About Our Site

Welcome to Building My Charlotte: The Queen City and its Architects. Our site aspires to explore Charlotte architecturally over the past century. More specifically, this site aims to reflect on the architectural creations of Louis Asbury, Charles Hook, and Martin Boyer to understand how these men and their designs impacted Charlotte’s community and style. In order to appreciate how these architects and their designs changed Charlotte, this site utilizes various images from the Mary Boyer Collection of postcards, located within Special Collections of the J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. These postcards reveal artistic renderings of Charlotte in the early decades of the twentieth century and enable visitors to our site to see how outsiders perceived Charlotte. As the century progressed, architects like Asbury, Hook, and Boyer brought fresh visions of community and style to business, home, and cultural realms of the Queen City.

This website was created by Melissa Barnett, Jacquelyn McGuire, Jillian Staurowsky, and Christine Wilkie as part of their studies in the History Master’s program at UNC Charlotte. Under the direction of Dr. Karen Cox, these students sought to understand history in the digital age and all of its implementations. This site acknowledges the images, information, and guidance provided by Special Collections of J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. We hope you enjoy our site!