by Leopold Lambert

Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788. (Library of US Congress)

In the previous article, I was evoking the architecture of the holocaust’s gas chambers to address the role of design in industrialized death; today’s article will describe another atrocious historical example of how architecture can no only serve the most violent ideologies, but also often makes itself indispensable for them to be implemented. From the 15th century to the 19th century, about 14 million West-African bodies were captured, brought to the coasts of the Guinean Gulf and then forced into ships to be enslaved in the Americas (the Caribbeans, the United States and Brazil in particular). Architecture intervenes at many steps in this process of displacement (the most massive in human history); however, I would like to focus on the slave ship in this text, as a technology without which the entire principle of the slave trade would have been simply impossible.

Slave ships were transporting from 400 to 700 slaves at a time in such horrifying conditions that 15% of them would not survive the trip, dying from diseases, from the cruelty of the crew or by committing suicide. Design seems to have “a solution to each problem” since some nets were sometimes set up around the ships to avoid slaves to jump overboard to escape this hell. Similarly, the ship was also designed to accommodate a potential riot from the slave as the crew would then be able to barricade themselves on the top platform of the ships to later gain back the control of the ship.

Let’s look at the ship as a holistic piece of design itself: rarely would an architectural set of plans and sections be able to present the violence of architecture on the bodies the way it does in the one presented above. Have you ever been viscerally disgusted by an architectural plan? As a matter of fact, this specific set of drawings was created for this matter: it describes precisely an actual boat but was not drawn by a naval architect or engineer, but by a group of abolitionists who wanted to illustrate the horrific conditions of the slave ship. Because the drawings were recognized by historians like Marcus Rediker, as exact in what they describe we can however consider them as architectural plans in the same way that if they had been drawn by the architect himself, although we might want to acknowledge the ingenuity of simply adding bodies to an architectural plan to reveal the violence of the architecture it represents. The four platforms of the ship were clearly indexed on an approximate minimal size of the bodies. Men, women and children were compartmentalized and one can notice the disproportion of their amount: this is explainable by the consistent monetary preference to displace bodies from Africa, rather than developing procreation “on site” that was considered as too costly.

Many historical books give us a precise numerous account of what the slave trade was about; however, only a few seems to take on describing the unfathomable horror that these ships were providing. Among them, we find Marcus Rediker‘s book The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin Books, 2008), and C.L.R. James‘s history of the Haitian 18th-century slave revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Random House, 1989), which describes the conditions of the ships in its first pages:....Continue Reading

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