Cal Poly’s Landscape Architecture Design Week 2006 To Focus on New Orleans Regeneration

SAN LUIS OBISPO – The Cal Poly Landscape Architecture Department’s annual Design Week, April 3-7, will focus on redeveloping New Orleans devastated by last fall's hurricanes.

Working in diverse teams from landscape architecture classes, as well as architecture and city and regional planning programs, students, faculty and design professionals will work together to create ideas and designs for regeneration of the Crescent City.

To plan the event, Assistant Professor Joseph Ragsdale and 11 students traveled to the Gulf Coast to collect site information and talk with residents and local professionals. They were struck by the magnitude of the damage within New Orleans and with clean-up and restoration activities. The team also visited one of the temporary housing locations north of Baton Rouge.

Design Week activities will run from 9 a.m. Monday until 5 p.m. Friday in the CAED Berg Gallery in the Architecture Building and in the Landscape Architecture Department studios in Dexter Hall. Design Week will include lectures, studio design sessions, design reviews and final presentations. The public is invited to attend the lectures, Friday afternoon presentations and the events held Monday through Wednesday in the Berg Gallery.

Here’s the schedule. Landscape architect and alum Randalle Hunt-Moore will give a lecture titled "New World, New Orleans" Monday, April 3, at 1:30 p.m. in the CAED Berg Gallery.

On Wednesday, April 5 at 7 p.m. in Philips Hall in the Performing Arts Center, author, activist and ecologist Janisse Ray will give a Hearst Series lecture titled "What Katrina Taught Us: Landscape, Community, and the Life We Dream." Janisse, author of "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," will challenge participants to think about how they might reconstruct the fragmented relationship between urban life and the natural world.

A public presentation of student proposals will take place Friday, April 7, from 12:30-
5 p.m. in the CAED Berg Gallery. Proposals will be reviewed by board members of the Southern California Chapter of the ASLA and other distinguished designers and planners in the region.

Design Workshop, an award-winning firm practicing landscape architecture, planning and urban design, will direct the activities. Leading the effort will be Todd Johnson, chief design officer of Design Workshop, and Don Ensign, co-founder of the firm, along with Juan Lagarrigue and Cal Poly alumnus Steve Noll.

Similar Design Week programs have been conducted around the country at other universities, including Mississippi State University and Louisiana State University.

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Note to Editors : An electronic graphic is available upon request. Reporters, photographers and television crews are invited to cover the Design Week proceedings. For best times or to arrange for an exclusive interview, please contact Ray Ladd at (805) 756-7432 or rladd@calpoly.edu .