STATION 1: PLANTATION

The intention of the first station was to deconstruct the icon of the plantation house, the home of the slaves’ master. Many design decisions were made to reduce the typical southern colonial plantation house to its original influences by provoking its archetypal elements in ways counter to their original aesthetic intentions. The gable roof no longer sits atop the wall, but instead turns directly into it; the whole of the building is an extrusion. The iconic volume is penetrated by four triangular tapered shafts, each covered with parallel wooden floorboards as one might find in a house or on the deck of a ship. The series of four vertical chambers, tapered and open to the outside air, are connected to each other by winding circulation tunnels. The front façade has been pulled harshly from the main body of the building and the grand staircase - a central element of the plantation house - is coiled between the façade plane and the larger volume of the building. The interior is disorienting, oppressive, and bleak. Some shafts pool with water, while others have their floors angled up towards a rooftop aperture filtering stratified light through the intersecting floor slats. Light is like short gasps of air to a drowning man. The whole building is a massive and dark thing, intended to create a harsh imposition on the surrounding environment and on the visitor. It must be so when visually communicating the oppressive imposition of slavery.

The building is composed of two floor levels – a grade level and an upper level roofscape. Architectural elements contribute to the imposing atmosphere of the station. The plan of the rooms and the connecting pathways fold and bend. The corridors connecting the chambers are inconsistent in width. The walls of black concrete have as little texture as possible. The interior is spatially disorienting due to the disorganization of the layout. The chambers themselves are all scalene, triangular, prismatic voids with no concurrent sides. The lack of orienting elements on the interior walls and the height of the chambers which, when coupled with the slated floors overhead, create an acoustical layering which suppresses ambient sounds. In two chambers, the floor slopes down into a small pool. In the remaining two, the floor slopes up sharply. These chamber types alternate along the zigzagging path from the entrance to the exit.

The upper level, which is reached either by the grand staircase at the front of the building or by an interior service staircase, is austere in its materiality. Platforms are formed above the interior chambers by spaced wooden floor slats. The same blackened concrete which makes up the entirety of the building mass forms a gabled roof covering the wood board flooring. The boards of the flooring allow light to permeate the interior in bands of long rays. The floor itself is frightening to walk across. Wood creaks when stressed by footfalls, and this is easily sensed by whoever is walking on the roof above, while the sound reverberates in the concrete chambers below. Unlike the interior ground level, where the chambers are connected by indirect halls, the upper level platforms are connected by a straight walkway positioned underneath the ridgeline of the façade outline. This creates a focusing, axial corridor along which the whole of the building may be perceived, establishing context for the severe environment and winding pathways in the ground level interior.

The atmosphere is meant to embody the harshness of the institution the icon represents. The interior space is unmistakably unwelcoming. Juxtaposing vertical compression and release creates an uneasy agoraphobia within the chambers and a claustrophobia within the corridors, despite movement being restricted to a uniform plane.

In deconstructing the icon of the plantation house, the architectural members typically determining the typology are laid bare. The first station stands in opposition to the institution of slavery. The bureaucracy of slavery and the lives of slave owners were hidden behind the beautiful and glorious architectural forms of the southern colonial mansion which itself was descended from the Palladian villa. The system of slavery is an ugly thing to associate with something as aesthetically pleasing as the Greek temple front or the gabled roof. Yet, these aesthetic elements that form the modern cultural image of slavery as it related to the aristocracy and so contributes to the aestheticization of the antebellum period. This association between the aesthetically beautiful and the antebellum period serves to anaesthetize and sanitize modern perceptions of history. The deconstruction of the aesthetic elements as a method toward understanding their form without creating a simulation of the exact same aesthetic elements deepens the understanding of history created by the monument without aestheticizing and romanticizing it.

The chambers and passageways form harsh canyons. Each face in the mass is seemingly created by fracturing and deforming a perfect extrusion. The chambers and passageways are imperfections that cruelly modify the fragile form. Moving through the building is an exercise in compression and release. The narrow corridors that sharply turn through the intermediate spaces open into large chambers; the large chambers then compress the visitor back into the narrow passageways.

The upper level is where the damage to the purity of the extrusion is most visible. Large triangular cuts are taken from the building with seemingly no order or regulation. This exposes the chambers and the visitors below to the elements of nature.

The front façade of the “plantation house” is pulled away from the central mass. The staircase directly behind it leads to the upper level, allowing one to bypass the grade level interior spaces. The viewing platforms on the upper level are directly above the chambers below. The roof over these spaces is removed, allowing visitors to see out over the walls to the landscape surrounding the building. The idea that the slave-owning aristocracy was tied to the land was a powerful one that contributed to the mindset of the south.