Tulane student receives Honorable Mention in Félix Candela Competition

OCtober 2, 2025

BY Emily Capdeville

Organized every year by the Instituto Español de Arquitectura (IESARQ), the Félix Candela Award is an international architectural ideas competition, soliciting revolutionary proposals and demonstrating the power of architecture to answer complicated human questions. This year, Alex Cohen (B.Arch. ‘26) received an Honorable Mention for his submission, a design that proposed to transform New Orleans’ Florida Avenue Bridge. According to Cohen, the brief for the seventh edition of the Félix Candela Award asked participants to design a space for spiritual enlightenment in an urban environment, reflecting on the complexity and disunity of today’s society, and Cohen's work, reimagining the Florida Avenue Bridge, met that challenge.

The call for proposals asked participants to “devise a spiritual place located somewhere in the city of their choice, in such a dreamlike way that allows the person, in their experience and through any form of spiritual rituality, to meet with themselves and others to reach a higher level of consciousness.” As a student participant, Cohen sought the guidance of Dean Iñaki Alday as his advisor. Dean Alday helped Cohen throughout the process, much like studio professors guide students through their projects during the semester. They held weekly check-ins and sought feedback from outsiders during a pin-up. 

In working on his proposal, Cohen reimagined this iconic New Orleans site as a place for spiritual reflection, in response to the Prize's call to design a project that helps people "overcome local consciousness and cross the threshold of supra-consciousness through meditation in the spiritual place of an architecture that serves the encounter of man with the true meaning of Life." Inspired by a discussion with Alday, Cohen selected the bridge because of the metaphorical way that the Industrial Canal in New Orleans can be seen to split communities, motivated by control of the waterway for profitable ends. Ultimately, the project sought to transform this symbol of the “chaos and tension in today’s ultra-materialist capitalist society” into a site of spirituality, selflessness, and existential enlightenment.  

The following is an excerpt from his project:

This proposal reclaims the Florida Avenue Bridge, a redundant vertical lift bridge in New Orleans spanning the Industrial Canal. Once a means of access, the bridge now remains useless, a relic of disconnection and damage. The project repurposes and transforms the bridge into a place of unity and reflection, guided by the belief that we as humans are inherently connected through water.

The goal of this project is to create a space that reclaims the water of New Orleans as a point of unity and reflection rather than isolation and destruction. Referencing sculptural works such as Eduardo Chillida's 'Elogio Del Agua' (In Praise of Water), this project transforms the bridge into a beast yearning to return to the water.

The permeable materiality of the project allows visitors to physically approach the water, interacting with it as it filters into the space and creates spaces for reflection. As the beast rises from the water, it weeps, expelling water out of itself. Meanwhile, as it lifts, visitors can reach an elevated vantage point and a completely different experience, allowing them to enjoy the magic of the place: the marshes, the water of the ground and sky, the city. The transformation of this beast allows each individual to leave their ego behind and return to the simplest of roots: water.