The Power of Design Ideas | Dr. Kwesi Daniels

In 1860, approximately 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to enter the United States was set ablaze as the ship’s captain William Foster smuggled its cargo of newly enslaved Africans into Alabama.[i] When the war ended and the captured Africans regained their freedom, they settled into an area in Mobile Bay, Alabama, now known as Africatown. In 1931, Zora Neil Hurston wrote her first book titled Barracoon, that remained unpublished until 2018. It was a collection of interviews she conducted with Oluale Kossola (Cudjo Lewis), one of the last remaining survivors of the Clotilda. The interviews consisted of his account of being captured from Benin, transported across the Atlantic Ocean to Mobile, Alabama, and making a life for himself and his family in Africatown. In 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission confirmed the remains of the Clotilda were located off the coast of Mobile, Alabama. In 2021 the Clotilda was approved by the National Park Service as a national historic site. About the same time as the rediscovery of the slave ship, urban designer, Renee Kemp Rotan of Studio Rotan began developing the Africatown International Design Ideas competition. She recognized the opportunity to pay homage to the descendant community of Africatown through design. She called on the architecture community around the globe to submit ideas for the development of four major sites in Africatown, (1) The Africatown Historic District, (2) The Josephine Allen Site, (3) The Africatown Connections Blueways and (4) The Africatown Park USA, along with 16 venues within the sites.  

Her desire was to provide a venue by which the descendants of the Clotilda and the Africatown community could receive the benefit of design in the development of their community. I had the pleasure of serving as one of the Design Commandos for the competition, under the leadership of the lead juror/Commando, African-American architect Jack Travis. A 16-member jury panel consisting of design professionals and community members was assembled and of the 16 member16-member panel, four jurors were selected to be “Design Commandos.” The Commandos were tasked with translating the design elements presented in the competition submittals, for the community jurors, to best understand the solutions that were developed. The competition yielded 169 design boards, 142 essays, and 23 submissions from architects and planners throughout the world. 

[i] Zora N. Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” (New York: HarperCollins Books, 2018), 57.

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