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CSS is a place where scientists, engineers and designers come together to intensively study and respond to issues at the intersection of settlement, coastal restoration, flood protection, and the economy.” — Jeff Carney
studio’s community partner, the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Design. In 2010, CSS worked as part of a collaborative project of architects, landscape architects, engineers, and coastal scientists from LSU and architects from the Princeton University School of Architecture that received international acclaim. “The Mississippi Delta: Constructing with Water” demonstrated how a multi-disciplinary approach can be used to address issues of coastal sustainability in two high-profile coastal communities: New York City and southeast Louisiana.
sediment and eventually rebuild central wetlands, taking into account what that would mean not only for the landscape but for the inhabitants who currently live there. Their designs included visualizations of new paradigms for building communities, changing infrastructure to support more sustainable and resilient living, and three-dimensional maps of the coast with new landbuilding capacity. More detailed speculative designs were undertaken for the Lower Ninth Ward and the restoration of Bayou Bienvenue as well as parts of St. Bernard Parish.
The project, combined with the similar Princeton study concerning coastal sustainability in New York, was included in the themed exhibit “Workshopping: An American Model of Practice.” The exhibit was unveiled that August at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious art and design exhibition in the world, and displayed at the American Pavilion during the threemonth exhibition. The project was selected from among hundreds of applicants from around the world to represent the American Pavilion, and was a collaborative effort of Princeton engineer Guy Nordenson and architect Catherine Seavitt and the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio. Together, they expanded on an earlier project of the Princeton team that looked at what would happen in New York City during sea level rise. In its conceptual approach to answering that question, the team proposed opening up the river in five spots and creating diversions or basins that would fill with
In the studio’s first year of operations, CSS found that Hurricane Katrina’s toll on the Lower 9th Ward was related to degradation of New Orlean’s natural surrounding environment.
CSS also spent much of 2010 trying to find solutions to the problem of coastal erosion in Louisiana. Projects along these lines specifically involved the town of Lafitte as well as both Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. The Lafitte project took a trans-disciplinary approach to the examination of relationships between the built, natural and cultural environments of the Jean Lafitte area, 35 minutes south of New Orleans in the Barataria Basin.