When the International African American Museum (IAAM) opened in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023, it marked the culmination of more than two decades of community advocacy, fundraising, and design. It also signaled a beginning: a new civic landscape that acknowledges a painful history while inviting healing, learning, and celebration. For Carolina-based landscape architecture firm SeamonWhiteside (SW+), the project was both a privilege and a responsibility as they partnered closely with designer Walter Hood and his California-based landscape architecture firm - Hood Design Studio - to translate a powerful design vision into a resilient, technically precise, and deeply symbolic site: one that lets the ground itself speak.

Where It Stands
IAAM sits on Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston Harbor, where historians estimate nearly half of all enslaved Africans who entered the United States took their first steps on American soil. This "power of place" drove every design decision, such as deliberately elevating the museum's main volume above the ground. By keeping the "hallowed" earth open and visible, the land is preserved as a memorial while framing views to the water, an ever-present reminder of the Middle Passage and ancestral routes across the Atlantic. The site and building work as one interpretive experience, extending the curatorial arc and carrying history beyond the walls and into the Charleston air, tidal rhythms, and native plantings.

 

Project Goals
The project had four main goals, first: honor and reveal the ground. The land beneath the museum had to remain legible, walkable, and respected as a memorial landscape. The second goal was to extend storytelling outdoors. The landscape had to be an essential interpretive layer, an open-air preface to the museum's exhibitions, and a part of the learning experience. Third, the team designed for the Lowcountry. Features needed to reflect coastal heritage and perform against tides, storms, and heat. The final goal was to create a welcoming civic place. In addition to its role as a museum, IAAM was envisioned as a neighborhood landscape, free and open to the public.

Site Features that Carry the Story
As a museum has various rooms and exhibitions, so does the landscape at IAAM function like an outdoor museum. In the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, a grove of Silver Date Palms (Phoenix sylvestris) paired with a field of Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) integrates both African and Lowcountry ecologies while geographies are knit together by the stone stele columns that echo historical African building traditions and Charleston's cultural forms. At the water's edge is a water feature titled 'Tide Tribute,' which ebbs and flows, revealing and concealing embedded figures, viscerally connecting visitors to the rhythm of the sea and to those who crossed it in bondage. Down at Gadsden's Wharf, a stainless-steel band featured the engraved names of African countries as a literal line through history, measured, mapped, and made legible on the ground. Resting on columns formed with tabby - a traditional coastal material made with oyster shells - the contemporary museum building is anchored to regional memory and materials science. Nearby, brick outlines the location of a long-gone "Warehouse Wall" on the wharf where enslaved Africans were confined, placing a precise historical trace in the present-day landscape.

Technical and Cultural Challenges
Elevating the museum created unusual site interfaces. Close coordination with the architects and structural team allowed the team to knit plazas and paths to column bays and undercroft spaces while preserving openness and clarity of movement. Tidal hydraulics and precision grading presented another challenge, as the choreography of 'Tide Tribute' depends on millimeters of slope and highly predictable inflow and outflow performance as tides change daily and seasonally. The Landscape Architects worked with mechanical and plumbing specialists to fine-tune the grades, edge conditions, and controls so the feature reveals and conceals as intended, in real tidal time. Given the museum's location on the East Coast, coastal durability and maintenance was a matter of great importance. By integrating discreet drainage and selecting regionally appropriate materials, irrigation strategies, and plant species, the landscape is built to endure and age gracefully. With so many different elements to the project, aligning fabrication tolerances, finish elevations, and accessibility across disciplines required iterative mockups, frequent field verification, and responsive construction administration.

Outcome and Impact
Since opening, IAAM has been hailed as a major cultural institution and an urban landscape of national significance. TIME recognized it as one of the "World's Greatest Places" in 2024. Visitors encounter history first with their feet, on pavers that follow harbor lines, beside gardens that bind continents, and over waters that ebb and flow across 'Tide Tribute.' The result is exactly what Charleston needed at this site: a civic room that is open and free, designed with care, engineered for a harsh coastal environment, and resonant enough to hold memory without spectacle. That is the work the firm is proudest of -quiet precision in service of meaning.