6 days and counting until our final review. Here’s the concept of what I’m attempting to do:
The redesign of the Visitor’s Center and Desoto Park I propose is an interpretation of the Louisiana landscape with a highly engineered wetland cleaning system. I’ve defined productive landscapes as landscapes that enhance natural systems in ways that have social, ecological, or economic value. They produce goods or services that benefit people and the environment. This particular design treats water on site, within urban and disturbed natural system contexts. An elevated, constructed wetland addresses the problem of the Mississippi’s pollution, providing an area protected from flooding for the water cleaning system to function. The treated water is directed to crawfish and fish ponds. Annual crawfish boils and fish frys take place at the Visitor’s Center to celebrate Louisiana’s culinary heritage.
The design speaks to interstitial connections of human settlements with ecological areas. Rarely do we see binary relationships in human settlement patterns and ecological typologies; rather patterns of branching and networks emerge with edge conditions that lack clear boundaries. Human consciousness is evolving to deconstruct the barriers we’ve erected in perceiving reality in binary relationships and in doing so, we meet the interstices and hybrid expressions of that which is in between. The overall design seeks to express this phenomenon.
Landscape in Louisiana 