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Alumni Spotlight: Marcus Williams, BArch 2005

Alumni, Architecture, Alumni Profiles, ,

Marcus J. Williams, AIA, NCARB (BARCH ’05) is a product of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System. So it feels only natural that he has returned to work for the school system of his first alma mater.

Marcus Williams

Marcus Williams (BARCH ’05)

Marcus serves as the CSRS|Tillage Program Director of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System’s Program Management and Grants Management contracts. He spent years as a student in the Louisiana community he now works to improve, as he attended Mayfair Elementary School, Jefferson Terrace Elementary School, Kenilworth Middle School, Woodlawn High School, and went on to LSU for his architecture degree.

“My ultimate goal was to become a licensed architect,” Marcus said. “I knew I had to graduate from an accredited school of architecture. My parents could not have afforded to pay for my college education, so I utilized the TOPS program and went to Louisiana State University.”

With tight financial constraints, Marcus lived at his parents’ home during college and worked on his five-year degree. His professional experience began in 2003 when he was hired as a draftsman at a civil engineering firm (Dalton Honore II-Krestworth Group) as an intern/draftsman. “Working for a civil engineer was my only option at the time, as no architectural firm in town would hire me,” he said.

Upon graduation from LSU, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia where he began working for Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, and Stewart (SRSS), an international architectural firm. At SRSS, he worked on numerous high rise residential and hospitality developments in the Southeast United States.

Following his relocation back to Baton Rouge in 2008, he worked for two well-known firms, Remson|Haley|Herpin Architects, and then Grace Hebert Architects until 2017. His project experiences include high rise residential and hospitality, industrial, corporate office, commercial, K-12 education and disaster-related renovations. While his expertise is in all phases of project delivery, his specialization is in construction contract administration.

“I earned my license to practice architecture in 2014, and joined the small list of minority licensed architects in the state of Louisiana,” Marcus said.

As the new program manager of CSRS|Tillage’s East Baton Rouge Parish School System program, Marcus currently manages the construction and renovation budgets of educational facilities identified in the tax plan voted on by the parish residents, and the repair budgets of facilities damaged by the Great Flood of 2016.

These construction projects are part of an ongoing long-term initiative to improve the East Baton Rouge Parish School System (EBRPSS). In 1999, a sales tax referendum to fund a district-wide facility and technology improvement program for the EBRPSS passed. As a result, the EBRPSS selected architecture and engineering firm CSRS, along with joint venture partner Tillage Construction, to provide comprehensive program management services for the school system. Facility projects completed in the three phases of the program included 13 new schools, 48 classroom additions, nine major renovations, 85 roof replacements, and numerous repair and maintenance projects. Most notably, Phase III of the program included a $50 million historic renovation and addition to the Baton Rouge Magnet High School, the flagship school of the EBRPSS, and the region’s first 21st century school, Lee Magnet High School.

“Projects I manage include the construction of new schools, the renovation of existing schools, the construction of classroom additions, and interior and accessibility upgrades,” Marcus said. “In order to achieve this we consistently communicate with the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, specifically the Superintendent and facilities departments.”

In many ways he has come full circle; Marcus now serves as a mentor to students as they prepare for college. For the past four years, he has had high school students from Scotlandville High School Engineering Academy work in the office for the summer, to help provide them with professional career opportunities.

“My LSU degree provided me with opportunity,” he said. “I received a quality technical education from a talented group of professors. They challenged and expanded my education, and provided architectural experiences in other cities and states.”

Marcus is proud to bring those experiences back home with him as he works to help improve Baton Rouge.

LSU Architecture Team Publishes Paper Proposing Changes to LUMCON Research Facility to Adapt to Climate Change

Art & Design, Research, Publications, Architecture, ,

LSU School of Architecture A. Hays Town Professor Ursula Emery McClure, with the LSU School of Architecture Research Studio, published the paper “The SEA Is Coming: The Future of a Marine Research Facility.” The paper proposes changes to the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) facility, with LSU architecture students’ research to support its findings.

LSU Architecture Research Studio students investigated the LUMCON facility and environment, and re-imagined both the building and landscape as a cutting-edge (albeit remote) research and educational destination. “The SEA Is Coming” Integrative-Design Studio proposes adaptation to climate change as a means to investigate the transformative capacity of a site. Going far beyond the boundaries of current (and future) building program, the studio method provoked profound rethinking of current conventions about coastal change and occupancy, design, community, the environment, and land use.

“The Architecture Research Studio students had the opportunity to investigate questions that the marine research facility is struggling with in real life,” Emery McClure said. “Their research has been recognized and published by an international publication.”

LUMCON’s facility sits at the nexus of deltaic land, freshwater, brackish wetland, and salty ocean and provides access to all these systems. It has withstood the volatility of this environment: flooding, hurricanes, oil spills, the Gulf dead zone, salt-water intrusion, etc. Now over thirty-years-old, the building must adapt to changing conditions. The LSU Architecture Research Studio investigated LUMCON’s ability to continue functioning in its changing environment and further its indispensable research capabilities of the rapidly changing coastal landscape.

The paper has been published by The Plan Journal, which aims to disseminate and promote innovative, thought-provoking and relevant research, studies and criticism in architecture and urbanism. This paper represents a growing body of research devoted to adapting coastal architecture for the effects of climate change.

The LSU Architecture Research Studio tasks architecture students with intellectually investigative research projects that integrate all areas of the students’ education and help them to understand the profession in the context of the real world.

“The real-world scenarios that students are presented with allow them to engage in research for public institutions and participate in the public forum,” Emery McClure said.

The LSU Coastal Studies Institute and the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio supported the project.

Landscape Architecture Students win 2017 ASLA Honor Award for Disaster Autopsy Model

Art & Design, Students, Research, Landscape Architecture, Honors & Awards, ,

LSU’s College of Art & Design is pleased to announce that the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture students Donguk Lee and Xiwei Shen (BLA ‘17) won the 2017 student honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) for their Disaster Autopsy Model. Cathy Marshall, associate professor at the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, was faculty advisor for the project.

Students Xiwei Shen and Donguk Lee

BLA Students Xiwei Shen and Donguk Lee

The project, spurred by the catastrophic flooding of Louisiana in August 2016, researches why Baton Rouge’s urban and suburban spaces have a distinctive look and feel, largely because of the intertwining systems of infrastructure, land development, and the “laissez faire” culture as those flood waters receded.

“As landscape designers, our missions are not only to design beautiful gardens and parks, but also to help cities refine a model to protect from disasters,” Shen said.

Lee and Shen’s research investigated impacts and the disaster economy of large infrastructural systems. The proposal aims to connect existing lakes and levees with a weir system and reuse of vacant urban lots for filtration branded the blue network, as well as a green belt flood zone that houses a flood reservoir and an emergency beacon system retrofitted into towers to alert the public of future emergencies.

“Water is the heart of Louisiana. Water is why Baton Rouge was founded,” the Disaster Autopsy Model project statement says. “Water that moves, water that sits, water that rises, water that cleanses, and water that destroys. Canal water, ditch water, muddy water, spring water, crawfish water, dark water. The history of south Louisiana is a history of man learning to live with water and learning to shape water to our own means.”

On the Gulf Coast, impacts of climate change are most frequently evidenced in flooding caused by hurricanes and sea level rise. However, flooding associated with cloudburst phenomena (sudden, intense rainfall with relatively short notice and duration) is not as well documented and understood.

To help mitigate the issue of cloudburst flooding, the project focused on using existing lakes and levees with a weir system branded the blue network, as well as a green belt flood zone that houses a flood reservoir. The authors also proposed an emergency beacon system retrofitted into cell phone towers to alert the public of future events and the reuse of vacant urban lots for water recharge.

“The design intention is to educate and promote community stewardship, awareness, and responsibility between personal and government,” Lee and Shen wrote.

Prior to the planning and design phase, Lee and Shen examined the documented disaster areas and analyzed the causes and effects of the storm. During the study process, individuals from the Baton Rouge Area foundation, local planners, and landscape architects provided feedback to discuss flooding and resiliency with the aim to ultimately create solutions.

Founded in 1899, ASLA is the professional association for landscape architects in the United States, representing more than 15,000 members. The Society’s mission is to advance landscape architecture through advocacy, communication, education, and fellowship. ASLA gives professional and student awards annually.

LSU Architecture Students Place in Top of Earth Architecture Competition

Students, Architecture, , ,

The LSU School of Architecture is pleased to announce that ten students in the Bachelor of Architecture program recently placed in the top 40 of the fifth Earth Architecture Competition DESIGNING A RURAL ARTS CENTER FOR SENEGAL. Students in the ARCH 3001 studios, taught by Professor Ursula Emery McClure and Assistant Professor Robert Holton, spent five weeks of the fall semester designing projects and preparing competition entries for submittal. The following third-year students received Top 40 Design Entries awards: Daniel Berg, Austin Copete, Nicholas Dubuc, Claire Duncan, Cornisha Lyons, Kaylan Mitchell, Cory Natal, Logan Osborn, Dylan Roth, and Antonio Tejeda.

The Earth Architecture Competition, organized by the Nka Foundation, aims for sustainable architecture designs intended for real-world application. Every design team that made the Top 40 Entries shortlist is offered the opportunity to build their design in Senegal. The competition jurors used judging criteria involving form, function and technical issues to evaluate all entries in the contest.

Through the 5th Earth Architecture Competition, Nka Foundation issued a challenge to professionals and students of architecture, design, urban planning and others from around the world. The challenge was to design a modern mud type to be built as a unit of an artisanal village, a residential vocational training center for unemployed rural youths of ages 16 to 25 years to undergo a two-year skills development training in the vocational arts and design in the Diakounda village in Sédhiou Region of the Casamance in Senegal.

The contestant was to design one of the following school types: a classroom, cafeteria, office building, dormitory, group toilet, dwelling type for the local teachers, and guest house type for our international visiting staff.

“The LSU awarded students selected projects covered the full range of building types and each student in the course successfully completed a cost analysis per the competition guidelines,” said School of Architecture professor Ursula Emery McClure.

The winning designs emphasize cost efficient construction and sustainable architecture by fully integrating earth architecture and passive solar design. Therefore, the competing teams were to design their school types for construction by maximum use of earth and local labor. Total cost of constructing the design entry was not to exceed $10,000 (USD) for materials and labor.

“My design, Senegal Seasonings, serves as a space that allows students to relax for a meal or a quick bite as they converse with classmates over their current scholastic achievements and trials,” said architecture student Claire Duncan, one of the top entry winners. “With both a social environment for interactional learning and an economic design through passive solar energy, Senegal Seasoning utilizes local and natural materials.”

Earth Architecture Competition design entry

Design Entry by student Claire Duncan

The competition promotes open source design, which implies that the submitted designs will be available for all to appreciate, use, or improve them to generate more practical and contemporary design solutions for the region. The organizers’ long-term goal is “to enable the rural population and lots of other places, to overcome the stigma that mud architecture is for the very poor,” according to the Nka Foundation.

The Nka Foundation will host building workshops to realize the construction of the Top 40 Design Entries, beginning in February 2018. Through an open call for volunteers, each workshop will bring together professionals and students of architecture, landscape architecture, design, engineering, urban planning, the arts and others from around the world to share their expertise. After the students have learned some construction techniques, they will test their acquired knowledge and skills by building the next part of the school or some functional buildings for the community.

“Thus, the students are challenged to solve real problems, work together, to learn and build and create,” according to the Nka Foundation.

Photography by Jeremiah Ariaz Featured in Creoles du Monde Exhibition; Wins Documentary Photography Award, Fellowship

Art & Design, Galleries, Art, Photography, Exhibitions, Faculty, , ,

“As a child I had a particular image of a cowboy shaped by popular culture,” said Jeremiah Ariaz, associate professor of photography at the LSU School of Art. “He was gruff, serious, white, and situated in the West.”jeremiah ariaz

Then one day he encountered Louisiana trail riders, and that image shattered.

“Riding my motorcycle in rural Louisiana, I encountered a large group of people riding horseback,” Ariaz said. The riders were numerous, commanded the road – and African American. “I retrieved my camera.”

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) has awarded Ariaz the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography. LEH annually awards individuals and organizations that have made significant and enduring contributions to the humanities.

“I’m extremely honored to receive the 2018 award and will be forever grateful to the trail riding club members of Louisiana who allowed me to join them and photograph their weekly rides,” Ariaz said.

South Arts, the organization advancing Southern vitality through the arts, has named Ariaz one of nine visual artists from the South to receive a State Fellowship award of $5,000 each. These nine artists are now in consideration for the Southern Prize, which will be announced April 16.

Ariaz’s work will be featured in the West Baton Rouge Museum’s new exhibition Creoles du Monde, which opens on February 1, 2018. The exhibition explores the Creole world and culture from Africa and Europe to the Americas.

Photographs from Ariaz’s project Louisiana Trail Riders will be included in the Creoles du Monde exhibition. The series depicts African American trail-riding clubs in Louisiana, asserting a counter-narrative to historic representations of the cowboy and prevailing contemporary images of difference and despair in Black America.

“The trail riders in Louisiana are a stark contrast to most depictions of cowboys, offering a radically different vantage point to consider images of the West,” Ariaz said.

In the United States, the word “creole” refers to the people and culture of South Louisiana. Ariaz’ Louisiana Trail Riders project portrays Creoles in south Louisiana on horseback, a pastime with historical and cultural significance. Archival evidence reveals the prominence of enslaved cattlemen in the Louisiana colony back to the 1700s, suggesting that the tradition of trail riders of African descent is centuries-old.

“Trail riding is closely associated with Creoles of rural Southwestern Louisiana who descended from some of the region’s earliest settlers, many of them landowning gens de couleur libres (free people of color) in antebellum times,” according to Alexandra Giancarlo in Riders: Southwest Louisiana’s Creole Trail Riding Clubs.

Photos by Jeremiah Ariaz

A monograph titled Louisiana Trail Riders will be published this year by UL Press.

Creoles du Monde celebrates the vibrant culture of Creole people through the eyes of the historians, collectors, artists, and photographers who have captured a rich history in textiles, rare paintings and photographs. The exhibit includes works from the collections of Jeremy Simien, Derrick Beard, Ulrick Jean-Pierre, and Mary Gehman. Creoles du Monde will run through May 5th.

Alumni Spotlight: Ainsley Dreher, BID 2010

Art & Design, Interior Design, Alumni, Alumni Profiles, ,

Ainsley Dreher (BID 2010), president and owner of Design Innovations in Birmingham, Alabama, never expected that she would be directing her own interior design firm this soon in her career.Ainsley Dreher

​Upon graduating from LSU in May 2010, Ainsley accepted an internship with Engineering Ministries International (eMi), an architecture and engineering ministry based in Colorado Springs. Ainsley and fellow LSU graduate, Lindsay Zollinger White (BID 2010), were both accepted to the program and moved to Colorado in August 2010. While working for eMi, Ainsley met her future husband, who is from Birmingham, Alabama.

Ainsley moved to Birmingham, Alabama in September 2011, and started working for Design Innovations, a full services commercial interior design firm. The company was originally founded in 1983 by two sisters, Sue Matthews and Phyllis Reed. Over decades Sue and Phyllis grew their company to work on multiple types of commercial interior design projects, but always had a strong focus on healthcare design.

“When I first interviewed at Design Innovations, my portfolio and preparedness left an impression,” Ainsley said. “I interviewed in May and at the time the company wasn’t hiring. However, three months later when they did need a designer, she remembered me and my work. I attribute that to LSU.”

At Design Innovations, Ainsley was afforded many opportunities to grow as a designer and project manager, she said. “I was given much responsibility early on that pushed me and helped me grow in my career.” In 2015, she passed the NCIDQ and became a registered interior designer in the state of Alabama.

“​I love that as an interior designer I can have an idea or concept in my head that can be transformed into a physical reality,” Ainsley said. “I love walking onto a job site close to project completion and seeing my designs come to life, walking though the space that was an idea in my head months or years before.”

Design Innovations is unique in the fact that it is an interior design-only firm, Ainsley said. This gives them great flexibility to work on a multitude of project types and sizes. The firm was on the design team for Madison Hospital, an entirely new hospital built from the ground up, and smaller-scale projects such as the Montgomery Cancer Center lobby renovations. More recently, the firm completed the interior design work for the first free standing emergency department in the state of Alabama. Outside of healthcare design, they have also worked in educational, government, and religious spaces.

“I find great satisfaction in knowing that what I do is meaningful to others,” Ainsley said. “I know the beautiful, clean, and functional spaces we create for patients and their families contributes to their healing and happiness.”

After several years of working under Sue’s leadership, an opportunity presented itself to buy the company. After much thought, planning, and prayer, Ainsley purchased Design Innovations in July 2017, she said. “The past six months have taught me and grown me in ways that the first six years never could have,” she said. “Inheriting a healthy business is a little like jumping onto a moving train. I had to learn quickly as the business continued to roll along in my first months of ownership. I am learning every day more about being a business owner, while continuing to be an interior designer.”

Her time in the LSU interior design program was invaluable to her future career, Ainsley said. “The program at LSU not only gave me the skills I needed to pursue a career in interior design, but it also equipped me to think outside the box, to visualize in big picture ways, and to reason and problem-solve,” she said. “I know the long hours and late nights spent in the studio up on the fourth floor built character in me.”

Ainsley plans to grow the Design Innovations company as it enters its next phase of life with a new owner. While she seeks to continue the firm’s legacy of healthcare design, as they look ahead she would like to expand into more markets. As Ainsley looks to the future, she can’t help but reflect on the past.

“I am forever thankful to TL Ritchie who first sat down with me as a freshman in the architecture program and considered me for the ID program at LSU,” she said. “That decision to major in interior design at LSU has shaped and blessed my entire life in ways I would have never imagined.”

 

Art History Professor Darius Spieth Publishes Book Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art

Art & Design, Publications, Art History, Art, Doctor of Design, , ,
Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art book cover

Book cover (Brill 2017)

Darius Spieth, professor of art history at the LSU School of Art, has recently published the book Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art, Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets Volume 3 (Brill 2017). The foreword is by Marc Fumaroli, Académie française. The book restores attention to the aesthetic, intellectual, and economic link between two key periods in the history of art: the “Golden Age” of Dutch and Flemish painting and that of the French Revolution.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution.

darius spieth

“This book is about the disastrous private lives of artworks during and after the French Revolution – and those of some of their owners,” Spieth said.

Spieth studied sales transactions during the time period to reveal interesting findings. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

Written for both scholars and an interested general audience, Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art is a book that shows how art, taste, economics, and history are interlinked.

A specialist in modernism, Spieth focuses his scholarship on the interrelationships between art, intellectual history, and economics. Spieth is the editor of the Grove Guide to Art Markets and Collecting (expected 2018), and the author of Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (2007).

LSU School of Art Welcomes Two New Faculty Members

Art & Design, Art History, Art, Faculty, Doctor of Design, , ,

The LSU School of Art welcomes two new faculty members for 2018: assistant professors of art history Ludovico Geymonat and William Ma, who joined the faculty this semester. Both Geymonat and Ma will add to the rich international perspective of the art curriculum at LSU.

Ludovico Geymonat teaches medieval art at LSU. His research has developed from doctoral studies on Byzantine and Romanesque wall painting to focus on medieval drawings, monumental programs, and the question of how images and ideas circulated in the Middle Ages. His work includes a focus on Italian medieval sculpture, with an emphasis on early Gothic sculpture in San Marco, Venice.

“I am excited to be here at LSU, very much so,” Geymonat said. “Coming to LSU for me means coming back to teaching, which I love, and conducting research within a larger intellectual context.”

ludovico geymonatGeymonat had previously worked at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, a research institute in Rome for art historians, and missed interacting with students and scholars of other disciplines. The university setting provides unique opportunities for collaboration between different areas of research, he said.

During a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07, Geymonat identified a sculpture of a seated king as connected to a series from Venice; it had previously thought to have been from elsewhere (and at one time even suspected forgery, later proven to be real.) He worked with geologist Lorenzo Lazzarini to study the sculptures, resulting in an innovative collaboration between science and art history.

Professor Geymonat and Professor Spieth

Photo of Professor Geymonat and Professor Spieth at the restoration site in San Marco, possible original location of the sculptures

Before joining the art history faculty at LSU, Geymonat was a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. He has published on 13th- and 14th-century Venetian painting and sculpture, the Baptistery of Parma, and medieval drawings. His teaching includes the history of medieval art and architecture in Europe and the Mediterranean. Geymonat received his BA in art history from the Universitá di Torino in Turin, Italy, and his MA and PhD in art history from Princeton University.

He is currently working on two book projects. The first focuses on wall paintings in the Baptistery of Parma, Italy, and the second, Monumental Decorations and the Medieval Perception of Space, investigates how ideas are translated into visual representations on a monumental scale.

Another art history professor focusing his research on a different area of the world, William Ma is a Chinese art historian. Ma specializes in the artistic exchanges among China and the world during the late-imperial and modern periods. His research interest includes material culture, workshop practices, aesthetic pedagogy, Jesuit missionary art in late imperial China, and the relationship between export art and the imperial court during the High Qing.

“I am a Chinese art historian who thinks a lot about art on the margin – whether because they are products of encounters between different cultures, commercial or decorative objects, and art objects made by unnamed individuals or communities,” said Ma. “Though often neglected, they accounted for a majority of artistic output in the arts of Asia.”

Ma is interested in what art objects – through their meanings, ornaments, material, function, etc. – can tell us about the people, the society, and the time that made them.  “I think a lot about stereotypes about the Other as revealed through these art objects – not only how the Euro-American West saw Asia and China, but also how China saw the rest of the world – and take seriously these often-problematic modes of representations and see what lessons they could teach us today,” he said.

William MaA fellow faculty member of the Doctor of Design in Cultural Preservation program, Ma is teaching courses “China and the World” and “Contemporary Asian Art” this semester. He typically teaches courses about the art of China, Japan, or India, and also offers special topics addressing artistic issues in Buddhism, Christian missionaries, and gender and sexuality, in Asia. The classes explore non-western art themes, contributing to the LSU School of Art’s diverse curriculum offerings.

Ma received a BA (2002) and PhD (2016) from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to teaching at his alma mater, he has taught courses in Asian art history at the University of San Francisco. During the academic year of 2016–17, he was a visiting professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Ma also has extensive curatorial experience; a former Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum, Ma has worked at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum, the Las Vegas Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The School of Art is very pleased indeed to have been able to recruit and welcome two such capable scholars. With degrees from top tier institutions and track records of scholarship and teaching, they have hit the ground running in the areas of medieval and non-western art history,” said Professor Rod Parker, director of the School of Art.

The LSU School of Art offers programs in art history, digital art, fine arts, and graphic design. For more information about the school, visit art.lsu.edu.

Kenneth Bahlinger (BLA ’85) Receives 2017 LaGasse Medal for Landscape Architects

Art & Design, Landscape Architecture, Honors & Awards, Alumni, Alumni Profiles, ,

Kenneth Bahlinger, (BLA ’85), received the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) 2017 LaGasse Medal for his significant contributions to the management and conservation of natural resources and public landscapes.

Kenneth Bahlinger

Kenneth is an award-winning landscape architect who has worked for the state of Louisiana restoring coastal wetlands for 26 years. Through his professional work, he has made significant contributions to the management and conservation of natural resources. He has assumed leadership of the Coast Vegetative Planting Program and the Christmas Tree Program, and was the landscape architect of record on vegetation plantings on state coastal restoration projects. More recently he has been a senior project manager of multiple large-scale restoration projects on the Louisiana coast.

“For the past 26 years I have been involved with the implementation of large scale ecological restoration projects on the coast of Louisiana,” Kenneth said.

Kenneth Bahlinger on site

The Louisiana Coast Vegetative Planting Program, a unique partnership to plant marsh vegetation throughout Louisiana’s coastal zone, was created to protect and restore wetlands. Through the program, over one million plants have been planted and monitored for their effectiveness across coastal Louisiana. Kenneth was the program administrator, working with the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry Office of Soil and Water Conservation and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“The program was an extraordinary vehicle for vegetative restoration to be accomplished on the grass roots level,” said Justin Lemoine, ASLA Louisiana Chapter President, in his nomination letter recommending Kenneth for the medal.

The Christmas Tree Program was designed as a coastal restoration technique, a means of reducing the amount of Christmas trees ending up in local landfills, and as an outreach program to engage the public in the fight to restore coastal wetlands. Over the years, hundreds of acres of wetlands were restored and over a million Christmas trees were diverted from landfills.

As Chief Landscape Architect with the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources and subsequently the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Kenneth was responsible for the development of plans and specifications for dozens of coastal restoration projects over the years. Large-scale restoration projects he led include the Scofield Island and the Long Distance Sediment Pipeline Project, and the Mississippi River Long Distance Sediment Pipeline Project.

coastal restoration before and after

(Photos of before and after the coastal restoration project in the Mississippi River marsh areas)

“It is with great honor and privilege to be awarded the LaGasse Medal,” Kenneth said. “I will treasure the LaGasse Medal with the greatest respect to the ASLA and especially to all of my professors and classmates at the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture.”