Seventeenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Teaching interior architecture students to understand and fully engage in the various dimensions involving the complexity of African American History requires a pedagogy that imparts a deep understanding. This paper is focused on an interdisciplinary design studio between interior architecture and African American Diaspora studies departments. The two departments collaborated to design a memorial space of Guilford County’s lynching monument. This studio forms a part of Guilford County’s effort to retrieve its lynching monument from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial was conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people could gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. Part of the journey through the memorial includes a public square with 800 steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where lynching took place. Each monument bears an engraving of the names of the lynching victims who perished in that particular county. As part of an initiative by the EJI to make counties acknowledge and amend from their racial pasts, counties have been offered an opportunity to reclaim a replica of their monument. In order fulfill this opportunity, counties need to propose a design idea to explain how they will honor and showcase their monument within a particular location. The aim of the studio was to design a space for Guilford County to reclaim its lynching monument from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and to honor and showcase its victims.