Archinect - News

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 ...

Prop and Property: The House in American Film

2017-12-19T18:50:00-05:00

Cinema heightens the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at property. The private property of the house is already a spectacle, of course, as the house is a medium for making visible the wealth of its owners and inhabitants. In a movie theater, this spectacular function is multiplied.

A history of the house in American cinema might well begin with Gone with the Wind, a film that is fascinated with the loss, acquisition, and consolidation of private property; and To Kill a Mockingbird, a putatively antiracist film whose production history is actually an archive of racist urban development. The houses in these pictures tell stories about property that the films do not mention, but cannot cease from showing.

American Icons: Monticello

2012-02-17T14:46:00-05:00

Monticello is home renovation run amok. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United States; he designed Monticello to the fraction of an inch and never stopped changing it. Yet Monticello was also a plantation worked by slaves, some of them Jefferson’s own children. Today his white and black descendants still battle over who can be buried at Monticello. It was trashed by college students, saved by a Jewish family, and celebrated by FDR.