Project Details
- Project Name
- Richmond National Slavery Museum at the Lumpkin's Slave Jail Site
- Architect
- SmithGroup
- Client/Owner
- City of Richmond
- Project Types
- Cultural
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Shared by
- Madeleine D'Angelo
- Team
-
Dayton Schroeter, Lead Designer
Jame Anderson, Project Manager
Hal Davis, Principal in Charge
Monteil Crawley, Project Architect
- Consultants
-
Other: Chora,Other: Gallagher & Associates,Interior Designer: KEi Architects,Other: Gray & Pape,Landscape Architect: Mikyoung Kim Design,Civil Engineer: Greening Urban,Structural Engineer: Silman
- Project Status
- On the Boards/In Progress
This article appeared in the October 2020 issue of ARCHITECT.
In the mid-1800s, Richmond, Va., was the second-largest slave trading hub in the United States; one of its most notorious sites was Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, known as the “Devil’s half acre,” where scores of Black men, women, and children were imprisoned, tortured, sold, and killed. After Emancipation, the site was covered over until being excavated in 2008. In 2016, the city tasked SmithGroup and a team of architects, engineers, archaeologists, historians, landscape architects, and planners with crafting a structure to acknowledge the site’s painful history.
An intensive community outreach process started with large-forum meetings, but “we needed to go deeper,” recalls principal Jame Anderson, AIA. It evolved to include small group sessions, on-location conversations, and workshops. The team logged hundreds of responses and developed guiding principles, including honoring the adjacent African burial ground, acknowledging the history and archaeology of the former jail site, and creating an iconic place that enhances the experience of the larger Slave Trail of historic sites across the city. The building should also provide services and spaces to enrich and support the present-day community.
The resulting pavilion erupts from the ground, its form “based on this idea of unearthing buried history, buried truths,” says principal Dayton Schroeter, AIA. The façade uses the iconography of stripes—which recall the American flag and “the uniforms of Black men on chain gangs during Reconstruction, physical jails, and even the rows of cotton of Antebellum slavery, in which African labor was exploited,” he says. Inside are interpretive galleries, community spaces, and places for quiet reflection, all under a green roof that references, among other things, the gardens cultivated by African American healers. “Often we talk about this history as Black history, but it is American history,” Schroeter says. “It’s an opportunity to preserve a rare artifact and create a comprehensive learning experience around it.”
Project Credits
Planning/Conceptual Design/Architecture: SmithGroup
Cultural Organization Planning: Chora
Interpretive Planning & Design: Gallagher & Associates
Local Architects/Interior Design: KEi Architects
Architectural History/Archaeology/Community Planning: Gray & Pape
Landscape Architecture: Mikyoung Kim Design
Civil Engineering: Greening Urban
Structural Engineering: Silman
Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
In the early 2000’s, archaeologists unearthed remnants of a slave auction complex that operated in downtown Richmond for decades in the mid-1800s. Known as “Devil’s Half Acre,” the site included several structures ranging from a large holding area and what was referred to as a “slave jail” on the lower portion of the site that was subject to periodic flooding, a hotel, tavern, and the residence of Robert Lumpkin, an especially cruel and violent slave trader. Despite its horrific impact on the lives of thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans, the site was all but forgotten over time—an ugly truth buried by train tracks, a parking lot, an interstate, and other modern infrastructure. Community leaders and the City of Richmond desired to develop a memorial that would reveal its haunting history and interpret its cultural significance.
Recognizing that this historic undertaking went beyond the traditional scope of an architecture and engineering project, SmithGroup collaborated with a specialized team with expertise in African American history, art, archaeology, historic preservation, museum organization and more. The first phase was to define the scope of the project and craft a concept of how the story would be told.
With substantial public engagement, the project purpose began to take shape: a visitor experience that would not only reveal the archaeology and Richmond’s history as a hub for transfer, sale and exchange of enslaved Africans and African Americans in the nation, but also explore how the legacy of slavery endures today. The themes that emerged and drove the design are that of resistance, resilience, light and Afrofuturism.
The site lies between a busy rail line and interstate I-95 and is along the interpretive Richmond Slave Trail. The concept design of the museum building is a metaphor representing the idea of the earth being pulled or pushed up to expose the hidden history beneath the site. The raised earth is tilted to create an iconic gesture of upliftment and hope. At its peak, an outdoor terrace creates a lookout point to the adjacent African Burial Ground, the James River, the Virginia State Capitol, and to the network of other slave-trade sites throughout Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom district.
The memorial-museum is surrounded by discreet landscaped moments that reach out to the surrounding neighborhood including water gardens referencing the historic Shockoe Creek. The plan envisions a narrow entry into the museum that signifies oppression and funnels the visitor inside. A bridge over a shallow pool is a metaphoric connection to the Middle Passage.
Interior spaces and exhibits pivot around a central core that descends to the actual archaeological remains of the sacred site, and then ascends upward with exterior views that symbolize resilience and rising amid unthinkable constraints.
On the highest levels a genealogy and research center will provide a place to make discoveries about one’s ancestors, and to connect visitors to other significant research entities, museums, and institutions throughout the US.
As envisioned by the people of Richmond, the museum and its unearthed archaeological remnants will serve to unearth the truth and legacy of enslavement and the systematic state sponsored violence against Black people that has yet to be fully acknowledged in America.
