REVEALING WITHIN
Location: Charlottesville,VA
Course: ARCH 8010 | Fall 2018
Instructor: Karen Van Lengen
Issues of racial, cultural and ethnical segregation in American cities have resurfaced greatly after Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. Related to this, the project rethinks a design alternative for Emancipation Park (former Lee Park) to spark communication between people from different historical backgrounds and opinions. Audial and visual communication devices that focus on Charlottesville’s forgotten African American history is utilized to stimulate this conversation between people as they experience the park.
IN PRESS
Zink, J. (2018, February 1). UVa Architecture students to exhibit Emancipation Park redesigns. Retrieved from CVille Tomorrow: http://www.cvilletomorrow.org/news/article/29740-uva-architecture-students-to-exhibit-emancipation/
The project makes itself a part of a network of historically important sites including Justice Park (Old McKee Block) and Vinegar Hill (Omni Hotel). The gestures that define the project such as carving, lifting and revealing, provide connections to surrounding sites such as Vinegar Hill, Court Square, and pulls people from the urban core of Charlottesville, the Downtown Mall. Although the image of the Lee Statue is gone, the lifting point that reveals these memories and creates the interior space of the building, coincides with Lee Statue and marks this axis as the point of change. The public area and the landscape becomes a space where people can gather but also house the festivals that takes place in the current park. The roof provides an open landscape with heirloom seed plants from African American culture. This landscape gives the opportunity to rest, contemplate and provide an “healing” experience by reminding the deep and diverse culture that African Americans brought to the US.
In the interior, the recording spaces also act as the lifting structure which listens people’s stories as they sit and talk to them. In the listening space these memories as well as older and more historical memories can be shared. The listening space also implies the revealing and the carving of hidden memories and lives with the materiality and the form. The discussion space can be an area where people discuss their feelings and thoughts in a more intimidate setting. As visitors pass through the exhibition space and continue through the building, they can reach the negotiation area where groups that have contrasting opinions can reach an agreement point by talking and having discussions in a space which reveals itself to the public realm. The thoughts and comments that people record or post online becomes revealed on the façade of this space digitally.
