Interior Arch_G4_Experimental_Rosewood, FL

Experimental Social Justice Project

Florida International University - Graduate 4

Design Concept for the Memorial of Rosewood Florida

Site Location: Rosewood, FL
Team: Interior Architect Students: Melissa Carrazana and Lyan Chavez

Landscape Architect Students: Alejandra Espinosa and Simone Jimenez

Our spring 2021 semester comprised of our interior class and landscape architect students as an experimental studio. Our professors, Roberto Rovira and Newton D'Souza, have based our semester studio project on deliverables required for the Green New Deal SuperStudio. Parallel to this, we worked with The Rosewood Foundation and historical archeologist Edward Gonzalez-Tennant in research about the town of Rosewood and the massacre that happened in 1923; resulting in the African-American population fleeing from angry white mobs trolling though the streets.

Not being able to visit the site in Levy County due to COVID, we were left with limited information to go by from property records and images of the site. Homes had been burned down shortly after the residents abandoned their properties resulting in one house left on the property.

In this project, we researched the site going as far back as 1850, digitally rebuilt the Queen Anne style home reminiscent of the era and provided a haven memorializing how a black community lived a humble prosperous life before the massacre.