Practicing ArchitecturePracticing Architecture

The monument is composed to two main elements: the triangular Ancestral Chamber and the circular Ancestral Libation Court. All images courtesy of Nicole Hollant-Denis.

The Ancestral Chamber is lit from above by a triangular skylight.

Twin water features run along each side of the Ancestral Chamber, reinforcing its comparison to a slave ship.

The map on the floor of the Ancestral Libation Court is centered on West Africa, and is surrounded symbols that relate to African and African-Americans.

On a modest slice of green near New York City’s Foley Square in lower Manhattan, Nicole Hollant-Denis, AIA, has designed a monument to tens of thousands of slaves buried there in a 17^th century cemetery for freed and enslaved Africans. With her African Burial Ground National Monument, Hollant-Denis, an African-American architect, uses simple geometry to communicate an alternative narrative of slaves in New York, and give a voice to those made voiceless by racism, marginalization, and the distance of time.

American paradox

The story of the African Burial Ground National Monument begins hundreds of years ago, with the origins of the international slave trade. The story of the memorial, however, began in 1991, when the GSA discovered archeological remains on the site of a new government office building. The remains were determined to be deceased slaves from late 17th and 18^th centuries; 419 specimens were excavated and sent to Howard University for archeological study. The discoveries made at Howard (who the slaves were, where they were from, what their lives were like) became central elements in Hollant-Denis’s design.

Unlike Native American archeological finds, there were no laws preventing development on historic African-America archeological sites. The local African-American community demanded that the site be preserved and respected. In 1993, the site became a National Historic Landmark, and the GSA agreed to preserve the land by scrapping plans for an annex facility.   

Researchers determined that the slave burial ground operated until the 1790s. As many as 20,000 people were buried there in unmarked graves—men, women, children, and individuals archaeologists theorize were white abolitionists, Hollant-Denis says. The pace of development and change in colonial American didn’t slow down for a cemetery full of dead slaves, and Manhattan grew up around, and on top of, the burial ground.

To this day, the full 6.6-acre burial ground extends for blocks around the monument site, under the paved and bustling streets of Foley Square, which happens to contain the United States seat of federal power in Manhattan. Courthouses by Cass Gilbert and Guy Lowell surround the square on top of unmarked graves.

Hollant-Denis prefers the term “neglected” to “forgotten” when discussing the failed cultural stewardship of the site. Nevertheless, it fell to her in 1994, 167 years after the abolition of slavery in New York, to begin reconciling the presence of these paragons of law and justice that somehow came to rest on top of the bones of dead slaves. In them, the scope and purview of the law would be continually adjusted in the pursuit of a more perfect state of freedom, but for so long, they were deaf to what rested in the ground beneath them.

Prescriptive path and narrative content

Hollant-Denis and her firm New York-based firm AARRIS Architects finished the memorial in late 2007 after winning the commission in a competition. Late last year, the project was honored with a National Organization of Minority Architects’ Professional Design Award, and on Feb. 27, a visitor’s center exhibit opened in the adjacent GSA’s Ted Weiss Federal Office Building.

The first gesture Hollant-Denis and AARRIS Architects co-founder Rodney Leon, AIA, used to acknowledge the perversely American paradox of building a federal courthouse on top of a slave burial ground is to have visitors face this contradiction head-on. As visitors walk through the monument, they face the grand Classical Revival New York Supreme Court building, designed by Guy Lowell. The memorial’s very presence in Manhattan calls attention to another paradox: Slaves, caught in an unsustainable, archaic, and outmoded economic model, built New York City—a supreme icon of contemporary urbanism and modernity.

Hollant-Denis’s monument progresses prescriptively and deliberately, “creating a physical expression of the story,” of slavery in New York, she says. And it’s a specific story that needs to be told. Slavery in the North remains a less understood phenomenon than the typically imagined plantation house tradition of the Deep South, and the burial monument presents this bit of history front and center. The experience begins with seven burial mounds on a grassy patch of land at the rear of the site. These mounds mark where sarcophagi filled with the remains studied by the Howard team were ceremonially reinterred in the earth in 2004. Hollant-Denis says this feature was suggested by landscape architect Elizabeth Kennedy. “It really brings a sense of sacredness to the site,” Hollant-Denis says.

The monument itself is made of black granite with a rich greenish hue. Visitors enter a vestibule attached to the triangular Ancestral Chamber. Hollant-Denis calls this entrance the Door of Return, a reversal of the Middle Passage’s Door of No Return, which refers to the slave-holding fortresses along Africa’s western coast where slaves were locked away before being shipped to the Americas.

The Ancestral Chamber is a quiet, meditative, and isolated space. As one walks through it, it progressively narrows into a prow-like triangular point, compressing and tightening around visitors, intentionally generating reflective claustrophobia. A triangular aperture in the roof provides the only relief. From the beginning of the project, Hollant-Denis wanted this part of the monument to recall a slave ship, and the visual and experiential symbolism works immediately, from the confined spaces to the arcing, ship-like profile. Twin, symmetrical water features even run along each of its sides. Another visual metaphor Hollant-Denis worked at refining is that of a Middle Passage slave fortress. The heavy entrance vestibule and imposing proportions similarly hint at this kind of dark and foreboding place.

From the narrowest end of the Ancestral Chamber, patrons walk down several steps that take them six feet below grade into the open and circular Ancestral Libation Court. The front edges of the chamber walls, seemingly so heavy and oppressive while inside, are revealed to be thin, even delicate. Granite retaining walls enclose the circular court, with a map of the world on the ground below them. West Africa is in the middle of the map, putting the buried slaves’ home at the center of the world.

Hollant-Denis took this element (an Afro-centric map at the center of a public forum) from her own undergraduate thesis project she developed while studying at Cornell. This project (a slavery memorial in Haiti) also included a tomb-like, imposing space with references to the Middle Passage, similar to the monument’s Ancestral Chamber. At the center of the court, a portion of the map floor can be removed to reveal a well to be used for libation ceremonies that honor the ancestors interred in the burial ground. Speakers standing at the center of the court can hear their voice echoed and amplified dramatically throughout.

Hollant-Denis says this hypnotic acoustic quality was not quite intentional, but certainly not accidental. “We thought that this might happen, and we were hoping that this might happen,” she says.

This echo effect makes this below-grade room a living, public forum where the forms and shapes that envelope the community transmit the voice of one directly to the hearts and minds of many—a reverberating heartbeat that sings to the ancestors commemorated by the memorial and eases their descendents transition into spiritual meditation.

Generic, demographic descriptions of the people buried at the site are carved into the map floor as well. (“Probable male aged between 35 and 40 years.”) Offering these bits of description and telling these stories is the most overt way the monument deals with the loss of cultural memory that allowed the burial site to sit neglected and unrecognized for so long. Various religious and cultural symbols line the inside retaining walls (a Christian cross, an Islamic crescent, an Egyptian ankh). These features, along with the world map, communicate the international presence of African and African-American culture in the wake of the slavery-induced Diaspora. “The intent was to be as inclusive as possible,” Hollant-Denis says. “The site isn’t just for Americans. It means a lot to the people of Africa as well, to understand that these ancestors have been honored with this memorial.”

West African Sankofa symbols adorn the outside of the Ancestral Chamber, as does a map of the entire burial ground, overlaid with the Manhattan street grid. Visitors exit the memorial via a spiraling ramp the runs along the perimeter of the Ancestral Libation Court.

The line and the circle

Two simple geometric motifs, the line and the circle, are at the conceptual heart of the burial ground monument. The memorial begins with a straight line through the Ancestral Chamber, representing the singular force and determinism that Africans experienced as they were forced from their homes and isolated in a new world. Through the dark and intimidating chamber, visitors catch echoes of the anguish Africans felt as they were pulled through history, alone and in shackles. Patrons emerge in the circular libation court, and are reminded of how slaves eventually created new cultures, communities, traditions, and art forms that would one day encircle the globe, represented by a map, and become an indelible part of American culture itself. This circle, peering across the entire world, represents community, enclosure, safety, inclusion, and globalism—values inherent in the laws upheld by the memorial’s formerly-aloof neighbors, and by the slaves and descendents of slaves that had to teach these institutions what such values really meant.

Recent Related:

David Adjaye’s Smithsonian Crowns African-American Culture as a Global Culture

Minority Architects Rebuild Pittsburgh From the Grassroots Up

Its Quiet Optimism Maintained, Louis Kahn’s Roosevelt Island FDR Memorial Moves into Construction

At Gonzalez Goodale’s Wilshire Public Park, a Monument to a Dead Hero and Living Activism

Winning Design Chosen for Daniel Burnham Memorial

Gehry Selected to Design Eisenhower National Memorial

Reference:

Visit the AIA’s Diversity and Inclusion web page.

See what the Committee on Design Knowledge Community is up to.

Do you know the Architect’s Knowledge Resource?

The AIA’s resource knowledge base can connect you to the podcast “YAF 150 at 150: Norma Sklarek, FAIA.”

See what else the Architects Knowledge Resource has to offer for your practice.