📅 FRIDAY, 10/30
📍Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

Designing with People, Designing for Place

This presentation will highlight the processes, challenges, and impacts of community-engaged design practice as told by the many voices of one project. The St. Mark’s Grove project is a collaborative public humanities initiative involving teams of architecture and interior design students and their instructors from VT and VCU in partnership with the people of Sewanee, Tennessee’s historic African American neighborhoods.

Through a process of robust community participation and deep engagement, the team designed a commemorative outdoor classroom which will ultimately be constructed on the site of the segregated Kennerly School, built in 1949 and demolished in 2010.

The project seeks to recognize, honor, and preserve the history of Sewanee’s Black St. Mark’s community with a monument that revives and sustains their memories and experiences – first for the benefit of their descendants and then of all others, today and in the future.

Thursday, 2pm

Hancock Hall 100

Kevin Jones (VT) | Members of the Student Design Team (VT+VCU)

Laura Battaglia (VCU) | Dr. Woody Register (Sewanee) | Evelyn Patton (St. Mark’s Community)