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When people look at the new Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts and Culture, they’ll be struck by this:
The focus is not the building’s front, but the south elevation, a huge expanse of seemingly fractured planes made of glass and metal.
Given the building’s purpose, housing a cultural center dedicated to African American history, designers at the Freelon Group in Durham sought inspiration in African textiles and traditional African American quilts.
Did they notice, too, their dramatic façade faces a street named for Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general with Charlotte connections?
In any case, the symbolism goes a step further. Those planes of glass and metal may not be fractured at all. Like the patches of a quilt – and the pieces of history, black and white – they stitch together into a new whole.
The staff will begin occupying the $18.6 million building in August. A grand opening is planned for late October.
Besides designing a building with meaning, the architects faced other challenges. The biggest was the long and narrow site on South Tryon Street: 45 wide and 400 feet long. Another was the structure underground, two tunnels to transport trucks and cars from Stonewall and College Streets to the parking garage beneath the 48-story office tower across Tryon.
The south elevation is billboard-sized, but the design breaks up the large surface and also makes it dramatic. At night, with interior lights and LEDs on the façade, it will glow like a lantern.
And the underground structure afforded another opportunity for symbolism.
Visitors will enter into a small lobby off Tryon and move to a main second floor space. The inverted “U” shape of the escalators and stairs, visible from outside, echo the shape of the stairs at the Myers Street School. Charlotte’s first graded school for African Americans, it once stood in Brooklyn, an all-black neighborhood since lost to urban renewal. Because of those stairs, it was called the “Jacob’s Ladder School.”
So when visitors ascend, they will at least symbolically go “higher and higher,” in the word’s of a spiritual long identified with black aspirations for freedom and opportunity.
The 44,000-square-foot building is airy and light, with an outdoor space overlooking Tryon on the fourth floor and large galleries on the third floor for the Hewitt Collection. The collection has 58 works by 20 African Americans, including Charlotte native Romare Bearden, purchased for the center in 1998 by Bank of America.
Two African American artists from North Carolina have been commissioned to design the building’s public art.
For the Tryon entrance, Juan Logan of Durham created “Intersections,” combining patterned pavers based on Central African Kuba textiles and a head-shaped sculpture engraved with the names of African American communities and streets.
A rear wall near College Street will have a 40-foot abstract mural made of glass panels by Apex artist David Wilson.
The size of this last piece shows that the new Gantt center, though on Charlotte’s main street, has a strong presence a block away on College. With the nearby Convention Center, the building creates a southern gateway into uptown.
