HDMedia
The Municipal Auditorium Special Committee met Tuesday for the first time since April 2024.
The committee, made up of City Council members and members of the Coliseum & Convention Center board, heard a presentation on the December report that showed options for saving the building’s historic facade.
The report includes an option to save the wall as a standalone feature, which would require extensive permanent steel supports.
There is also an option to attach the facade to a new theater. This option would require adding extra square footage to the building to configure the facade with a modern theater layout.
Renovating the building and building a new auditorium without the facade are also options. Both cost about $25 million.
The City has set aside $1 million for the project so far.
Adam Krason with ZMM Architects and Engineers, who did the report on the facade, said he didn’t think there were two viable options to save the facade.
“I think you either save it and incorporate it into the new construction, or you demolish it,” he said.
Krason said that keeping the facade surrounded by steel buttresses without the building attached makes the wall lose “any real historical significance.”
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 for its local significance in architecture, entertainment and the performing arts. According to the building’s registration form, “It is an excellent representation of the Art Deco architectural style in a public building, and one of the finest extant examples in the greater Charleston area.”
“This great curve [of the facade] is representative of Art Deco innovation which broke with, yet reflected in part, the revivalist tradition in architectural style,” the form says.
Read more from HDMedia, here.
