Raleigh

Ruby Deluxe, at 415 South Salisbury Street, was Raleigh's answer to the want of an intimate queer bar, run by Tim Lemuel as a sister space to his dive bar The Night Rider and music venue The Wicked Witch. It made programming and physical space for trans people and queer people of colour deliberately, and ran The Body Party, a monthly Drag King Competition, and karaoke. [INDY Week] The District, at 317 West Morgan Street, the guide declines to call an LGBTQ restaurant, but describes it as frequented by Raleigh's LGBTQ community and welcoming to queer folks of all generations, with a come-as-you-are atmosphere on Sunday afternoons. [INDY Week] The J.S. Dorton Arena was built on the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh in 1952 and officially named the State Fair Arena, though fairgoers commonly called it the livestock pavilion or the "Cow Palace". At the opening of the 1961 State Fair it was rededicated as J.S. Dorton Arena, for the long-time State Fair manager Dr. J.S. Dorton. [North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services] The arena's design was created by Matthew Nowicki while he was head of the Department of Architecture at North Carolina State University. Nowicki was killed in an airplane accident shortly after being commissioned as the architect, and his personal friend William Henley Dietrick of Raleigh was named to the project. [North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services] Dorton Arena carries the world's first cable supported roof system: a saddle-shaped metal roof suspended on cables strung crosswise between two 90-foot parabolic arches that lean away from each other and cross about 26 feet above the ground. The suspension removes any need for structural steel supports and leaves no view obstruction from any seat, and the exterior walls are glare-reducing tinted glass. The building was placed on the National Historic Registry in 1972. [North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services] In 1946 the consolidated University of North Carolina trustees created the School of Architecture and Landscape Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, combining the landscape architecture programme from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences with the architecture programme from the College of Engineering. In September 1948 it was renamed the School of Design. [NC State University College of Design] On arriving as dean, Henry L. Kamphoefner hired George Matsumoto, James Fitzgibbons, Matthew Nowicki, Eduardo Catalano and Edward Waugh, and started a guest lecture programme that brought Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller to the Raleigh campus as visiting professors. Eschewing traditional styles, the school sought a new modern style for North Carolina and the South, with structures such as Raleigh's Dorton Arena. [NC State University College of Design] Henry Leveke Kamphoefner was founding dean of the School of Design at North Carolina State University from 1948 to 1972, and although he designed few buildings in his adopted state he had a powerful influence on the profession and on the development of modernism in North Carolina. He set out his philosophy in the State College catalog for 1948-1949. [NCSU Libraries, North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary] Frank Lloyd Wright spoke at Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh on 16 May 1950, drawing some 5,000 people. George Smart, executive director of NCModernist.org, describes it as the largest architecture lecture held anywhere up to that point. Wright called on schools in the South to forget their reverence of the past and to humanise their buildings. [Our State] The Raleigh Historic Development Commission names the establishment of the School of Design at North Carolina State College in 1948 as the most influential event in the architectural development of Raleigh in the second half of the twentieth century. The professors Kamphoefner brought in built houses for themselves in the Modern mode throughout Raleigh, promoted Modernist styles for domestic, institutional and commercial architecture, and continued to practise while training a new generation of local architects. [Raleigh Historic Development Commission] The Fadum House, designed in 1949 and completed in 1950, was the first modern design privately executed in Raleigh, and the first house in Wake County to use structural wood columns to support a double-cantilevered roof truss grid. [Raleigh Historic Development Commission] Estey Hall at Shaw University, dated 1874, was the first structure built for the higher education of African American women in the United States and is the oldest surviving building on the Shaw campus. It was designed by G. S. H. Appleget, with a cross-gabled roof, a framed cupola and windows accented by surrounds of stuccoed brick, and was rehabilitated by the Estey Hall Foundation in the late twentieth century. [Raleigh Historic Development Commission] Artspace occupies the historic Sanders Ford building in downtown Raleigh, which was once the city's livery and later the Sanders Ford car dealership. The 30,000-square-foot facility holds over 30 artists working in a variety of media alongside three exhibition spaces, education space and a gift shop, and is described as one of the largest open studio environments in the country and the premier organisation of its kind in North Carolina. [Artspace] Raleigh Arts worked with the artist TJ Mundy on a series of murals along Hargett Street, a public art series marking four buildings that played a major role on Black Main Street — the stretch that was the segregated business district and cultural hub for Raleigh's Black community. [WRAL] Calvin Esau Lightner, a mortician and architect, designed and built the Lightner Arcade and Hotel at 122 East Hargett Street with his brother Rayford Hanahan Lightner in 1921. Believed to be the first Black hotel in North Carolina, the brick building housed medical offices, lawyers, a pharmacy, The Carolinian newspaper and a hotel for Black visitors and travellers, with a ballroom, hotel and meeting rooms on the upper floors and businesses opening onto the Hargett Street sidewalk. [NCpedia] The Lightner's third-floor ballroom was where big band musicians played — Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway among them — and the building's life added to East Hargett's reputation as the "Black Main Street", alongside the Royal Theater and the Richard B. Harrison Library, Raleigh's first Black library. The building later became the Home Eckers Hotel and then the Peebles Hotel, and was destroyed by fire in 1970; Raleigh's central municipal bus depot now stands on the site. [NCpedia] The North Carolina Museum of Art was established in Raleigh in 1947, when the General Assembly appropriated $1 million for the purchase of Old Master paintings — an action by which North Carolina became the first state in the nation to use public funds to create an art collection for its citizens. The General Assembly authorised further funds in 1953 to renovate the former State Highway Building in Raleigh to display the collection, and in 1983 the museum left downtown Raleigh for new facilities on Blue Ridge Road. [NCpedia] The Contemporary Art Museum's building at 409 W. Martin Street was originally a 1910 two-storey brick warehouse built for the Allen Forge & Welding Company and enlarged around 1927 for the Brogden Produce Company. CAM bought the 20,000-square-foot building in the heart of the Warehouse District in 1997 for $460,000 and converted it, with BROOKS SCARPA of Los Angeles as design architect and CLEARSCAPES of Raleigh as architect of record; a new 900-square-foot glass entry structure under a folded-panel roof was added as a modern re-interpretation of the old loading dock. [Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh] Raleigh Denim Workshop + Curatory, founded by Victor Lytvinenko and Sarah Yarborough, was one of the original businesses in what is now downtown Raleigh's Warehouse District. It is both a storefront and a factory, where jeans are cut and sewn on machines made in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that the workshop maintains itself. [WALTER Magazine] Every pair of jeans made there is signed by the person who made it, and beyond the two founders a handful of the workshop's makers — among them Rosendo Antigua, an early employee still on the team — have earned the right to sign their own names. [WALTER Magazine] The Shimmer Wall, completed in 2008, is a wind-activated surface on the west elevation of the Raleigh Convention Center by the Raleigh firm Clearscapes. Coordination with the building's architects and engineers let it replace what would otherwise have been large unadorned architectural louvers, putting a moving image into the skyline of the City of Oaks. [Clearscapes]

“bills itself as a place for everyone—as long as you're not an asshole” [INDY Week]

“devoted to the development of an organic and indigenous architecture; its accompanying landscape architecture and the related arts, to meet the needs and conditions of the southern region.” [NCSU Libraries, North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary]

“it was the largest architecture lecture ever at that time” [Our State]

“The Depot District contains Raleigh’s only significant collection of buildings related to the heyday of railroad transportation and shipping in the Capital City. By recycling this important building, CAM preserves an important part of Raleigh’s history and demonstrates its commitment to sustainability and leadership in historic preservation.” [Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh]

“From the beginning, we signed the jeans because we cut and sewed every pair, we wanted to forge that connection between the wearer and the maker” [WALTER Magazine]