AIA Virginia Prize
Competition

The city of Alexandria's Market Square is near the site of two racially motivated hate crimes. On April 23 1897, Joseph McCoy was lynched at the corner of Lee and Cameron Street. On August 8 1899, Benjamin Thomas was dragged for six blocks, then hanged from a lamp post at the southwest corner of King and Fairfax Street. Used as a method of control to keep African Americans "in their place," lynchings instilled fear in the African American community. The cultural impact of lynching must be brought American's consciousness.

Inspired by The Equal Justice Initiative - a nonprofit organization committed to ending mass incarceration, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society - a pillar installation is designed as a memorial for victims of racial violence. The memorial is comprised of hundreds of pillars, each one representing a county in the United States where racial lynching took place, and inscribed with the names of each victim.

A scalable and open-ended design suggests a participatory framework for collective production and dissemination. Accessible and distributed parts are able to aggregate into highly adaptable patterns, capable of representing diverse communities. As a format that emerges out of social dispositions, this design emphasizes a feedback loop between culture and tectonics. A monument is thus formed not as a whole, but as a pattern that defines value systems.