On Thursday, January 27, the Menil Collection hosted a lecture by Philip Freelon, one of the principal architects planning the redesign of Houston’s oldest public park, Emancipation Park.

While the 90-minute session included highlights of other projects the Freelon Group, Freelon’s firm, has realized, the bulk of the evening was devoted to a 10-acre patch of land in Houston’s Third Ward. In 1872, four newly emancipated slaves led the effort to raise $1000 to purchase the land in order to host a Juneteenth—June 19, the day word of emancipation reached former slaves in Texas—celebration.

Freelon emphasized the novelty of the right to ownership for freedmen, people who had, until very recently, been legally reduced to property themselves.

As demographic and economic changes came to Houston (including, specifically, the construction of US-59 which cut the Third Ward off from downtown), the Third Ward fell into a state of neglect, and Emancipation Park with it.

After a Project for Public Spaces survey concerning Emancipation Park, the Friends of Emancipation Park, a non-profit organization founded to protect, restore, and encourage the use of the park, took a leading role in catalyzing the redesign process. The Freelon Group was selected, in partnership with various Houston organizations, to plan a new vision for the park that would pay homage to its historic significance in Houston.

In a series of stakeholder meetings and community discussions, locals discussed what they would like to see in the rebirth of the park: outdoor recreation, community space, performance space, a memorial to the four former slaves who spearheaded the campaign to purchase the park.

Freelon and his team presented a series of designs, each still in the “conceptual phase,” all of which flow from a central iconic piece (yet to be designed) to the original purchasers of the park. Each design features four zones: a Story Zone, a Founders’ Zone, a Neighborhood Zone, and a Performance Zone. The overarching theme of freedom is understood in four ways: as liberation, as release, as opportunity, as creativity. As the team moves from the conceptual phase into the design and/or construction phases, I am interested to see:

1. How the “central iconic piece” will ultimately be realized
2. If any mention is made of the tension between the name and original purpose of the park and the man for whom the two streets that flank the park, Dowling and Tuam, are named
3. How (or if) the different conceptualizations of “freedom” produce silences

What do you all think about this dissonance? Is there necessarily tension at all?

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