“Art is a result, not a product,” wrote Ralph Adams Cram, a leading American architect of the early 1900s, who makes more than one appearance in these pages. Buildings are the result of many things: of time and place, of regional culture, and even, to use a word no longer fashionable, of civilization. And of people. My Charleston story involves a group of present-day builders: a self-taught lover of Byzantine architecture, an Air Force pilot, a trained architect who is also an accomplished craftsman, a developer who calls himself a civic artist, and a bluegrass mandolin player who dreams of Palladio. A motley crew, brought together by circumstance, curiosity, friendship, and love of their adopted city. And by love of building—all sorts of building: a bedecked Moorish house, an onion-domed Orthodox church, a spooky Victorian castle, and a latter-day medieval compound. My protagonists’ quirky approach to architecture and urbanism exhibits a kind of amateur mastery that runs against our cultural obsession with globe-trotting architect-for-hire expertise. Call it locatecture.