Mississippi Sharecropper Memorial

Students were given a plot of land to fill as much or as little as desired. The land, the side of a small hill, was steep and required specific design choices to accommodate the slope. This project was the last project of my first year in the architecture program. It was my first basswood product, too. It represents the turmoil and economic enslavement that sharecroppers endured The human rights movement later freed them from their servitude and awarded their own economic and entrepreneurial independence. The stairs descend twenty feet into the side of a hill, corresponding with the descent into entrapment by borrowing, failing, and then signing their lives away to a landlord. The passage, represents their perserverance through decades of servitude. The walls, tall and firm, represent the manipulative contracts that held these people down.