Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural implications of the disappearance of cultural heritage in New Orleans, dying “ghost towns” in the American Midwest, and the loss of heritage landscapes in the Arabian desert through presenting three design-build studios conducted as investigations and responses to the phenomena. First, we study the design-build of a Mardi Gras Indian Museum in the Lower Ninth Ward, post-hurricane Katrina, where students conserved an endangered culture and provided the city with a valuable educational and cultural resource. Next, we focus on a design-build studio working in a dying town in Iowa, where a hybrid approach of expeditionary learning and design-build developed workshops and infrastructure projects as critical responses to community needs. Finally, we look to a design-build project in the Arabian desert, where students provided environmental scientists with a shelter and research station to assist their study of protected but threatened landscapes. Although we understood in each of these cases that these places may eventually cease to exist, the projects were designed toward fostering community identity, reclaiming cultural space, and conserving collective memory to celebrate the history and surviving presence of the people and place, rather than as an attempt to restore. Historical analyses, assessment of the studio experience, and an evaluation of community engagement are presented here for each of the projects. These assessments evidence the successes and failures of the pedagogical and practical strategies implemented and reveal the quality and effectiveness of community-based design-build in the public interest of marking and remembering vanishing cultural heritage.