Mid Review, Recovery

Last week was a rough week. Saori decided to spend next semester in Buenos Aires, there was the triple disaster to strike Japan, and I had a mid review Friday.

Mid-review is a juried review of work done up that point in the semester. Some people think that its actually more important than the final review as there is still a chance to develop the project based on the feedback you receive.

The work flow of this studio has been a bit atypical- we began with several weeks of studying the city from an infrastructural and topographic standpoint, trying to understand New Orleans in relation to water that comes from the sky, from the river, and catastrophically from the sea. There was a week-long site visit where we went to New Orleans, listened to lectures, and visited critical sites in the city infrastructure. After we returned, we embarked on a further study of a particular area of the city which lasted about two weeks, which culminated in the creation of an analytical model and a conceptual model of the area of study. This gave us 13 days in which to individually select our own sites and programs and begin work to present to the mid-review. So there was a lot of work you could say embedded but perhaps not apparent in the works we presented friday.

I got about two hours of sleep wednesday night, and four hours thursday night. I sacrificed my other schoolwork. I gave up on trying to organize my board and instead focused on the creation of 1/8" scale concrete and wood sculpted sectional models of my proposal, in addition to a physical model at 1/32" scale.

The review went badly. I presented so poorly my studio professor felt compelled to jump in and "rescue" me and my project, which is actually pretty humiliating when you think about it. It is either an indication that my presentation is failing my project, or that the teacher has suggested so much that became manifest in the project that he feels himself vested in the work.

Actually, it really doesn't matter as there is very little original in my project, which is kind of how I've situated the project. Here's the abstract:

New Orleans was founded at the navigable juncture of the gulf and the Mississippi river. People and trade would float up St.John’s bayou from lake Ponchartrain, down the 30’ wide Carondelet canal to the turning basin at the edge of the French Quarter, and move through the city overland to reach the banks of the Mississippi river. This was the conduit of the city. Since, this conduit has been broken, replaced by the industrial canal which serves as an urban bypass, and the Carondelet canal filled in. This urban canal was the home of a wide promenade, the Carondelet Walk, which is one of the few water edges of the city where water was an amenity instead of a threat or nuisance.

This project’s goal is to re-establish the historic conduit that linked lake (and gulf), city, and river in a way that brings the urban fabric to water at a human scale.  The method I propose to do this is to tie together several urban projects in various stages of actualization in New Orleans with an infrastructural architecture at the locus of these projects- where the Broad St. community revitalization efforts intersects the Lafitte Greenway project, in immediate adjacency to the Lafitte Housing project.

Waggoner & Ball’s Lafitte greenway proposal includes a recommendation by the Dutch Dialogue’s workshop to extend Bayou St.John to pump station 2 and pump it back out the river via the under used Orleans canal. This proposal builds on all of the above projects: building housing along the extended bayou, and providing a navigable channel in the bayou to allow boat traffic to reach a dock at the end of the bayou where it meets Broad st. at pump station 2. The dock then becomes a node, where pedestrians and bicyclists from the green belt can transfer to the water and vice versa. Additionally, this project proposes widening the median along Broad st. beween Canal and the pump station, which would tie into community redevelopment projects along Broad st such as the conversion of an abandoned grocery store into a new grocery store and urban farm and convey people to the the streetcar line and thus connect to the rest of the city of New Orleans.

 Anyway, I got some good comments and a lot of negative comments, but it is a very complicated moment in time and in the city where I'm proposing my project. In this sense, its very satisfying as I feel like I'm proposing something with a much higher level of sophistication that simply creating a new type of raised house.

After the review, Chuck and I grabbed a beer and a burger at Blueberry Hill restaurant/bar and I crashed pretty hard when I got home. Ended up sleeping about 11 hours. Saturday became a day for recovery and cleaning as I prepared for my spring break trip to Phoenix.

This morning, I got up at what would have been 3 am to catch public transit to the airport for an early flight to Phoenix. I forgot how hot Phoenix is, even in spring break. It was a high in the 80s today, and I didn't even pack shorts or sandals.