Early concepts for the Claiborne Avenue corridor include green infrastructure, market spaces, arts and craft vendors, educational space and social services, but Revelo stresses that the eventual interventions will be fully articulated by community members. (Image courtesy Colloqate)
The routing of I-10 through New Orleans was one of the signal injustices of the interstate highway era. In the late 1960s, the highway was built atop Claiborne Avenue, a thriving center of culture and commerce in one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in America. The highway destroyed businesses and homes and cast the street, formerly lined with live oak trees, in shadow. Residents have been working to reclaim the space ever since.
This summer, two Master of Architecture students at the Weitzman School spent two months in New Orleans, contributing to the community’s efforts to improve Claiborne Avenue. Supported by the PennPraxis Design Fellows program, Diego Martin (MArch’24) and Cheyenne Yamada (MArch’24) worked with Colloqate Design, a multidisciplinary firm based in New Orleans and Portland, on the Claiborne Cultural Innovation District, an ongoing transformation of 19 blocks of Claiborne Avenue. Colloqate, which describes itself as a design justice practice, has been working with residents of the Tremé since 2017 on new visions for the corridor. In 2021, the firm received a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support work on the Cultural Innovation District (CID). It’s aiming to use that grant to transform one or two blocks of Claiborne Avenue by the end of next year.
One of the New Orleans neighborhoods affected by the construction of I-10 along Claiborne Avenue (Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans, via Wikimedia Commons)
The project is an exercise in helping the community design its own future, says Natalia Revelo La Rotta (MArch’21), a designer at Colloqate (and 2020 Praxis Design Fellow). While there have been periodic efforts to remove the highway altogether, that’s a longer-term movement that involves state and federal authorities, Revelo says. The Claiborne Cultural Innovation District is meant to reclaim the space of Claiborne Avenue for the community in the meantime.
“We can’t do the huge picture, but we can do something small that will at least bring joy,” she says.
Early concepts for the corridor include green infrastructure, market spaces, arts and craft vendors, educational space and social services, but Revelo stresses that the eventual interventions will be fully articulated by community members. As part of its work, Colloqate has hired half a dozen Community Design Organizers to help shape the project. Early in the summer, shortly after the Praxis Design Fellows arrived, the group also hosted a Cultural Futures Fest to begin the broader community engagement for the corridor. Martin and Yamada jumped into the fray coordinating that event, along with a Design Justice Summit that Colloqate hosted in June, Revelo says.
For both Design Fellows, the chance to work with a uniquely justice-oriented firm was part of the appeal. Neither Yamada, who grew up outside Washington, DC, nor Diego, who grew up outside Chicago, had been to New Orleans before.
“I was excited about the opportunity to be involved with the community engagement aspects of Colloqate’s work, especially because it’s just so ingrained in their design process,” says Yamada.
There’s a common pitfall in architectural practice, says Martin, in which community engagement is carried out as something shallow and performative or as an afterthought to the design process.
“There’s this idea that you can separate community engagement from ‘real architecture,’” Martin says. “What Colloqate is trying to do through the Community Design Organizers program, and a majority of their other initiatives, is that they’re trying to make the architecture and the community engagement so intertwined and embedded that you cannot separate them from one another.”
As Design Fellows with PennPraxis, Weitzman students helped revive a comprehensive plan developed by a grassroots group called the Claiborne Avenue Design Team in the 1970s.
The two students worked full-time with Colloqate for two months. Part of their charge was to help renew a comprehensive plan that was put together in the 1970s by a group of designers, activists and community members called the Claiborne Avenue Design Team. Martin worked on creating new images and renderings, while Yamada updated geospatial analysis with contemporary data.
Colloqate had the same justice-oriented mindset in its own internal practice, from how it runs meetings to how it works with design partners, as it does in its external-facing work, the students say. They say the experience of working with a practice like that, and directly with community members, was a critical supplement to the skill-building work they’ve done at Weitzman.
Design Fellow and MArch student Yamada (front row, at right) with members of the Colloqate team and community members in New Orleans
Revelo says the firm hopes to invite more Praxis Design Fellows in future years, including at its Portland office. She hopes they can call on their experiences there wherever they end up after school.
“The idea of our firm and what we practice is we don’t just want it for ourselves—we want it for everyone. We want the architecture practice to change,” she says.
Meanwhile, the group continues to work through the legacy of separation and disinvestment as it develops the Claiborne Cultural Innovation District.
“You can feel the exhaustion sometimes. Things have been tried. Things have failed. We’re at it again,” Revelo says. “The goal is still the same. The community still wants that space back.”
Expand Image
