These two scores follow a parent and a family. Their routines intersect with movements and moments of thermal comfort and discomfort.
The scores converge at the crossing of St. Bernard Avenue and the Claiborne Corridor.
Claiborne Avenue was previously a thriving black business corridor with a vast and heavily planted neutral ground. The I-10 Expressway, built above Claiborne Avenue and completed in 1966, ripped directly through the Seventh Ward.
Today, the underpass is place of memory, environmental racism, and use. The legacy of the underpass is repositioned through everyday acts and moments of collective joy. Second Lines reach their acoustic climax—with singing, dancing, and jazz reverberating through the concrete room.
Looking forward, the design celebrates the memory of the corridor as a site of cooling and entrepreneurship through the use of the circle motif and the 25 x 25-foot neutral ground planting grid.
The cooling design of Claiborne Corridor focuses on three main components—highway decommissioning and repositioning, acoustic capture, and increased porosity.
In the design, the I-10 overpass will be decommissioned and interventions to enhance cooling will be implemented.
The Claiborne Corridor plays a vital role in the Seventh Ward and nearby neighborhoods as a civic and transportation artery. Drawing from the site’s previous condition as a grassy circle, there is a particular focus in the design on the intersection of St. Bernard and Claiborne Avenues.
The design’s interventions support both daily gathering in the nearby Hunter’s Field and crossings during second line parades. The acoustic canopy reintroduces the neutral ground previously removed for the highway off ramp and throws both shade and sound on the site. The design shifts the porosity of the site to both increase thermal comfort and programs. The street paving establishes pedestrian prioritization and the flexibility to develop a plaza typology during celebrations and emergencies. The tree plantings extend the neutral ground grid into the surrounding blocks, establishing greater connections, and improved shade and air quality.
The circle cut to the top right of the drawing pulls from the past condition of the crossing, and is repeated throughout the corridor, providing orientation for the radial cypress plantings.
The modular acoustic canopy both shelters and directs water flow, improving drainage. By combining sound and shade, the design celebrates place and joy.
This score follows an elder from senior housing to the neighborhood center, to the public library, and back home.
Nora Navra Library is located on St. Bernard Avenue in the Seventh Ward.
In 1946, Nora Navra opened as the second black library in the city. The library was originally comprised of two repurposed army surplus huts and later expanded into a permanent building on the same site. After 69 years of use, in 2005, Nora Navra was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. Reconstruction was not started until 2017.
Today, Nora Navra sits next to a vacant lot, and across the neutral ground is a vacant drive through-ATM.
Looking forward, the design reflects the legacies of Nora Navra’s beginnings as a 32 x 54-foot surplus hut, and a place for learning and enclosure.
Nora Navra's redesign has three main components—the backyard grove, the introduction of an outdoor community kitchen and solar energy storage center, and the expansion of the neutral ground.
The language of linear and radial grids defined by oak and cypress plantings connects the adjacent lots, expands shade, and increases programs.
The library is expanded across the entire block, emphasizing its positioning as an open neighborhood resource. Both the introduced trees and structure throw shade onto the library, neutral ground, community kitchen, and sunken stepped landscape.
Until the tree canopy grows to provide expansive shade, the structure can provide comfort and expanded programmatic use. Below the living and constructed canopy, the light and shade define rooms for gathering and learning.
The final score follows a teenager on their way from home to school, to a park after school, home, to a friend’s house, and home again.
Hardin Park in a block-sized open space in the Seventh Ward.
The park was established in 1921 as a private black park. It hosted the 1933 Negro World Series, for which 4,000 seats were erected. For several years after Hurricane Katrina the park was home to tens of families, housed in FEMA trailers.
Today, there is little to no shade on the site. While the green space offers cooling, it is minimal, especially during heatwaves.
Nearby vacant lots offer potential for expanding the park and allowing for more shade to be thrown.
Hardin Park's redesign draws on the intersecting programs of baseball, music, and gathering, as well as the legacy of the stepped seating for the 1933 Negro World Series.
The redesign of Hardin Park has three main components—the bridged seating structure, the expansion into adjacent lots, and the introduction of cooling play elements.
The planting grid is expanded to the streetscape, and the shade structure introduced at Nora Navra library is adapted for the park’s programs.
The bridge across the park enables multiple programs to coexist—including baseball, performances, and play. Other amenities are moved to adjacent lots, and water features are introduced.
The double curvature formation of the shells provides shelter and performance space. Like the acoustic canopy at the Claiborne Corridor, the curvature here creates both shade and sound reverberation.
The large shell supports daily music and performances, as well as community-wide programming. The small shell casts shade on seating that overlooks a grassy area and splash pad.
The final movement of the design is the Interstate-10 swamp between Claiborne and Elysian Fields Avenues.
The cypress swamps historically provided homes for indigenous populations and protection for formerly enslaved Africans. To expand the city, there have been numerous attempts to control and drain the swamps. These attempts have funneled groundwater and organic matter out of the water table, leaving the dried-out soil to crumble under the weight of roads and buildings. More than 50 percent of the city’s geographic area has sunk below sea level—creating the well-known bowl condition where residents walk up to the water’s edge.
The soils below the I-10 overpass swell when moist and crack open when dry, making building foundations, roads, and pipelines structurally compromised.
Today, the highway is only 15 feet above the ground, placing the traffic at a competing vertical scale with the adjacent houses, and flooding the ground below with polluted runoff.
Looking forward, the design will consider both the flows of water and vibrant cypress swamps that have been covered and removed.
The design of the Cypress Corridor incorporates three key factors—the decommissioning of the highway, the restoration of the canopy and soil, and the reduction of neighborhood flooding.
Through the Cypress Corridor, the cooling spine established at the Claiborne Corridor is extended to Elysian Fields Avenue, totaling a two mile stretch.
Through sloping the footprint of the highway but retaining the bike and pedestrian boardwalk at street level, the Cypress Corridor brings users from the ground to the canopy, with porch rest points shaded by radial cypress plantings. The four percent sloping ensures water movement with central outflow points. This relieves some of the routine and emergency flooding experienced in the Seventh Ward neighborhood.
The corridor is bounded by berms, reminiscent of levees.
The boardwalk and shaded porches are constructed with cypress planks. While the highway top will be removed, the supports will remain—transformed into objects of memory that will become less visible as the canopy grows.
The corridor allows water to slowly seep into the ground, keeping the water table more stable and reducing the rate of subsidence. In large rain events, water can be directed and held in the swamp, reducing pressure on city’s aging drainage system, and preventing neighborhood flooding.
Together, the sites provide movements and moments of shade that remember and resist the racist legacies of heat through the act of cooling. The framework and tools presented can be employed as a multi-neighborhood or city public cooling strategy.
