Plant Gallery

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

This design looks to acknowledge and reconcile voids left when space is unclaimed. The loudness of the vacancy on this site is prominent on West Chimes Street, along which many of the buildings and businesses had been there for a very long time. These buildings—a book store, a sandwich shop, a small local pub, and a coffee house preceded the building as one travels down Chimes Street.  Aside from these, other businesses and buildings quickly came and went in the neighborhood. The constant variable among the long-lasting site conditions were their engagement with the local community. 

It was clear that the site needed to acknowledge the communities around it. There was a loud emptiness in the site that echoed the lack of engagement between three particular neighborhoods surrounding the site. These were the communities which the project would aim to engage.

• Closest to the site is a cluster of apartment complexes housing mostly LSU students and faculty, as the site is located just off campus.
• A few blocks north is a series of residential neighborhoods often referred to as "Old South Baton Rouge." This part of town is known for its lower income residents. Vastly overlooked is its thick cultural history. Many of the elderly women who own home-style restaurants near campus live here. They grow their vegetables in community gardens on the abandoned lots next-door. However as LSU sprawls into its neighborhood, it will soon be completely gentrified.
• Lastly, the site is geered toward the Lake Crest community, made up of high-income residential neighborhoods surrounding the LSU lakes, man-made lakes commissioned by former Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long in order to keep Southern University, a predominately black university, from building its campus near LSU. 

It would not be realistic to say that these communities will eventually dissolve into one another or that they could through a building.  But a public gallery which targeted these three specific societal constructs could be a nudge toward a more diverse, co-mingled Baton Rouge.

This site would house two structures. Most prominently on the site would be a greenhouse. This would serve as a place for college students passing by to watch and understand where their local foods are coming from. It would also serve as a place for the women of Old South Baton Rouge to continue gardening as property values rise in their community and the abandoned lots they garden on become developed. Lastly it encourages those who live in the Lake Crest Community to visit and possibly by groceries and help fund the gallery. Attached to the greenhouse would be a work space for them to store supplies and have a shaded, conditioned space on the side to store and possibly sell harvested vegetables. Lastly, there would be a space for a small exhibition gallery, including a wood-decked roof on which people can walk on and look down into the greenhouse and the rest of the site. This gallery could house art made by locals in order to further encourage understanding of other people in the comminity's ways of thought.