Architecture studio Adjaye Associates has designed a memorial on a rammed-earth mound, museum and research institute focused on the impact of slavery for Bridgetown, Barbados.
The studio, which is led by RIBA Royal Gold Medalist David Adjaye, designed the Barbados Heritage District to address the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the island, which recently became a republic.
"Drawing upon the technique and philosophy of traditional African tombs, prayer sites and pyramids, the memorial is conceived as a space that contemporaneously honours the dead, edifies the living, and manifests a new diasporic future for Black civilization," said the studio.
It is estimated that almost 400,000 enslaved Africans were transported to Barbados during the 17th and 18th centuries, while the island was a British colony. Adjaye Associates has designed a memorial to slavery in Barbados
Set to be built on Newton Plantation, next to the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground, the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial is designed to commemorate an estimated 570 West African slaves who are buried on the site.
The memorial structure will have 570 vertical timber columns topped with circular brass plates arranged in rows on top of a mound made from rammed earth.
The site will be called the Barbados Heritage District
"As a means of physicalising and commemorating the enslaved buried below this sacred earth, the field is punctuated by 570 individual timber beams each capped with ...