Background

Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue is a tree lined mall featuring large monuments to confederate soldiers. It was designed during the City Beautiful Movement, an architecture and urban planning philosophy led by upper-middle class citizens. The movement has been criticized for valuing aesthetics at the expense of social reform. Formerly the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond built these monuments as part of the “Lost Cause” narrative. They were erected during the Jim Crow era between 1890-1929 as instruments of revisionist history.

The Competition

Storefront for Community Design (SFCD) is a non-profit community design studio in Richmond, working to provide equitable design services to the city. SFCD believes that design “has the power to offer tangible solutions to community challenges,” and encourages citizens to participate in shaping their community.

In response to this forum, SFCD applied to and received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts for a juried design competition to generate ideas for a reimagination of Monument Avenue. The competition was intended to facilitate constructive discussion, because “good design has the power to offer nuanced, multi-layered and hybridized representation of the built environment in places where conventional discussion has failed.”

My team and I were tasked with creating the branding for the competition, named Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion.