© Hood Design Studio 

Written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and put to song by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is a traditional hymnal song.  To some it’s the Black National Anthem evoking the history and resiliency of African American peoples.  On the site of the brother’s historic birthplace and home, a new park is proposed that celebrates the brother’s life and achievements.  A space of lifted eartha small workers cottage and stage is overlaid atop of historic ground plane tracings of maps and property lines, forming new spaces and relationships that document the site and neighborhood history. The new park features a lifted lawn for seating, an illuminated Poet’s Walk, a shotgun house and stage, and a small garden with sculptures of the brothers.

The poems of James Weldon Johnson are made legible on one side of the house while the other side is used for performances as a megaphonic stage - the shotgun house thus provides a way of speaking while also inviting the neighborhood to sing and bring new life to the space. Mounted on a new concrete plinth, the old shotgun house, mobilizes its form into an individual monument that resist a romanticized ideal of passive restoration and idealization of the past. The shotgun house gains new terms of engagement that not only recognizes the displacement of a once-ubiquitous architectural expression, but also reinterprets its character as a new actor within the neighborhood.