[10 Years, 10 Stories of Impact series]

Richmond’s Monument Avenue has been a showpiece of our city’s ambitions since its inception, and a source of controversy for just as long. Designed during the City Beautiful era, its wide boulevard, grassy median, and grand architecture reflect the principles of urban city planning aesthetics, while also celebrating the Lost Cause narrative that fit hand-in-glove with the overt racism of the Jim Crow era. Since then, Monument Avenue has remained a target of strong feelings and, for better or worse, a defining symbol of our city.

Storefront for Community Design began programming efforts focused on Monument Avenue in 2015, following the racially motivated shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. Storefront, in partnership with VCUart’s middle Of Broad (“mOb”) studio, sponsored a design education program and panel featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Paul Williams, architectural historian Calder Loth, and Bill Martin, Director of the Valentine.

The issue gained renewed urgency in the summer of 2017, in the wake of the violence of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Storefront, once again in partnership with VCUart’s mOb Studio, decided to take a different approach by engaging not just local Richmonders, but the design community at large to reimagine Monument Avenue.

Storefront proposed a juried design competition, coined “General Demotion/General Devotion”, intended to facilitate constructive discussion about the future of Monument Avenue and guided by the principle that "good design has the power to offer nuanced, multi-layered and hybridized representation of the built environment in places where conventional discussion has failed."