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01-19-26 | Feature
Project Goals
The project had four main goals, first: honor and reveal the ground. The land beneath the museum had to remain legible, walkable, and respected as a memorial landscape. The second goal was to extend storytelling outdoors. The landscape had to be an essential interpretive layer, an open-air preface to the museum's exhibitions, and a part of the learning experience. Third, the team designed for the Lowcountry. Features needed to reflect coastal heritage and perform against tides, storms, and heat. The final goal was to create a welcoming civic place. In addition to its role as a museum, IAAM was envisioned as a neighborhood landscape, free and open to the public.
Site Features that Carry the Story
As a museum has various rooms and exhibitions, so does the landscape at IAAM function like an outdoor museum. In the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, a grove of Silver Date Palms (Phoenix sylvestris) paired with a field of Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) integrates both African and Lowcountry ecologies while geographies are knit together by the stone stele columns that echo historical African building traditions and Charleston's cultural forms. At the water's edge is a water feature titled 'Tide Tribute,' which ebbs and flows, revealing and concealing embedded figures, viscerally connecting visitors to the rhythm of the sea and to those who crossed it in bondage. Down at Gadsden's Wharf, a stainless-steel band featured the engraved names of African countries as a literal line through history, measured, mapped, and made legible on the ground. Resting on columns formed with tabby - a traditional coastal material made with oyster shells - the contemporary museum building is anchored to regional memory and materials science. Nearby, brick outlines the location of a long-gone "Warehouse Wall" on the wharf where enslaved Africans were confined, placing a precise historical trace in the present-day landscape.
Technical and Cultural Challenges
Elevating the museum created unusual site interfaces. Close coordination with the architects and structural team allowed the team to knit plazas and paths to column bays and undercroft spaces while preserving openness and clarity of movement. Tidal hydraulics and precision grading presented another challenge, as the choreography of 'Tide Tribute' depends on millimeters of slope and highly predictable inflow and outflow performance as tides change daily and seasonally. The Landscape Architects worked with mechanical and plumbing specialists to fine-tune the grades, edge conditions, and controls so the feature reveals and conceals as intended, in real tidal time. Given the museum's location on the East Coast, coastal durability and maintenance was a matter of great importance. By integrating discreet drainage and selecting regionally appropriate materials, irrigation strategies, and plant species, the landscape is built to endure and age gracefully. With so many different elements to the project, aligning fabrication tolerances, finish elevations, and accessibility across disciplines required iterative mockups, frequent field verification, and responsive construction administration.
Outcome and Impact
Since opening, IAAM has been hailed as a major cultural institution and an urban landscape of national significance. TIME recognized it as one of the "World's Greatest Places" in 2024. Visitors encounter history first with their feet, on pavers that follow harbor lines, beside gardens that bind continents, and over waters that ebb and flow across 'Tide Tribute.' The result is exactly what Charleston needed at this site: a civic room that is open and free, designed with care, engineered for a harsh coastal environment, and resonant enough to hold memory without spectacle. That is the work the firm is proudest of -quiet precision in service of meaning.
Honoring History Through Design
International African American Museum
First publicly proposed in 2000, it wasn't until 2023 that the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, was ready for visitors. A world-class array of design firms worked on the project during that time, including design architect Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, architect of record Moody Nolan, conceptual Landscape Architect Hood Design Studio, and Landscape Architect of record SeamonWhiteside (SW+).
The museum was elevated by eighteen 13-foot-tall columns clad with Tabby, a traditional, regional material made with an oyster shell aggregate. A lawn of Celebration Bermuda Grass (Cynodon dactylon 'Celebration') encloses a grove of Silver Date Palms (Phoenix sylvestris). The rectangle of clay brick was specified to match the museum's fa??ade and to denote the former location of a confinement warehouse. Along one edge of the turf is the Reflection Walk, whose walls have CMU cores clad with 2-inch-thick, polished black granite. The five sculptures are crafted with precast concrete integrated with mussel shells and placed along a pathway of Black Locust decking.
A water feature measuring about 160'x 60' titled "Tide Tribute" consists of engraved precast concrete pavers whose design alludes to the brutal conditions on the 18th-century slave trading ship 'Brookes.' The pavers are embedded with sea bottom shells and tinted with graphite iron oxide pigment. Replicating tidal fluctuations, a water pump system fills and drains the area, covering then exposing the bas-relief figures. Running along the front edge of the feature are stainless-steel bands that were bead-blasted and etched with the names of the Africans' home countries.
Rough-chiseled, 3-to-6-feet-tall, Grand Coulee basalt columns represent historical African building traditions. Frameworks (upper middle) contain rows of diamond-shaped embellishments (inset) that symbolize the badges enslaved workers wore to identify their specific skills. Next to the frames are custom benches devised by Hood Design Studio.
At the front of the museum, Silver Date Palms were planted between mounds covered with Bahia Grass (Paspalum notatum). Regionally appropriate irrigation strategies and discreet drainage was integrated into the landscape to ensure longevity.
Winding walkways of Ipe wood decking are complemented by curved, perforated, 'woven' brick walls that evoke Charleston's historic craftsmanship. Selected plantings are resilient to the region's coastal conditions. Other plantings reflect both African and Lowcountry ecologies, including Queen Ann Lily of the Nile (Agapanthus africanus) and Papyrus (Cyperus papyrus).
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When the International African American Museum (IAAM) opened in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023, it marked the culmination of more than two decades of community advocacy, fundraising, and design. It also signaled a beginning: a new civic landscape that acknowledges a painful history while inviting healing, learning, and celebration. For Carolina-based landscape architecture firm SeamonWhiteside (SW+), the project was both a privilege and a responsibility as they partnered closely with designer Walter Hood and his California-based landscape architecture firm - Hood Design Studio - to translate a powerful design vision into a resilient, technically precise, and deeply symbolic site: one that lets the ground itself speak.
Where It Stands
IAAM sits on Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston Harbor, where historians estimate nearly half of all enslaved Africans who entered the United States took their first steps on American soil. This "power of place" drove every design decision, such as deliberately elevating the museum's main volume above the ground. By keeping the "hallowed" earth open and visible, the land is preserved as a memorial while framing views to the water, an ever-present reminder of the Middle Passage and ancestral routes across the Atlantic. The site and building work as one interpretive experience, extending the curatorial arc and carrying history beyond the walls and into the Charleston air, tidal rhythms, and native plantings.
Project Goals
The project had four main goals, first: honor and reveal the ground. The land beneath the museum had to remain legible, walkable, and respected as a memorial landscape. The second goal was to extend storytelling outdoors. The landscape had to be an essential interpretive layer, an open-air preface to the museum's exhibitions, and a part of the learning experience. Third, the team designed for the Lowcountry. Features needed to reflect coastal heritage and perform against tides, storms, and heat. The final goal was to create a welcoming civic place. In addition to its role as a museum, IAAM was envisioned as a neighborhood landscape, free and open to the public.
Site Features that Carry the Story
As a museum has various rooms and exhibitions, so does the landscape at IAAM function like an outdoor museum. In the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, a grove of Silver Date Palms (Phoenix sylvestris) paired with a field of Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) integrates both African and Lowcountry ecologies while geographies are knit together by the stone stele columns that echo historical African building traditions and Charleston's cultural forms. At the water's edge is a water feature titled 'Tide Tribute,' which ebbs and flows, revealing and concealing embedded figures, viscerally connecting visitors to the rhythm of the sea and to those who crossed it in bondage. Down at Gadsden's Wharf, a stainless-steel band featured the engraved names of African countries as a literal line through history, measured, mapped, and made legible on the ground. Resting on columns formed with tabby - a traditional coastal material made with oyster shells - the contemporary museum building is anchored to regional memory and materials science. Nearby, brick outlines the location of a long-gone "Warehouse Wall" on the wharf where enslaved Africans were confined, placing a precise historical trace in the present-day landscape.
Technical and Cultural Challenges
Elevating the museum created unusual site interfaces. Close coordination with the architects and structural team allowed the team to knit plazas and paths to column bays and undercroft spaces while preserving openness and clarity of movement. Tidal hydraulics and precision grading presented another challenge, as the choreography of 'Tide Tribute' depends on millimeters of slope and highly predictable inflow and outflow performance as tides change daily and seasonally. The Landscape Architects worked with mechanical and plumbing specialists to fine-tune the grades, edge conditions, and controls so the feature reveals and conceals as intended, in real tidal time. Given the museum's location on the East Coast, coastal durability and maintenance was a matter of great importance. By integrating discreet drainage and selecting regionally appropriate materials, irrigation strategies, and plant species, the landscape is built to endure and age gracefully. With so many different elements to the project, aligning fabrication tolerances, finish elevations, and accessibility across disciplines required iterative mockups, frequent field verification, and responsive construction administration.
Outcome and Impact
Since opening, IAAM has been hailed as a major cultural institution and an urban landscape of national significance. TIME recognized it as one of the "World's Greatest Places" in 2024. Visitors encounter history first with their feet, on pavers that follow harbor lines, beside gardens that bind continents, and over waters that ebb and flow across 'Tide Tribute.' The result is exactly what Charleston needed at this site: a civic room that is open and free, designed with care, engineered for a harsh coastal environment, and resonant enough to hold memory without spectacle. That is the work the firm is proudest of -quiet precision in service of meaning.
