For immediate release: March 27, 2006

Design Workshop and Cal Poly to lead five-day New Orleans planning effort

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIF. — California Polytechnic University and planning and design firm Design Workshop are partnering to guide a student exploration of rebuilding issues for the city of New Orleans in a workshop on the Cal Poly campus April 3-7. This student charrette will give students real-world experience while helping take proposed redevelopment ideas for New Orleans down to the level of detail.

“We believe that this student charrette can make an important contribution to current planning efforts,” said Todd Johnson, Design Workshop’s chief design officer.

In January, Design Workshop led a five-day charrette at Mississippi State University dealing with Gulf Coast redevelopment, which included Leland Speed, director of the Mississippi Development Authority, as a speaker and attracted the participation of Gulfport, Miss., Mayor Brent Warr. The session was featured in the March issue of Architectural Record.

Johnson will help prepare for the five-day California session, which will be led by lecturer Joe Ragsdale of the Cal Poly faculty; Don Ensign, one of the firm’s founding partners; Steve Noll, a Cal Poly alumnus and principal of the firm’s Tahoe office, and landscape architect Juan Lagarrigue, also from Tahoe. Ragsdale and 11 Cal Poly students toured New Orleans in January in preparation for the charrette, talking with residents, collecting site information and working with design professionals. The April workshop will use the main plans already advanced for the city, including a plan by the Bring Back New Orleans Commission, which is FEMA-endorsed, and a collaboration by the Urban Land Institute and Moore Planning Group of Alexandria, Louisiana.

More than 200 students in landscape architecture, architecture and city and regional planning will use this basis to formulate plans and designs for the city at a more detailed level. The project divides the city into neighborhood planning districts, each of which has areas impacted by flood damage. Groups of students will be asked to tackle the question of whether to rebuild or not, and in either case, to devise plans for each district. The teams will then collaborate to create a rebuilding strategy for the city itself.

Speakers for the event will include landscape architect Randalle Hunt-Moore of Moore Planning Group, ecologist Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood) and Cal Poly professor Ken Topping, a leading U.S. expert in planning for disaster mitigation and former planning director for the City of Los Angeles.

 Students’ work will be judged by a jury of Fellows of the Southern California Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architecture and other distinguished designers and planners in the region in a public presentation on Friday, April 7, from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in the gallery of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

In the past, Design Workshop has led similar educational sessions at Illinois, Penn State, Louisiana State, California Polytechnic and North Carolina A&T. These included redevelopment of an underutilized rail site; a multi-use master plan for a site bounded by an oil refinery, park, river and rail yards; and redevelopment of an industrial brownfield site with the preservation of historic industrial structures outside of Chicago. The firm will hold its third and final Design Week of the year at Ball State University in October.

Founded in 1969, Design Workshop practices sustainable design and planning on sites ranging from urban infill, parks and open-space projects to brownfield redevelopment and resorts. The firm, which has seven offices across the United States, has received more than 120 awards for design and planning, including a 2003 Charter Award from the Congress for New Urbanism for its rail-yard conversion in downtown Denver.