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 maintained by over four thousand enslaved laborers in its first half-century of existence. On its own, the gesture of pulling back the veil to acknowledge that history is in no way commensurate with the catastrophe of enslavement and its survival, but without it nothing further is possible.

Walking toward its rising and falling wall, the memorial appears understated, generously inviting life to register against it. From certain angles, an image momentarily appears. When its jagged carvings (done in collaboration with the New York artist Eto Otitigbe) align just right, Isabella Gibbons’s facial features, her eyes, flash momentarily in the relief. Born into slavery and owned by a UVA professor, Gibbons was freed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation, studied for her degree, and then taught at New England Freedmen’s Aid Society’s Charlottesville Normal School. Her fleeting gaze and powerful words are cut into stone so as to invoke graphic memories of lashings, never to be forgotten. They insist on her, and every enslaved person’s, humanity. Gibbons’s gaze is represented as a larger-than-life image, scaled to speak on behalf of the many. But the UVA Memorial to Enslaved Laborers is decidedly not a figurative project. The memorial’s overall balance of the figural, the abstract, and the performative—the elements that make it architecture—resists the typical modes of commemorative works: the authorial and the heroic. Or rather it subtly recasts heroism as a collective attribute to represent, in open-ended terms, the resilience that persists in a people surviving a catastrophe. Entering the space of the memorial, you will be standing in an architectural embrace for the collective this memorial generously and hopefully anticipates. I imagine that if you walk along its hewn stone outer perimeter enough times and perhaps around the campus, its eighty-foot diameter may begin to impress itself upon you, and this in turn may make it possible to recognize in it the dimension of the dome of the university’s Rotunda higher up on the hill—and thus the roofless house of the memorial as a deliberate inversion of that dome.

They say that the memorial has acoustic properties, literally amplifying the voices of the collective in its gentle embrace. I imagine hearing the testimonies carved into the stone propped up by the wordless guttural sighs of horror, breathed in response. There is room here for voices beyond our time as well, for stories that are yet to be written by a new collective. Though “healing” and reparations of any kind are a long way away, possible only much after acknowledgements can take real root in the community, the encounter with the hard facts, as well as the encounter with markings that speak of the systematic erasure of facts, and of the humanity of the enslaved laborers, is an important beginning.

I tried to see the UVA Memorial to Enslaved Laborers as a kind of architectural Sorrow Song, with all of its truth and hope, but it did not work. It speaks of enslaved laborers and the human cost of propping up UVA as an institution, of the foundational inhumanity and hypocrisy of it, but it is not a story told by the enslaved or their heirs; it is rather a confession and an opening for a conversation. To call that conversation “difficult” would be a cliché that allows habits to hide behind it. So perhaps first this memorial space has to be a space in which to contemplate being stuck, as Sara Ahmed implored. Because that mode of being, only that kind of honesty and orientation, reserve room for habits to change.

You might visit on a rainy day and see the inscriptions—of names, work- and kinship-based identities (mother, cook, grandfather, Charles, daughter, Isabella Gibbons), as well as 3100 horizontal slashes for the nameless—cry. Or you might come on a day like one early in the pandemic to witness the doctors and nurses give a knee during their White Coats for Black Lives attestation, arraying their bodies toward these inscriptions and completing the open figure of the circle with their collective gesture. The memorial marks the university’s willingness to begin working out its past and its legacy in the larger history and narrative of slavery. It does not represent a resolution. And yet, in “monument-country,” where Jefferson (a slave-owning founding father and designer of this model campus) “rides” with Generals Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson, and on a campus in which architecture encoded race and cast interactions in stone and landscape, the memorial offers another model of relating to others and to history. Borne out of listening and translating between the community of those enslaved laborers’ descendants, university officials, and the builders and artists, it speaks both of the necessity and of the possibility of change.

The UVA Memorial to Enslaved Laborers performs an important didactic role in educating the public, in recognizing and telling the history of a people that has for far too long been left out of the picture, a people whose catastrophe, constitutive of the making of America, has been minimized—historically and daily—in order to protect the innocence of the country’s foundational narrative and its white population. Höweler + Yoon Architecture and Wilson were able to include and weave the didactic material (the stories in the form of timelines, names, quotes) within the aesthetic and spatial experiences of the memorial. Together these architects and academics modeled change. They seeded a future in which healing follows from facing the history of slavery, making room for the celebration of lives lived in spite of it, and collectively authoring the built world. The memorial might be characterized as humble and restrained if we were to measure it in the sheer weight of material transformed and shaped, but just as constitutive as its concentric circles of stone and water is its model of collaboration and collective authoring—the processes of listening to, acknowledging, and telling a community’s narrative as well as instigating new stories.

There is something Cornel West said in one of his mesmerizing lectures that is sticking to this project in my mind. He spoke of the way that Black American history, traditions, and music, starting with the Sorrow Songs of the slaves, have been teaching this country and all of its citizens many things: love, joy, civility, ingenuity, hope, but also—crucially—of the way voice becomes vocation. Architecture has a “voice,” and architects too have voices. The UVA Memorial to Enslaved Laborers points to the way these turn into a vocation as they resonate with the history of slavery everywhere around us.