Madeline Luke Sciortino

Group: Julia Scheuermann + Grayson Bouillion

Professor: Kris Palagi

Due to its unique geographic conditions and abundance of wildlife, Louisiana is often called “The Sportsman’s Paradise”. Focusing on recreation, education, and sustainability, Native highlights the specificity of Louisiana outdoor culture while doubling as a storm shelter. Comprised of a museum, testing center, indoor classroom, and outdoor classroom, each program has a particular focus on local recreational activities.

By using concrete as a stereotomic mass that efficiently protects and combats flooding, while also creating light, tectonic spaces, the project blurs together two seemingly separate roles of recreation and disaster relief. The design proposal utilizes the durability of concrete as fire, flood, and impact resistant, but also challenges its experiential properties of mass, heaviness, and opaqueness.

Along the main entry, a central axis guides visitors into a volume of circulation where a secondary perpendicular axis intersects. The raising of the ground plane calls for an upper level entry. Mezzanines and interior glass walls create an open space looking down into the lower museum. Louisiana history and culture extends beyond the confines of the museum and into the everyday outdoor activities and landscape. The dual-functioning space of the museum/storm shelter recognizes the sense of safety provided by being able to view the conditions of the storm while feeling protected from it.

Research Facility + Visitors Center in Aqueduct Park, Rome, Italy

My site intervention is composed of a path in which the users orientation is altered to promote a sense of the historic and modern, local and global aspects of water conservation in Rome.

The aqueducts themselves serve as a barrier between what is modern and historic. This barrier can ultimately be used to heighten our understandings and sensitivity to water because water is a constant connection between what was historically and will be. As you walk perpendicular to the aqueducts your view is blocked creating a more localized environment. On the parallel axis a more global view extends into the distance and extends our understanding of the site. We must reorient ourselves to understand water in a new way- with the modern age and modern technology. This subtle change in orientation encourages the openness to new ideas for solving modern water issues not only in Rome but also globally.

The new axis perpendicularly cuts through the existing pattern of the site, connecting the modern areas outside of the aqueduct axis to the historical area between. 

Along the created axis, built forms create a rhythmic pattern forwarding users through the site in a series of compression and expansions of space and program. Progressively, from the entry to the research facility, the site intervention increases in scale and built form, until one reaches the global expanse. The main Entry lifts you above the aqueduct and gives you a visual connection to the built axis while maintaining the local view. Continuing forward into the gallery and theater space- users are reoriented into the long global view of the park into the distant mountain range and water system. Water- the connection between the two axis- guides you into this view and into the built form transitioning from aesthetic into life supporting functionality. The irrigation system allows for the centralized strip of landscape to be alive even in the times of drought- symbolizing the intrinsic value of water both historically, in present times, and in the future.

PROFESSOR: Jeff Carney

DURATION: Semester

Develop a Baton Rouge city center within Town Center development

PARTNER: Julia Scheuermann

The current site exists as a traditional shopping mall with area parking, disconnected pedestrian walkways, and a large boulevard that cuts off neighborhoods to the shopping area development. Our proposal focused on turning commonly known “eye sores” on the site into experiences that could be enjoyed. We accomplished this by creating green spaces that connect neighborhoods to commercial areas, redesigned the back functioning sides of the existing strip mall, and rethought exposed drainage systems into a pedestrian friendly area.

PROFESSOR: Andrew Baque

DURATION: Semester

LETTERMANS COMPETITION: 2nd PLACE

Memorial Competition for Alton Sterling and Police in Baton Rouge, LA

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…..When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” 
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

This memorial, in memory of Alton Sterling, Officer Montrell Jackson, Officer Matthew Gerald, and Officer Brad Garafola, seeks to foster human connection through visibility. Eye contact- even for a second has the ability to transform our ‘visibility’ of someone by allowing us to see their true identity, connecting us beyond any stereotype or preconceived ideas we may form. This memorial is a reminder that we must learn to love + recognize that at the end of the day we are not so different from one another after all.

Their memory is honored by what can bring us together not tear us apart.

Professor: Jori Erdman

Letterman’s Competition is a locally sponsored competition at Louisiana State University.

Devil’s Den, Big Bend National Park, Texas

The natural site offers a physical, visual, and audible rhythmic quality that can enhance focused meditation. Through four different rhythmic and patterned qualities, meditators are compelled to focus on specific visual patterns in the landscape while experiences a pause in both the physical and audible rhythmic patterns, which maximizes focused attention. Reinstating pattern, the four locations create a pattern within itself to reiterate the cycle of passing areas and holding areas.

SITE ONE: a focus on visual patterns of linear vegetation formations. The site is intended to be a pass through area where focused meditation is offered while enhancing visual linear patterns.

SITE TWO: A community campsite removed from the trail that allows for focused meditation on spotted rock patterns.

SITE THREE: A focus on the visual pattern of rectangular rock formations allowing for quick meditation on cantilevered platforms.

SITE FOUR: A community campsite that allows for a focus on horizontal linear lines in the distant horizon.

PROFESSOR: Kristen Kelsch + Camile Silva

DURATION: Half Semester

A place where people can gather, histories can be shared, lost ones can be mourned and remembered, activists can meet; a place where people will have a voice. 

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES 

Personal history, through the lens of storytelling, has the ability to unify strangers and communities. All immigrants are searching for a better life and have dealt with a multitude of hardships through their journey to the border. Many have been stripped of their personal belongings, sold everything they own, and lost friends and family along the way. This desire for something more, a better life, is the thread that ties these people together despite their different backgrounds and ethnicities. The two local communities have family and friends on either sides of the wall making their connection to it and the issues it encompasses both “good” and “bad. Both sides with different perspectives and experience can meet to express their stories to better understand the realities of the existing border and how this shared and recorded knowledge can change the way the present day and future developments of the border are created around the world. 

This space will be about bringing these personal experiences to the forefront so that healing can happen both between communities and personally. It will also serve as a basis for the rest of the world in terms of how the knowledge and information collected can transform the way we see international borders. As the U.S. Mexico Border receives constant media attention (some skewed and biased), Mexico is also building its own borders on their southern border to Guatemala. The U.S. Mexico border has been established as a precedent- a way of dealing with border on a larger scale. The border between U.S. and Mexico is only one of hundreds across the globe. The hope is that maybe from this new platform of understanding, we can change the way the present day and future developments of the border are created around the world. 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION_ Memorializing, Documentation, + Interpretation 

MEMORIAL + PUBLIC PLATFORM: 

-A temporary memorial space that allows for the local people to make their own memorial… pictures, drawings, prayers, memorabilia, paintings, art, crafts. This space will allow for personal expression in memorializing those lost on both sides of the border wall.

-A formal memorial space with names and dates. A solid permanent memorial that will withstand time + changes.. An active memorial to an issue that is ongoing..

-Public platform, a space that enables voice, a designated area of protest and community discussions + events 

*Along the border there is a string of memorials- a cross here, flowers there, a name, a board of missing people- their images spread across with information- while there are plenty of examples of locals wanting to memorialize those lost- the bringing of all of these individual pieces together into one place would show the large impact on our communities. 

DOCUMENTATION CENTER: 

Description: photos, names, descriptions, family trees, background- a data base of immigrants and their personal backgrounds as well as their story.

-A space that allows for the collection of information about their personal histories + stories into a permanent database sharing their names, family lineage, those lost, occupations, their stories. This will serve as a node for those looking for missing people as well as a place to find out more about the people in the community. 

INTERPRETATION CENTER: 

Description: from the documented information and memorial pieces researchers, activists, politicians, and all citizens/noncitizens would be able to analyze the issues (failures and successes of the wall and the implications as it exists today through a humanitarian and statistic base) 

-How can the true reality of these shared histories, experiences, and loss shape the way we construct our borders? How we see one another? This space will be the culmination of all of the information funneled into the site. A space where we can dream about how to handle borders, recognize each other as humans with the same basic needs and desires. The analytical portion would focus on how what we have learned here can affect the global idea of borders. 

ARCHITECTURAL RESPONSE: 

The building is designed along a circulation path that takes visitors through the narrative of the building. Visitors can enter at the international bridge level- walking perpendicular to traffic and into an entry space serving a(documentation). From this point the visitor is “in between” two different zones, one zone above (more everyday- more movement, more casual) and one below (quiet, reflective- memorial). The above floors and zone (documentation and analytical) are reached by an elevator and stair that carries you quickly between the floors. Documentation broken into two levels to bring visitors in and up, also has an obscured view to the surrounding environment from corten steel panels covering the facades. This change in visibility protects visitors sharing their story creating a removed environment from the bridge and border. The highest level, analytical, is glass- allowing for a long, global view from all sides. A long and slowed ramp brings you down into the memorial space below the bridge. The lower memorial zone uses a suspension system to support the ascension into the memorial- the weight of the memorial is directly supported by the international bridge. A continuous void from the entry point of the atrium down into the memorial space under the bridge uses light from under the bridge to guide visitors from one end of the memorial to the furthest end under the bridge. A public pedestrian walkway cuts through the light atrium connecting visitors into the larger master plan scheme and directly into a memorial sculpture garden which then leads to a platform bridge into a public market. 

Master Plan Group: Grayson Bouillon, Saul Belloso, Gurkirat Kaur

Professor: Paul Holmquist

Duration: Semester

Boys and Girls Club at Howell Park, Baton Rouge, LA

The Boys and Girls Club goal is about enabling children to succeed through educating and nurturing an environment that is safe and supplemental to each individual. the intervention on the Howell Park site seeks to enable children- particularly through enhancing imaginative skills which result in improved critical thinking skills. imagination is encouraged both in the “more structured” programs such as the learning center and in the “less structured” programmatic spaces such as the playground or dance center. this intervention is designed to allow for an ambiguous play area that enables children to test their imaginations- maybe they are climbing Mount Everest or a monkey running through the trees in a jungle far far away- the choice is theirs, wherever it may take them.

PROFESSOR: Jori Erdman

DURATION: Semester