With the length of a football field of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast disappearing every hour, College of Art and Design graduate students partnered with the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to take a good look at the state’s future.
“Losing Ground,” the culmination of a fall 2014 graduate level architecture and landscape architecture research seminar called “Fabricating the Delta,” is now on display in the Design Building Atrium.
The temporary display will come down soon, CSS Director Jeff Carney said, but will find a new home in the Center for River Studies, which is currently under construction.
The project is a mock-up of a larger exhibit to be displayed in the Center, as part of a contract CSS has with CPRA.
LSU broke ground on the Center for River Studies in February, the first of three buildings on a $45 million, 33-acre Water Campus being built along the Mississippi River.
“Part of our role is designing an exhibition, so [at] the entry when you walk into the Center for River Studies, there will be an exhibit,” Carney said. “We used the opportunity of the wall to showcase some of the work we are developing for the exhibit.”
The class of 17 graduate students focused on the area around the Wax Lake Outlet in St. Mary Parish.
The outlet was created by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1942 to divert water from the Atchafalaya River to the Gulf of Mexico.
The outlet, along with other flood protection and navigation landscaping, diverts sediment to the Wax Lake Delta, which keeps it from replenishing the coastline, according to the project display.
The large exhibit displays interactive models explaining the features of the Wax Lake Delta using different mediums, including video and interactive applications as well as laser cutting, 3D-printing, casting and drawing.
“The benefits to having a project like this in an academic setting is exploration of all these ways to represent the delta, which is a very dynamic, changing place,” Carney said. “So that was one of the real challenges: How do we represent what is changing so rapidly?”
Each of the class’ groups was given a budget and a question to answer about the process of building in the Wax Lake Delta. Several of the questions and students’ answers to them are presented in the final exhibit.
The class was taught by CSS assistant visiting professor Shelby Doyle and funded by CSS.

Gallery • 3 Photos

Ari Ross

Losing Ground is a graduate student project exhibited in the LSU Design Building using different media to show coastal erosion in thw Wax Lake Delta.