2000 Rotch Scholar - Patricia Anahory

Mapping the Invisible

A Museum for the Underground Railroad

Between 1830 and 1865, the Underground Railroad movement reached its peak. During this time, quilts operated as secret markers for the runaway slaves on their arduous escape to the North. These quilts were hung outside houses to indicate safe places of refuge. They displayed a lexicon of abstract symbols and patterns, mnemonic devices used to map an unknown landscape. The operative quality of the quilt became a guiding element in the conception of the Underground Railroad Museum.

I interpreted the U.R. quilt as a mental map. It was for me, a way of entering the project and understanding the museum program. The idea of the quilt was not translated into a formal diagram; rather it became an analogous system, suggesting a particular understanding of spatial relationships of the historical and physical site and beyond. This highlighted the importance of working at both macro and micro scales. The museum was thus inserted within a larger network of U.R. routes and other links were established to the city. One, for example, was connecting it to the Black Heritage Trail, a walking tour that explores the history of Boston’s 19th century African-American community.

The Museum was conceived as an itinerary of passages, a journey mediating between individual and collective experiences. The itinerant condition of the runaway slave subverted inside/outside relationships of spatial boundaries through the notion of a covert journey. This project thus analyses inside/outside relationships through the articulation of thresholds and passages rather than the definition of permanent boundaries — allowing the body to become an activate participant in establishing spatial relationships which are no longer restrained by the architecture itself.

There is no main entrance to the museum, instead there are many. By denying a monumental and singular approach to the space, the multiple entries became symbolic and physical ways into both the museum and the narrative. This flexibility encourages multiple interpretations and possibilities.

The plan is a flexible arrangement of programmatic elements. There is little distinction between the exhibition spaces, circulation and other elements of the program. Large exhibition spaces can be partitioned into smaller ones, transforming passages into storytelling spaces; outdoor programmatic voids into enclosed exhibition surfaces and gathering spaces.

The museum does not attempt to recreate the hidden nature of the Underground Railroad, instead it became apparent that the clandestine mission of the U. R. must become transparent in the design of the project. Therefore the museum was turned inside out in order to make explicit the content of its program.

I was not interested in recreating or re-presenting a distant experience but rather in implicating the visitor, the curatorial material and the museum into a larger historical context at various scales of intervention. Much of the curatorial data, archives and library occupy the outer surface of the museum. In this way the facade does not project a static face but rather, it changes with the flux of curatorial data and the circulation of visitors. This creates a three-dimensional storyboard, a layered zone that is constantly changing. There is little distinction between the architecture and the curatorial material. The North facade becomes reminiscent of the quilt as marker and reference point along the Black Heritage Trail and other routes.

The design for the museum focused on creating a place of possibilities and a strategy of narration rather than a search for a clear definition of enclosure; not a reconstruction of a past experience but instead a choreography of new ones. Through the juxtaposition of articulated circulation and exhibition spaces the visitors become narrators and active participants in the choreography of this story, provoking awareness, multiple readings, chance encounters and juxtaposing experiences.