Archinect - News

Plans for restorative New Lots Library are unveiled in Brooklyn

2024-12-09T14:00:00-05:00

MASS Design and the New York-based Marble Fairbanks Architects are behind a new library project in Brooklyn that combines restorative justice with the needs of the community into one dynamic 25,000-square-foot design.

The forthcoming New Lots Library will be realized on a site historically recognized as a burial ground for former slaves and freedpersons dating to the Revolutionary War era, simultaneously acknowledging their experiences and the fact that slavery as an institution was legal in New York until two decades into the 19th century.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Architects

Through an extensive community feedback process, both firms have envisioned a library whose activity is centered around a unifying 'Palaver' inspired by traditional African spaces used for collective community gatherings and defined by 'branch-like' radial beams extending outward to cover the reading areas and collection rooms.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Ar...

BIG-designed National Juneteenth Museum receives $1 million grant

2023-08-09T13:45:00-04:00

Bank of America has awarded a $1 million grant towards the development of the National Juneteenth Museum, designed by BIG. The money will contribute to the project’s estimated $70 million price tag. Located in Fort Worth’s Historic Southside neighborhood, the museum will serve as an epicenter for awareness and preservation of Juneteenth’s history. It also aims to revitalize the surrounding area by acting as an economic catalyst.

The 50,000-square-foot museum takes on a handcrafted design, utilizing materials such as heavy timber. It also draws on the local architecture of gabled rooftops. The structure’s undulating roof results in a series of peaks and valleys that combine to form a star-shaped courtyard in the middle of the museum. In addition, the building will feature 10,000 square feet of exhibit galleries, a 250-seat theater to host lectures, a speaker series, performances, and more, a black box, a business incubator for local entrepreneurs, and a food hall featuring local vend...

Davidson College unveils plans for a new memorial to enslaved and exploited people, led by Hank Willis Thomas and Perkins&Will

2023-06-01T12:17:00-04:00

Davidson College has unveiled its plans for a new memorial to the enslaved and exploited people whose hands built the 186-year-old liberal arts institution. The design effort of the sculpture titled “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited” will be led by Perkins&Will in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas.

The artist of Boston's new commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King will deliver a similar monumental bronze sculpture that emerges prominently from a refuge-like space nearby the campus’s original Oak and Elm buildings.

Thomas was selected for the commission following a two-year search process led by alumni that reflects similar reconciliation efforts at Brown University, The College of William & Mary, UNC Chapel Hill, and perhaps most notably, the Höweler+Yoon project at the University of Virginia spearheaded by alumna Mabel O. Wilson.

A new documentary explores the process behind UVA's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers for the first time

2022-11-07T17:42:00-05:00

A new documentary from local filmmaker Erik Duda exploring the process and impact of the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers has been released, providing insights into the creation of one of the most important public monuments in America since the opening of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982.

Titled The Lives Between the Lines, Duda’s documentary was included as part of this year’s Virginia Film Festival and offers a look into the implementation, design, and eventual construction of the monument, which, unfortunately, had to open in a subdued ceremony last year owing to health concerns related to the pandemic.

Previously on Archinect: A decade in the making, UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers begins to take shape

The memorial was first commissioned in 2013 as part of the UVA President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, which eventually led to the formation of a Community Engagement Committee comprised of descendants of the enslaved communities ...

Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed set an opening date for South Carolina’s International African American Museum

2022-08-04T13:50:00-04:00

The much-awaited debut of the Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners-designed International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, now has an official opening date after the latter announced it will be available to the public for the first time on January 21st, 2023.

This is an important project to both offices as over 22 years of planning have gone into the creation of the almost $100 million new institution. Its location on the site of the city’s former Gadsden’s Wharf is significant, too, as Charleston Harbor is considered the “ground zero” of the North Atlantic slave trade, a place where 48.1% of all enslaved Africans entered the United States, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor, historian, and early contributor to the project.

Image courtesy International African American Museum.

The museum's website, therefore, outlines a mission to “create an opportunity for visitors to engage with authentic and lesser-known history through tran...

David Adjaye selected to design Barbados Heritage District dedicated to memorializing slavery

2021-12-06T18:27:00-05:00

Last Friday, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced the development of the Barbados Heritage District with Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye leading its design. The cultural center will be located at Newton Plantation, located just outside the country’s capital Bridgetown.

The announcement arrives in the wake of Barbados’ transition to a Parliamentary Republic, which saw the removal of Queen Elizabeth as its head of state and the induction of Sandra Mason as its president. According to the country’s statement, the district will be “dedicated to accurately recounting the historic and contemporary impact of slavery on Barbados and on the lives of individuals, cultures, and nations of the Western hemisphere.” It will include a major global research institute, a museum that will house the largest collection of British slave records outside of the United Kingdom, and a memorial located at the Newton Burial Ground, the largest and earliest slave burial ground in Barbado...

Hidden cartographies: the vanishing graves of the enslaved in Death Alley, Louisiana

2021-06-29T17:30:00-04:00

The London-based research group, Forensic Architecture (FA), published a new project on Monday, June 28, called “Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana,” which was featured by the New York Times.

A short documentary on the Times website tells the story of the fight to identify and preserve the graves of enslaved people in Louisiana’s Death Alley, also known as Cancer Alley. Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the area along the Mississippi River is known for its deadly concentration of polluting petrochemical facilities, which have led to high rates of cancer in the local, majority-Black population. According to advocates, identifying and preserving these burial sites is a way to memorialize the enslaved Black people who built Louisiana’s economy; it also raises awareness of the connection between current day structural racism and the history of capitalist development. Helping to identify and visualize the extent of these sites, FA mobilizes the architect’s tools in suppor...

Grace Farms' Design for Freedom movement seeks to eradicate forced labor from the production of building materials

2020-10-28T12:48:00-04:00

Sharon Prince, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Grace Farms Foundation, announced this week Design for Freedom, a new movement to eradicate modern slavery from the built environment by addressing the systemic use of forced labor in the building materials supply chain.

"Examining our building materials supply chain is a moral and legal imperative,” said Prince in a statement. “Almost all modern construction projects are subsidized with slavery, due to unchecked forced labor that permeates thousands of raw and composite materials sourced both locally in the United States and globally. While initial attention concentrated on developing ethical labor practices on construction and job sites, we now seek to extend these regulations to the building materials supply chain, including oversight of sub-contractors, manufacturers, and commodities-level providers in such areas as forestry, fiber, and mining."

Design for Freedom began back in 2017, when Prince and the late Bill Menking, Fo...

Southern plantations adapt to the Black Lives Matter era

2020-08-13T13:43:00-04:00

While much attention has been paid this summer to the removal of racist monuments to the confederacy, America's legacy of historic plantations continues on as a lucrative, popular, and deeply controversial industry.

A transformation has been taking place within some of the organizations and entities that own and operate these sites, however, writes Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University, in The Boston Globe.

Previously on Archinect: "Architect Jobie Hill is creating a national survey of America's slave houses." Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Preservation Maryland.

Miles explores the conflicting messages sent by the operators of some of these estates in recent months as support for the Movement for Black Lives has increased even among the operators of former plantations.

Miles also highlights Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina has a new type of historic plantation that "consciously centers African and African American e...

Houston realtors retire use of "master bedroom"

2020-06-30T12:15:00-04:00

The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) will no longer use the term "master" to describe the primary bedroom of a home on their housing listings. The term "master" has roots in slavery, and HAR says the topic of removing it from realty terminology has been debated for years. Now, the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) platform that HAR uses for listings, will use "primary bedroom" and "primary bath," HAR said in a statement to CBS News.

"The origin of the terms is debated, and we are not saying they are rooted in slavery. Others didn't personally view them as sexist or racist but believed we should change the terms for anyone else who might find them objectionable. The consensus was that Primary describes the rooms equally as well as Master while avoiding any possible misperceptions," a statement by HAR reads as reported by CBS News.

London Metropolitan University renames its School of Art, Architecture and Design to dissociate from slave trader John Cass

2020-06-11T18:27:00-04:00

In a statement issued this week, London Metropolitan University announced the decision to rename its Art, Architecture and Design School and remove the name of John Cass, an English merchant who was instrumental in the early development of the slave trade in the late 17th and early 18th century.

The name change follows widespread protests against racial injustice around the world, including a reevaluation of public realm landmarks, statues, and monuments as announced by London Mayor Sadiq Kahn.

Read the full statement issued by the university's vice-chancellor Professor Lynn Dobbs below:

Following consultation with the Students’ Union, staff, and our Board of Governors we have taken the decision to remove the name of Sir John Cass from our Art, Architecture and Design School. We recognise that the use of Sir John Cass’ name contributes to the redemption of a man without acknowledging the enormous pain he caused as a major figure in the early development of the slave trade, and the ...

Architect Jobie Hill is creating a national survey of America's slave houses

2020-02-28T11:00:00-05:00

Since 2012, Hill has surveyed hundreds of structures that she believes once served as a home to enslaved African Americans. More often than not, the buildings bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground.

Writing in Atlas Obscura, writer Sabrina Imbler takes an in-depth look at the work of Jobie Hill, the Iowa City architect who started Saving Slave Houses, a project that aims to catalog, document, and ultimately preserve the remaining "living and working environments of enslaved people" in America.

Among many other thought-provoking comments, Hill tells Imbler, “There has never been a national survey of slave houses, except for the one I’m trying to do."

Statues of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman unveiled in Maryland capitol

2020-02-24T11:04:00-05:00

At a time when states are debating the removal of Confederate monuments, Maryland unveiled bronze statues of famed abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass during a ceremony Monday night in the Maryland State House. The life-sized statues were dedicated during a special joint session of the Maryland General Assembly in the Old House Chamber, the room where slavery was abolished in the state in 1864.

According to ABC News, the statues were dedicated during Black History Month and have been made to show Tubman and Douglass as they would have appeared in age and dress in 1864.

Harriet Tubman. Photo by Danielle E. Gaines. Via marylandmatters.org

"A mark of true greatness is shining light on a system of oppression and having the courage to change it," ABC News reports Adrienne Jones, the state's first black and first female House speaker saying in regards to the new installment. "The statues are a reminder that our laws aren’t always right or just. But there’s always room for improvement."

Assessing the built legacy of America's slave auction sites

2020-02-13T18:52:00-05:00

The latest installment of The New York Times' 1619 Project takes a look at the largely erased built legacy of slavery in America. The article visits a collection of sites that had to be uncovered more or less through original research, as little documentation and few historical markers exist with regards to these places.

Writer Anne C. Bailey and photographer Dannielle Bowman take a look at what remains of this sordid legacy. In the article, Bailey writes, "After the Civil War, most former auction sites quietly blended into the main streets of today. Except for the occasional marker or museum, there was no record of the horror of separation suffered by many black families."

Enslaved people owned by Thomas Jefferson were sold on the steps of Monticello to help pay off the ex-president's debts following his death in 1826. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user David Broad.

Bailey adds, "The sales took place all over the growing nation — in taverns, town squares and train stations, on riverb...

Slavery and liberty: A new exhibit explores the Thomas Jefferson paradox

2019-10-23T13:07:00-04:00

The Chrysler Museum of Art on the University of Virginia campus will put on an exhibit entitled "Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals."

It looks at the Jefferson's influences and ideas around architecture, including displays of models based on his designs, reports Associated Press (AP). On the one hand, Jefferson was a man who sought to create architecture that symbolized "liberty and democracy," but on the other, he used enslaved Americans to construct the very same structures designed to embody these ideals.

"They helped build everything from Virginia's Statehouse—a precursor to the Capital Building in Washington—to the University of Virginia and Jefferson's home of Monticello," writes AP, speaking of Jefferson's use of slave labor.

The exhibit opens this Saturday. It "juxtaposes Jefferson's visions with the realities of slavery." The exhibition catalogue, Thomas Jefferson, Architect, includes contributions from Guido ...

A decade in the making, UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers begins to take shape

2019-10-19T16:10:00-04:00

“The memorial is a circle, a continuous ring never ending, an opening for people to step inside and contemplate, to learn what slavery was about. For the community, I hope it enlightens young and old, and reminds everyone that slavery was a very evil part of our history.”

Members of the University of Virginia share their personal experiences and connections to the currently-under-construction Memorial to Enslaved Laborers that is taking shape on the campus.

The university’s Board of Visitors has chosen an interdisciplinary team to bring the project to life that includes Höweler+Yoon, UVA alumna Mabel O. Wilson; Frank Dukes, past director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation in the UVA School of Architecture; Gregg Bleam, a UVA-based landscape architect; and the artist Eto Otitigbe.

That traffic jam you're stuck in? Blame white supremacy

2019-08-15T19:59:00-04:00

This intertwined history of infrastructure and racial inequality extended into the 1950s and 1960s with the creation of the Interstate highway system. As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta—local expressways at first, then Interstates—were steered along routes that bulldozed “blighted” neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities.

Writing in The New York Times, Kevin M. Kruse connects the dots between highway planning and America's historical campaign to keep African Americans "in their place," an impetus that can be traced back to slavery and its modern day manifestations: segregation, urban renewal, redlining, gentrification, and mass incarceration.

The story is part of The New York Times' 1619 Project, a collection of stories and reports that "reframe the country's history" by foregrounding America's conception in its historical relationship to slavery.

America's long overdue memorial to the victims of lynchings opens in Alabama today

2018-04-26T14:01:00-04:00

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

In a week that began with Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a new chapter of American history has begun today with the official opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a place so central to the crimes and injustice of white supremacy in the South. The memorial commemorates and dignifies the more than 4,400 black men, women, and children who were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

Image: Equal Justice Initiative

"The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given," Campbell Robertson writes for the New York Times. "But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings."

Why Build a Lynching Memorial? Video via Equal Justice Initiative on YouTube.

The memorial aims to educate for a more informed dialogue and includes a section with material on volunteer opportuni...

London man jailed for forcing 15 construction workers into slavery

2018-04-24T14:13:00-04:00

A Romanian man who used threats of violence and indebtedness to keep a group of his countrymen as slaves while he pocketed their wages from a London construction site has been sentenced to seven years in jail.

David Lupu, a 29-year-old Romanian, was found guilty of holding 15 of his countrymen in slavery or servitude in two small one-bedroom apartments in East London and sentenced to seven years in jail.

Lupu had lured the men to work as demolition workers in the UK, falsely promising a wage of £50 a day for work and a good standard of living accommodation, however took away the victims' ID cards upon arrival and threatened that they had to pay hundreds of pounds for permits and certificates to work in the UK. When Lupu failed to pay them after one month of work, they confronted him, and, according to the London Metropolitan Police report, "his response was to threaten to beat them to death."

Two victims managed to escape when Lupu traveled to Romania and reported him to the police.

The Alabama memorial dedicated to African-American lynchings

2018-04-09T20:52:00-04:00

Uneven, rusted steel is meant to echo the many shades and skin tones of those African-Americans lynched.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which Oprah Winfrey
visited, opens to the public on April 26, 2018. She talked with criminal
defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is behind the project.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Amnesty International reports ongoing systematic exploitation of 2022 World Cup migrant workers

2017-12-22T15:23:00-05:00

Migrant workers constructing stadiums for the Qatar 2022 World Cup continue to be trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and exploitation, according to new research by Amnesty International. Fifa is already under pressure from its own advisory board to act over the kafala system, used to monitor migrant labourers, which has been described as modern slavery. Now, a survey by Amnesty has found two-thirds of migrant workers have paid excessive or illegal recruitment fees.

Despite promises from Qatari and FIFA officials about improved labor conditions, the situation for Nepali migrant workers building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup remain dire.

In its 2015 report Qatar: Profit and Loss. Counting the cost of modern day slavery in Qatar: What price freedom?, the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that "7,000 construction workers will die in Qatar before a ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup" and demanded that FIFA would make workers' right a central concern of the preparations. In response, FIFA launched a Human Rights Advisory Board in early 2017 and published its first report in November. Amnesty International welcomed the report but pointed out that it omitted "some key issues related to the Qatar 2022 World Cup."

Jean Nouvel rejects accusations of exploitation at Louvre Abu Dhabi

2017-09-25T15:31:00-04:00

The French architect Jean Nouvel has defended his Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, a massive domed complex that opens in November, from accusations it was built by exploited and abused migrant workers. [...] In an interview as the finishing touches are put to the colossal construction, the architect dismissed accusations over exploited workers as an “old question” and insisted conditions for those building the museum were better than for some employed in Europe.

"A 2015 a Human Rights Watch report," The Guardian explains, "suggested migrants working on the Louvre museum and neighbouring Guggenheim, part of a £18bn 'cultural hub' on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, were subjected to conditions amounting to forced labour including summary arrest and deportation if they complained."

Nouvel insists on having inspected the workers living quarters at the beginning of the project, resulting in no concerns: "We saw no problem."

Widespread human rights abuses of migrant laborers building the Gulf region's megaprojects have repeatedly been reported over the past years.

Looking into the White House's “much longer history” of slave labor

2016-07-28T15:17:00-04:00

I think it was a wonderful moment in American history. I thought what Michelle Obama was attempting to do was to draw that link to show that it isn't just what's going on in the White House now and isn't it great that there's a black family there, but there's a much longer history that needs to be appreciated... [It was] just grueling, grueling kind of work. And nobody was really willing ... to do it. So slave labor played a massive role in getting this city built.

During her speech at the DNC on Monday, First Lady Michelle Obama alluded to the White House's history of slave labor during the 1790s. NPR interviews Clarence Lusane, chairperson of Howard University's political science department and author of “The Black History of the White House”, who gives his two cents on the historically significant topic.

"7,000 construction workers will die in Qatar before a ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup," new ITUC report finds

2015-12-29T18:00:00-05:00

A report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has estimated that 7,000 workers will die before the first ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup. [...] “Qatar’s labour laws are ruinous for workers. All the government has done is to codify slavery. Employers can now even lend out workers to another employer without the worker’s consent for up to a year”

In its 2015 report Qatar: Profit and Loss. Counting the cost of modern day slavery in Qatar: What price freedom?, the ITUC demands that FIFA would make workers' right a central concern of the 2022 World Cup preparations. The organization has also called on Qatari authorities to take these immediate steps to improve workers' conditions:

End the kafala system starting with the elimination of the exit visa;
Allow worker representation – a collective voice with elected representatives and workplace committees;
Employment contracts through direct employment or large, reputable, recruitment companies;
A national minimum wage for all workers, and collective bargaining rights;
Proper labor inspection and grievance mechanisms, inclusive of contractors, and an independent labor court.

Click here to read the full report.

Previously in the Archinect news:

Employers Have Greater Leeway on Unpaid Internships, Court Rules

2015-07-03T11:37:00-04:00

Employers have considerable leeway to use unpaid interns legally when the work serves an educational purpose...

Writing for a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge John M. Walker Jr. held that the Labor Department’s criteria were both out of date and not binding on federal courts.

He argued that the proper way to determine workers’ status was to apply a “primary beneficiary test” — a concept proposed by Fox in which the worker can be considered an employee only if the employer benefits more from the relationship than the intern.

Judge Walker wrote that he and his fellow judges on the panel “agree with defendants that the proper question is whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary of the relationship.”

He further argued that the test should hinge largely on the internship’s educational benefits: for example, whether the internship was tied to the intern’s formal schooling and whether it occurred in an educational setting.

That new Texas Confederate Memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive

2015-06-22T14:15:00-04:00

In Orange, Texas, the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans just built a large Confederate memorial park, complete with a classical-ish monument featuring 13 columns—one for each of the states in the short-lived, and utterly defeated, Confederate States of America. [...] And this being Confederate sympathizers, they did not hesitate to build the memorial where the highway meets Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

Archinect Sessions Episode #19: Don't be Evil, Don't Throw Stones

2015-03-05T14:11:00-05:00

This week Amelia, Paul, Donna and Ken discuss the somewhat controversial Google Headquarters design by BIG and Heatherwick. On a completely different note, we also discuss the new, and the nation's first, slavery museum, Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana.

As always, you can send us your architectural legal issues, comments or questions via twitter #archinectsessions, email or call us at (213) 784-7421. And if you can, we'd love for you to rate us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Listen to episode nineteen of Archinect Sessions, "Don't be Evil, Don't Throw Stones":

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Building the First Slavery Museum in America

2015-03-02T13:03:00-05:00

Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney [Plantation] had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States. Located on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both educational and visceral.

How America is failing to preserve its historic slave markets

2015-02-13T14:36:00-05:00

It’s easy enough to blame economic forces for the postwar destruction of slave markets, but not for the persistent concealment of their history. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, the South has no shortage of memorials to the Lost Cause, while memorials to the slave trade remain few and far between. [...] After the Civil War, Johnson says, “the price of moving forward for the white United States was the forgetting of slavery.”

Pei Partnership sues National Slavery Museum for... get this... not getting paid for their services

2013-01-25T14:12:00-05:00

The National Slavery Museum, which was spearheaded by former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, never paid Pei for the architectural work. Pei says it is owed more than $6 million, money that the firm hopes to recoup in an eventual sale of the 38 acres. The slavery museum organization now owes more than $300,000 in delinquent real estate taxes to Fredericksburg. The city has begun the lengthy legal process of selling the land at auction to recoup the back taxes.