Post-Katrina NOLA, Episode III: "Recipe": God's Vineyard Update February 2009

Friday, February 20, 2009

God's Vineyard Update February 2009

Derek Hoeferlin's Spring 2009 Wash. U. architecture and urban design studio of 10 students and Jane Wolff's and Elise Shelley's University of Toronto landscape architecture studio of 26 students visit God's Vineyard on February 7, 2009.

God's Vineyard co-directors Earl Antwine and Noel Jones present the mission of the garden and update the studios on the current state of the coops and garden. The chicken coop is appropriately dirty, fully functioning, fully resilient, and at full capacity. It is outputting dozens upon dozens of beautiful brown and green eggs for the community. The African Geese are happy in their separate goose coop too, despite damage the goose coop received from a wind-driven projectile.

At present, the garden has a new gang of volunteers, including John Kleinschmidt - former Hoeferlin student/RECIPE member and now New Orleans transplant/intern architect at Waggonner & Ball Architects. The garden is being tilled and seeded at time of this posting.

GREAT NEWS INDEED!!!

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"RECIPE" was the third episode of ongoing Post-Katrina New Orleans studios led by Architect Derek Hoeferlin at Washington University in St. Louis. The first challenge was to explore the possibilities of a chicken coop. This was a design/ build project that required the production of the coop in St. Louis and transportation to and assembled. Our client for the coop was God's Vineyard Community Garden in the Lower Garden District neighborhood. The chicken coop at present is fully functioning and resilient. The second project was an adaptive re-use design for the historic Franz Building on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in the Central City neighborhood. The client for the Franz Building was the Good Work Network, a small business development corporation that purchased the structure. For the latter project, Washington University students collaborated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies students to develop a correlating business development plan for the adaptive re-use design. It placed first in the 2008 JP Morgan Chase Community Development Competition. The $25,000 award acted as seed money for the non-profit. The joint work completed by WUSTL/MIT has helped the Good Work Network raise over $500,000 to implement the project. Work on both of these projects would not have been possible without the assistance of the CITYbuild Consortium of Schools, hosted by Tulane School of Architecture.