Lafitte Greenway Sustainable Water Design Proposal Wins AIA New Orleans Honor Award

Waggonner & Ball's Sustainable Water Design proposal for the Lafitte Greenway has received an Honor Award from AIA New Orleans. The awards jury specifically recognized our research methodology and holistic response to the history, existing condition and multi-functional potential of the site.

Jury Comments:

"This proposal for a 3.1 mile greenway running North-South from Canal Boulevard to the French Quarter, intersecting the Bayou St. John along the way, envisions the adaptive re-vitalization of historic navigational canals and train right-of-ways into a cohesively interwoven bicycle, pedestrian, greenspace, and water-management system. The jury found confidence in the historical research, adaptation of proven Dutch principles of landscape and water design, and the celebration of a design attitude that prudently balances complex urban development with the realities of natural systems. This is exactly the type of integrated environmental and urban planning that fellow American cities need to commission, study, and implement.

To use water as the main organizational element in a master plan is a very powerful idea in the context of New Orleans location and history. The project addresses the complexity of master planning and explains of how the idea of the project might change the urban space of the city on multiple levels.

One of the greatest ironies of being in New Orleans is that for a city both defined and confined by water, the presence of water remains hidden from daily experience. Given the disastrous results, repeated throughout its history, this project does far more than provide sustainable solutions for the challenges of urban hydrology. Unearthing old canals and waterways also brings back parts of the past that never should have been discarded. In doing for the city what the Mississippi does on a much larger scale, the Lafitte Greenway renews and celebrates the historic connection between the Lake and the French Quarter and —in today's terms— brings new energy to neighborhoods in need of connection and inclusion in the larger mapping of the city."