What does it mean to design an engagement with history? Well, it depends who you ask.
For architects, the answer may begin with massing or material. For exhibit designers, it may start with artifacts, media, and interpretation. For historians and civic leaders, it may hinge on memory and public perception.
So perhaps the more important question is: why design an engagement with history?
At the Shockoe Institute in Richmond, Virginia, architecture, exhibition design, and institutional purpose converge around a shared ambition: helping people use the lessons of history to improve civic life.
Designed by Baskervill in collaboration with experience design studio Local Projects, the 12,000-square-foot educational facility occupies Main Street Station in Shockoe Bottom—once the epicenter of the domestic slave trade in the Upper South. Through its permanent exhibit, Expanding Freedom, the Shockoe Institute examines the evolution of American racial slavery, Richmond’s pivotal role in that history, and its enduring impact on our shared American experience. At the conclusion of the exhibit, visitors have an opportunity to act on what they’ve learned and consider how to put this history to work to improve our civic life.
Architecture, exhibition design, and location create a one-of-a-kind visitor experience.
The project challenges the idea that architecture and exhibition exist as separate disciplines. Places that make a lasting impact don’t emerge when architects design a building and exhibit designers fill it afterward. They emerge when architecture, interpretation, and institutional purpose are developed together around a shared outcome.
That shared purpose shaped the collaboration from the very beginning. Rather than approaching the project as separate entitites, the three organizations aligned around a common ambition before a single design decision was made.
“We showed up with agreement on our values and a shared intention,” said Todd B. Waldo, Chief Operating Officer of the Shockoe Institute. “From there, everything—from design decisions to coordination across disciplines—was about staying aligned around the mission and making sure every part of the experience supported it.”
That shared ambition shaped more than the project’s outcome; it shaped how the team worked together. Architects, experience designers, historians, and Institute leadership approached the project as a single conversation rather than a series of handoffs, using collaborative workshops to test not only where visitors would move, but how the experience should feel—quiet or expressive, immersive or restrained, historical or contemporary.
Preliminary design exercises explored visitor flow, interpretive sequencing, and experiential goals.
Beginning with Place
To sit inside the historic train shed at Main Street Station is to sit inside a collision of American ambitions. Above you are the vaulted iron arches of nineteenth-century industrial innovation that speak to an era of economic growth and expanding networks. Beneath you is Shockoe Bottom, a landscape that served for decades as the epicenter of the domestic slave trade in the Upper South. Here, thousands of enslaved men, women, and children were bought, sold, imprisoned, and forced into new lives through the machinery of the domestic slave trade.
After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond’ by Eyre Crowe, 1854 (Chicago History Museum)
These two realities never existed in a vacuum. As railroads expanded across Virginia and the South, they relied on enslaved labor for construction and maintenance while strengthening the transportation systems that supported the domestic slave trade. The two histories occupy the same ground and timeline, and for the design team, could not be conceptually separated.
The decision to house the Institute inside a functioning community hub also meant the building itself became an active participant in the narrative. If you ask Burt Pinnock, NOMA, FAIA, about the project, he rarely starts by describing the building. He starts by describing the place. As Pinnock led Baskervill’s Cultural Studio through the project, he remained constant that its success rested less in what was added than in what visitors are encouraged to notice.
“The architecture isn’t the story,” Pinnock said. “It’s the framework that allows the story to unfold. The responsibility of the design team was to respect that significance while connecting the dots between this place, this history, and now.”
The preserved steel structure of Main Street Station frames the entrance to the Shockoe Institute.
By preserving the exposed industrial skeleton of the station and introducing modern, curved wood and glass interventions, the past and the present do not blend seamlessly; they confront each other.
That dialogue extends beyond the building itself. Expansive glazing keeps the surrounding area in view, allowing visitors to continually reconnect the history unfolding inside the galleries with the city beyond the glass. The visual relationship is subtle but persistent. The past never feels isolated from the present because, in this place, it isn’t.
A February 2024 tour with project partners helped shape a shared understanding of the site’s significance.
Translating History into Experience
To convert passive observation into an active civic encounter, Expanding Freedom relies on a choreography of physical and emotional states. The journey across its seven sections is shaped through deliberate spatial pacing and an intentionally linear experience as opposed to an open-ended layout in an effort to support visitors in engaging with the many layers of this complex story.
The ground itself tells the first story. Meandering lines along the carpet—formed from a single, continuous image that spans the entire facility—echo the historic path of Shockoe Creek, guiding visitors through the space. In one section, these organic lines are suddenly overlaid by a mapped street grid of nineteenth-century Richmond. To walk through the experience is to literally step along the historic cartography of the City’s slave trade.
A continuous floor graphic, timeline, and 3D media connect visitors to Richmond’s historical landscape.
As visitors push deeper into the space, the space pushes back. Sharply angled exhibit walls tilt into the circulation path, intentionally disrupting the flow of movement. Elsewhere, layers of interpretation are revealed only through carefully shaped cut-outs in freestanding panels, allowing visitors to glimpse fragments of archival newspapers, illustrations, and historical narratives before seeing them in full. Visitors must slow down, pivot, and reorient their bodies as historical texts and photography surround them piece by piece. These physical interruptions mimic the cognitive disruption required to face difficult truths; the flow is designed so that the gravity of the site cannot be bypassed with a straight-forward stroll.
The environment functions as a continuous narrative where shifts in light, sightlines, and material act as an emotional cadence. Long before a visitor reads a single document, the experience has already claimed their attention through moments of compression and release.
“There’s a rhythm to how people absorb difficult history,” observes L’Rai Arthur-Mensah, Executive Account Director at Local Projects. “We intentionally balanced cognitive and emotional experiences, giving visitors the space to both feel and learn, because emotional connection is often what opens people up to understanding history’s relevance today. We were equally intentional with our interpretive tools. The annotations, story tags and look-throughs were designed to help visitors navigate the language of the past and trace a direct line from the decisions made to outcomes that are still shaping communities in our present.”
By the time a visitor reaches the end of the exhibit, the experience has done more than inform, it has positioned the visitor to act. The design promises that a visitor arrives not with the comfort of closure, but with the weight of a question or many questions, and a space, The Lab, deliberately designed to hold it.
Prior to installation, the Local Projects team reviews how layered exhibit elements will guide visitors.
From Education to Engagement
The true test of a cultural space is not what happens inside its galleries, but what happens after a visitor leaves. In the case of the Shockoe Institute, the exprience does not end with a stark conclusion; there is an invitation into an open area known as The Lab.
The Lab was thoughtfully considered as a civic workshop—a space for dialogue, research, programming, and local action. It’s the physical manifestation of the projects team’s shared ambition: moving visitors from historical understanding into contemporary participation. By providing a highly-flexible environment for community assembly, the design breaks the traditional museum mold and refuses to grant the visitor the luxury of closure, replacing it with an active question: now that you know, what’s next?
The Lab transforms the exhibition’s conclusion into an adaptable space for continued conversation.
What emerges as a result of the Shockoe Institute’s connected spaces is less a museum and more a conversation. The architecture establishes a physical connection to the site and its history. The exhibit interprets that history through media, graphics, interaction, and storytelling. Together, guided by a shared mission, they construct an engagement with history that visitors move through with both their bodies and minds.
“Design alone can’t shape history,” says Waldo. “But it can shape how people encounter it. It can slow you down. It can ask you to sit with discomfort. It can remind you that these stories are not separate from the places we occupy—or from one another. And hopefully, in that moment, people begin to understand themselves not as observers of history, but as an extension of it and what comes next.”
To plan your visit to the Shockoe Institute, visit www.shockoeinstitute.org