dec.
“The River Ends Between Two Hills”
There is no doubt that all of us have heard of the Underground Railroad, but the context under which we speak of its relevance is never discussed through spatial planning and architectural design. The Underground Railroad was a social network driven by societal demands and moral ideologies, but it was realized through innovation in oral cartographies and the inhabitation of the pochè. Unlike our communal knowledge of the Underground Railroad, there is less understanding of the importance (or even the definition) of the pochè. Pochè is the French word for pocket. In architecture, it is the shaded space on a plan representing solid walls. It is filled in, distinguishing solid and uninhabitable spaces from livable areas.*
*Aside: This is where, as an academic and disciple of Darrel Fields, I would love to geek out and fall into the trap of pivoting this conversation to one about signs and signification; how the relationship between negative and positive space in architectural drawing draws parallels to signs and signifiers of the negation of Blackness in space. BUT, alas, I will refrain and stick to the topic at hand. Perhaps this can be discussed at a later date.*
Pochè is where the architectural relevance of this journey to the North begins.
“The river ends between two hills.”, is an oral mapping phrase used to code where one would find the meeting point of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers near Woodall Mountain in Mississippi and Alabama from the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd. Just like oral codes were used to hide roads and pathways, the pochè was an architectural tool that was used to hide bodies - Black bodies - in space. Hideouts, secret tunnel passages, basements, and cellars were all methods of escape, and they were all left undrawn - outside of recorded knowledge. Most of these design features were found in “safe houses”, in and through trap doors, secret attics, concealed staircases, unusually thick walls, and false walls alike. Each of these gateways to freedom was, and is to this day, concealed as architectural anomalies across the Northeastern United States.
It is essential to acknowledge the anomalous nature of these design features and their connection to the absence of Blackness in American architectural history. They remain unrecorded because they are site-specific interventions, which, for the majority of this nation's history, were a highly punishable offense due to the socioeconomic stance of sovereign governmental powers. Historic preservation must go far beyond our common regard for visibly significant places, but also seek, uncover, and protect sites of specificity that have been deemed irrelevant and sentenced to erasure.
The designers who worked to employ the pochè are left unknown and unrecognized, leaving a certain level of educational deficit in both spatial planning and archival research. Although there are a few homes noted as “railroad stations,” for many years, only the homes of white abolitionists were recognized, whilst the homes of free Blacks were not considered for preservation. Even across the ever-changing landscape of New York City, there are Underground Railroad stations across all 5 boroughs.
The Underground Railroad is not a social fable, nor is it a topic to be relegated solely to history and archeology. The Underground Railroad is a history of infrastructure and design, which needs more attention from the architecture and design community.
I believe that American studies professor Laura Bieger of Ruhr-Universität Bochum stated something worthy of recall in her 2024 article The Underground Railroad and the Promise of Infrastructure;
Infrastructures are not passive entities but world-making agents that secure life by distributing vital goods and services such as food, water, energy, labour, information and knowledge. Doing so requires form. And it is through taking on form that infrastructures not only transport the things listed above but also convey a promise about life’s possible shapes. In being essentially a promise about form, this ‘promise of infrastructure’ is inherently aesthetic: it makes felt a vision of the world that has been condensed into infrastructural form. Such ‘political aesthetics of infrastructure’ are by no means innocent, however; they have propelled large-scale extractivist projects such as colonialisation and the invention of modern slavery.
I agree with Bieger in this regard. Infrastructures require form, and form requires aesthetics. This union of form and aesthetics is architecture, and architecture in its politically subjected position is not innocent of its contribution to neo-colonialism or modern slavery. So, I think that it would benefit us all to think a little bit more about the physical realities of common historical topics. The Berlin Wall was a literal wall. The Underground Railroad, not so literal, was an abstraction of a vast network of spatial resolutions coded into architectural forms. Let's take the necessary time and attention to decode it.
Until next year,
stay BAD.d