Jack E. Duncan III

I am a classical designer, urbanist, and educator working at the intersection of architectural practice, historic preservation, and architectural and urban education. Based in Charleston, my work is grounded in the study of historic cities and the belief that preservation is not a constraint on architecture, but the discipline through which architectural judgment is formed. It is where memory, craft, and proportion are learned through direct engagement with buildings, materials, and places, and where architecture is understood as a civic art rather than a stylistic exercise.

I hold a Master of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame and dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Historic Preservation & Community Planning and Art History from the College of Charleston. I previously served as Chair of Classical Architecture and the Allied Arts at the American College of the Building Arts, where I developed and led a curriculum centered on classical language, traditional craft, and the transmission of architectural knowledge across generations.

Today my work moves between the academy and practice. I teach studios in architectural design, urbanism, and the rendering of architecture and landscapes within the Historic Preservation and Community Planning program at the College of Charleston, while maintaining a Charleston-based design practice focused on preservation-minded residential architecture and urban work. This dual role keeps my teaching anchored in lived experience: real buildings, real constraints, and the accumulated intelligence of historic environments.

In the studio, students are asked not simply to draw or design, but to study how cities and buildings endure, adapt, and retain meaning over time. Charleston itself becomes a laboratory for understanding architecture as part of a long civic tradition, where proportion, material craft, and urban form have been refined through generations of building.

Across teaching, research, and practice, I approach historic architecture as a living tradition that must be actively transmitted, not merely protected. Preservation, in this sense, is an educational act and a civic responsibility. It requires clarity of judgment, respect for inherited form, and the confidence to build with continuity in historic places where the past remains present and instructive.