Baskervill is honored to share that the Burying Ground Memorial at the University of Richmond has received a 2025 Honor Award for Contextual Design from AIA Virginia. Among the organization’s highest recognitions, the award celebrates projects that demonstrate a deep responsiveness to their surroundings, histories, and communities.
The project began with a discovery: unmarked burial grounds of enslaved individuals uncovered during campus renovations. Rather than minimizing the significance, the University of Richmond partnered with descendant families and community members to create a place that restores dignity and acknowledges lives that had been silenced.
The resulting memorial is deliberately modest in form but profound in impact. A circular path and stone wall create a defined space of remembrance. Through features embedded in water, stone, and metal, the design includes a story wall, art, poetry, and symbolic plantings to tell an inclusive history.
AIA Virginia’s recognition underscores the role of design as a civic act—one that carries ethical weight as much as aesthetic ambition. It affirms that architecture has the responsibility to confront difficult histories and create space for collective truth-telling.