STATION 4: RIVER

The fourth station is the architectural exploration of a living icon. The iconography of Christian baptisms and the demarcation line between freedom and enslavement are demonstrated in the Ohio River, an important divide between slave states and free states. The river itself is an icon and refers to both the Christian imagery of baptism and the geographical imagery of the separation of the United States into slave states and free states. The river is the dividing line between two worlds: the world of enslavement and the world of liberation. Most slaves escaping on the underground railroad would need to cross the Ohio River, somehow. There are many ways to cross a river — swimming, boating, and wading are all options. An architectural solution is a bridge. A bridge connects and mediates the two worlds. In the case of this bridge, it also connects the literal world to the mythic world, the physical to the spiritual, and the past to the present.

The difficulty in designing an iconic referent to a bridge is that any span between two points is defined, literally, as a bridge. The icon is the aesthetic subject. A literal depiction of the iconic subject risks subverting the meaning of the architecture with aestheticization. The solution is removing the span between the two points to connect them implicitly. The implication of connection using an aesthetic theme, along with the broader theme of crossing, creates the bridge. In this way, it is not a physical bridge, but a spiritual and emotional one.

The river station's design is split in two parts. There is the south bank landing from which the visitor approaches (in the same way an escaping slave would approach), and the north bank landing. Both are connected aesthetically by the repetition of horizontally long concrete steps. The south bank landing uses the same channel glass as seen in the Isolation station (#3) which, here, directs the visitor to the water. The glass is positioned harshly to mimetically reference Friedrich's The Sea of Ice. The steps form a staircase leading to the river. From the water's edge, the visitor can see the north bank landing across the broad Ohio River. At this scale, one can understand the peril involved in a river crossing.