After toiling in a cramped Design Building studio since the semester’s start, 12 second-year landscape architecture graduate students got to unveil their projects Wednesday night at the Louisiana State Museum.The two-part, River Road-inspired projects are the first phase of a larger effort to give River Road a place in the National Scenic Byways Program, according to a news release. The program was established by the U.S. Department of Transportation to “recognize, preserve and enhance” chosen roads.For the first part, students found pieces on River Road that embodied factors of its history and identity, assembled them and tied them together with a story of combined truth and myth.”We’ve spent the first few months back finding and learning about River Road,” associate professor and project leader Kristi Dykema said. “It has such a long and vibrant history and characterizes so much of what makes Louisiana what it is.”Chicago native Stephanie Nelson said she was fascinated by the Christmas bonfires on the river and structured her project around the Cajun “Papa Noel” tale. The first part was a series of handmade clay dolls that progressed from the story’s nativity scene to more industrial figures, such as trucks and machinery. This was to represent the real-life movement from a rural to industrial landscape and the worldview of a child growing into an adult.”The figures in the second part are things you become more aware of as you get older,” Nelson said.Dykema said the goal at this early point is to set up a foundation of research. The process to become a national scenic byway would take years, and she stressed the importance of getting basic research right to meet expectations of the diverse group of stakeholders who were invited to the exhibition.”We have everybody from residents to business owners to farmers, politicians, people visiting the new casino,” Dykema said. “They all have their own very real and particular reasons for wanting it to be done their way.”The second part on the projects involved constructing a device that showed movement and the relationship between the factors that impact the road.Mary Martinich’s drawing device, a contraption that casts intertwining lines of ink, pencil and eraser when cranked – each representing a different factor that affects the landscape – exemplified the inseparable relationship among them.”They can’t stand alone,” Martinich said. “All these forces act together.”Martinich said it was one of the hardest projects she had done because of the amount of invention and engineering involved.”The program is really heavily design based, so if you can think it up in your head, then [usually] someone else is going to figure out how to make it work,” Martinich said.Getting students to break out of the conventional mold was one of her goals, Dykema said. Though the students were reluctant to embrace construction at first, Dykema said they have adapted well.The next phase of the project will be to design a “disembodied museum” out of the area, Dykema said. She will assign the students a five-mile section of River Road, which they will design as a museum, including long-needed signage and rest stops.- – – -Contact Julie Gutierrez at [email protected]