http://guttertogulf.com/

Operation Gutter to Gulf (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the water)

This Blog is a Spring 2009 collaborative effort between architecture students of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and landscape architecture students of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. The studios' charge is to assist in an ongoing effort titled Dutch Dialogues, a multi-disciplinary trans-national group led by Waggonner & Ball Architects of New Orleans, the American Planning Association and the Royal Netherlands Embassy. The overall intentions of Dutch Dialogues are to examine, research and speculate on integrated water management and infrastructural strategies for New Orleans and the surrounding region. The studios will examine water as a means to rehabilitate the urban landscape of New Orleans, positioning water within our sights and within our minds. Multiple scales of architecture, landscape, infrastructure and urbanism will be researched and designed as inextricable parts of the same whole, tracking and integrating water from the gutter to the gulf [of Mexico].








New Orleans Layered Systems site model generated from basemap provided courtesy of Waggonner & Ball Architects

NOLA study areas



This map represents the convergence of individual work the studio did following our NOLA field trip. We have narrowed our collective focus to the area surrounding two adjusted transects that run lake to river, including certain spacial and infrastructural connections between them:

1) London Avenue Canal/Elysian Fields
2) 17th Street Canal/Washington Ave Canal/MLK
(connections include Bayou St. John, City Park, the Lafitte Corridor, Jefferson Davis, I-10, and the railroad)

Six groups will study specific aspects of the existing condition in these regions:

1) residential case studies (housing typologies throughout the study area)
2) infrastructure moments (highway, canal, railroad crossings)
3) bottom of the bowl trends (relationships between three adjacent neighborhoods)
4) "blue/green" connections (connective tissue between the transects, see map)
5) surface trends (resettlement patterns, vacant land, etc)
6) physical sections (spaced along transects)

These groups will present their research at the mid review on Monday, March 2, in addition to documentation of all previous Wash U and Toronto work.