by Michael Ball
Urban colleges and universities must balance their desire to expand with the necessity of extroversion, more fully acknowledging their roles as agents of change in their communities.
Rather than revolutionizing the entirety of whatever campus already exists, can on of the campus’s neglected edges present an opportunity for expansion in a different way, creating a zone that exposes students to a larger social realm, provides the public with the full educational and cultural benefits of proximity to the university, and revitalizes a blighted, suffering area, while creating an identity of its own?
The project transforms Tulane University’s neglected, under-utilized S. Claiborne Avenue end not so much to create two “front” in the form of two completely defined and closed “bookends,” but to counterbalance Tulane’s compositionally closed, homogeneous 19th-century entrance to an academic enclave with a hybrid, heterogenous early-21st century counterpart which plays a variety of economic, educational, and social roles within its context.