“...a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages... guilty of practices... shocking and bloody” - Frederick Douglas
Emancipation Education Center is a multi-use historical, social, and ecological archive that will serve as an orientation place for the public and visiting researchers, as a field trip destination for groups from local schools and other institutions, and a spatial gateway linking the community to the Third Ward environment for cultural, recreational, environmental, and aesthetic purposes.
Emancipation Education Center is a multi-use historical, social, and ecological archive that will serve as an orientation place for the public and visiting researchers, as a field trip destination for groups from local schools and other institutions, and a spatial gateway linking the community to the Third Ward environment for cultural, recreational, environmental, and aesthetic purposes.
At the site of Emancipation Park, stories, artifacts and historical records that have been gathered in support of the significance of the Emancipation NHT will be housed and made available for research, along with a center for education about the Black experience in Houston before and following emancipation. This Center will serve as a sister institution to the 22,000 sq ft African American Library at the Gregory School in the Fourth Ward.
FACE OF THE PAST SLAVES
The design concept shows the content of the building inside as an education center on slavery and the Emancipation Trail on the outside through use of color and form. The building performs as the face of the past slaves and explicitly surfaces the negative connotation of slavery history that is avoided but needs to be remembered. Using red emphasis on structure and rigid edges of extruding volumes, building depicts a veil masked over a facial figure that is reminiscent of all who were enslaved and oppressed in the past.
Work Collective, 2024