Quoins at the Corner

A very common architectural detail in Charleston is the “quoin”. The word is derived from the French word “coin”, pronounced “cwahn”, and means “corner”. The idea in architecture is to add a heavy corner structure to help support a building’s walls. The ancient Romans and Greeks figured out that load-bearing must be stabilized at certain points, otherwise walls could collapse, so heavy granite blocks were built in corners to create that stability.
The quoin also gives a building a very distinctive, decorative look, and as classic architectural styles influenced Western Europe by the 17th century, quoins became all the rage. This idea came to Charleston in a variety of forms by the 1720’s, with new Georgian styles in buildings that usually mimicked the stone corner with sections of brick that were built to protrude, then covered with stucco to resemble a solid block.
Some expensively-built buildings, such as the 1801 City Hall (built as a Federal bank), feature true stone quoins, but the vast majority of quoins around the city are brick beneath, stucco on top.
As a young boy growing up on Legare Street, I learned the gret value of quoins to downtown residents who had locked themselves out of the house. A quoin is a fairly easy climb to get to a second floor piazza, and was most notably used at our old family house in 1985. My brother was getting married in Columbia, two hours away, and after the ceremony, was to fly off to his honeymoon. He realized, leaving the church, that his and his new bride’s passports were sitting back on Legare Street. So, we called a neighbor, she climbed up the quoins to the second-floor piazza, let herself in the house, grabbed the passports, and sent them by courier to Atlanta, where the flight was departing. The passports got there, the honeymoon was a success, and it all was made possible by the ancient idea of the quoin.