Making Room for the Future

I have walked around it in my mind, touched it, seen it cry. Like you, perhaps, I saw images of the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on social media, in major news outlets online, images of it enabling important gatherings just within a few weeks of its opening. The memorial was designed by Höweler + Yoon Architecture (Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon) and Mabel O. Wilson with the help of their collaborator at UVA Frank Dukes and Charlottesville landscape architect Gregg Bleam. It offers a necessary and hopeful lesson on the agency of architecture in our times, but it also presents a vital challenge to culture and life in the US more generally. On UVA’s campus, and upon the valiant insistence of its students, this memorial’s architecture, and the listening, deliberating and translating (which I think of as architecture as well), have begun the local process of what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as “pulling back the veil.” The University of Virginia was built and maintai…