Genealogie / Genealogies

Vicenza, palazzo Barbarano. 5 October 2012 - 31 March 2013; extended until 8 September 2013
by Guido Beltramini and Giovanna Borasi
A joint project by Canadian Centre for Architecture and Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio

Through the lens of the American photographer Max Belcher, this exhibition illustrates the unwitting Palladianism of slaves freed from the North American cotton fields. After returning to Africa, they built from memory the mansions of their former masters using local materials. Belcher worked in Liberia from 1977 and 1978 and focused mainly on the community of Arthington, where emigrants from North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia had settled.

From 1816 to 1847 various North American organisations encouraged former American slaves to emigrate to Liberia. Around 17,000 Afro-Americans founded new settlements in the country.

The new arrivals partly copied the settlement patterns of American communities as regards social organisation, burial practices, and place names. But especially architecture became a way of imposing their own culture on the local African communities.

The Afro-Americans rejected the circular-plan type of the native dwellings and built houses with rectangular plans, pediments and front and rear porches, typical of the neo-Palladian mansions on American plantations.

In ancient Rome, Vitruvius pointed to primitive wooden huts as a model for the stone temple. The triangular pediment of a temple was used by Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano da Sangallo to crown the entrance to the villa at Poggio a Caiano in fifteenth-century Tuscany. Seventy years later it became a typical feature of the villas that Palladio designed in the Veneto. In the seventeenth century the Palladian villa emigrated to the English countryside and then crossed the Atlantic to become plantation houses, like those in Gone with the Wind.
From there, the gable returned to Africa.