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. 

The museum's website, therefore, outlines a mission to “create an opportunity for visitors to engage with authentic and lesser-known history through transformative storytelling, compelling artifacts and exhibitions, and its unique 'power of place.'”

To best effect this power, the design includes a total of nine thematic gallery spaces, an ancestral memorial garden designed by Walter Hood, a tributary reflection pool, and narrative wayfinding that allows visitors to trace “the paths and patterns that enslaved Africans, and ultimately African Americans, made for themselves.” 

Its extended rectangular volume stands supported by opposing rows of 13-foot-high cylindrical columns, sheltering a space for the reflecting pool and helping to orient the site symbolically towards the harbor. According to the architects, the materials used further reflect a sensitivity to place, site context, and the legacies of the Gullah and Lowcountry people.

“The special design challenge of the museum was to build on this site without occupying it,” the late Henry Cobb said of the project, which he also described to the New York Times as “unrhetorical architecture,” shortly before he passed away in 2020. 

The opening will conclude a vision set out by former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. in the 2000 “State of the City” address and was achieved only through a two-decade fundraising campaign that came up with $75 million in private donations.

“Our journey has been long because it took time to secure the optimal site,” Riley finally offered in a press statement. “A site that is called ‘sacred’ because it is precisely where so many enslaved Africans arrived in our country, and many died here. It took time to raise the resources, assemble the team, and plan every detail that would enhance the experience of being here. And it took time because we have been committed to excellence.”