By Daniel Roche • April 15, 2024 • Architecture, Editor’s Picks, News, Southeast
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It’s been almost a decade since June 17, 2015. That afternoon, a neo-Nazi entered Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church’s Fellowship Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine African American parishioners participating in bible study. The victims were Reverend Clementa Pinckney (41), Reverend Daniel Simmons (74), Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor (49), Reverend Sharonda Singleton (45), Cynthia Hurd (54), Tywanza Sanders (26), Ethel Lance (70), Susan Jackson (87), and Myra Thompson (59).
The 2015 attack rocked the nation, and even provoked South Carolina politicians to finally remove the confederate flag from outside the state capitol. This past summer, construction started on a memorial indebted to the nine victims, entitled the Emanuel Nine Memorial. The design is by Michael Arad, a principal at Handel Architects. Renderings of the project were released in 2017 but the project took longer than expected to break ground and is anticipated to partially open in spring 2025.
Michael Arad is certainly no stranger to emotionally charged projects. In 2004, he won an international competition to design the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan at age 34. But for many reasons, the Emanuel Nine Memorial was different. “I’m not Christian, I’m not African American. I did not personally know anyone who was lost. And I’m not from South Carolina,” Arad told AN. Thus, the question became: How does one go about designing such a sacred space for a community that you’re outside of?
