Summer Fellows
Fellows spent five weeks working at the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design
By antonio pacheco, for tusa
Exploring the impacts of industrial development and the future of the Gulf Coast region was the focus of six students’ work this summer, as part of the Public Interest Design (PID) Summer Fellowship program hosted by Tulane University School of Architecture’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design.
Over the course of this five-week intensive summer program, students came together with Small Center faculty and staff to support the development and implementation of a forthcoming exhibition curated by Liz Camuti, Assistant Professor in Landscape
Architecture.
The exhibition, titled What Matter’s Here.?!, is set to take place at Small Center over the 2024-25 school year and builds off of a recent research studio Professor Camuti led at the school. What Matter’s Here.?! will explore how the Gulf Coast’s industrial legacy can inform a regenerative future for the region.
Kris Smith (B.Arch ’25 candidate) explained that the fellows cohort cast a wide net across material and ecological typologies, looking to steel manufacturing, oil and gas industry infrastructure, clay, and even oyster habitats for inspiration in developing exhibition materials. For Smith, the key to reimagining the past and potential future of the region lies in understanding how industries operate and how materials relate to people.
“Reimaging harmful relationships between industry, people, and the environment can help create something that is beneficial to the Gulf Coast region,” Smith explains. The exhibition will include a series of informational panels depicting speculative design work and research, with the work displayed on a custom-built scaffolding system designed and built by the summer fellows cohort.
Corwin Almo, a rising fourth-year Undergraduate design student, explained that the project provided valuable hands-on experience necessary for a design architecture student to succeed in school and beyond. “The project was the first time something I designed was approved to be built outside a studio setting,” Almo shares, adding, “It was exhilarating to hear clients approve our work.”
José Cotto, Small Center’s Assistant Director for Community Engagement, highlights that the exhibition was designed to make use of advanced digital fabrication techniques that students have learned at TuSA, such as CNC mill prototyping, and that the students developed new skills needed to create and deploy a large-scale map of the Gulf Coast charting significant data points, like oil rig and pipeline locations. Cotto explains, “The exhibition work is meant to activate the Small Center’s storefront by drawing on the display and experiential qualities of what makes the Gulf Coast region unique.”
What Matter’s Here.?! opens on Sept. 18 at Small Center and is on display through Spring 2025.
