Students from the Texas A&M College of Architecture helped the Beaumont Housing Authority win a national award by providing designs, master plans and supporting community research for the renovation of Magnolia Gardens, a BHA housing project damaged by Hurricane Rita.
The housing authority received the 2007 National Award of Merit from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials for its collaboration with the Texas A&M students.
Demolition and rebuilding of the project site, which began summer 2007, was funded by a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A redesign proposal for Magnolia Gardens, which helped garner the grant, was developed by an architects who used the landscape students’ revitalization concepts, as well as a mound of data that informed the project, which was compiled by planning and land development students.
In spring 2006, 10 students in Nancy Volkman’s Open Space Development II studio spent the semester surveying Magnolia Gardens residents and talking with Beaumont Housing Authority staff and city of Beaumont personnel. The housing project had been destroyed by Hurricane Rita, which ripped ashore in September 2005.
The students created a design concept for the housing project’s revitalization, which they presented to a panel of residents, architects and community leaders. Those designs provided the basis for the revitalization project.
Students in Shannon Van Zandt’s Neighborhood Revitalization class and Cecilia Giusti’s Urban and Regional Economic Development class also traveled to Beaumont, where they reviewed site plans and discussed options for bringing investment and economic development to the beleaguered neighborhood. The students met with Robert Reyna, BHA executive director, Cleveland Como, BHA planning and development director, and Andre Lewis, HOPE VI coordinator.
Also assisting this initiative were students in a landscape architecture and urban planning class taught by June Martin.
The data collected by this multidisciplinary group, which included architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture students, was integrated with parcel-level data in a Geographic Information System, or GIS, to help track changes to the neighborhood throughout the four-year redevelopment.
The May 2007 issue of the Beaumont Housing Authority Connection newsletter lauded the students’ involvement in the project.
“This partnership provided tangible, real-life experience to the graduate students involved in the program,” the newsletter reported, “and provided BHA with resident survey results, community stakeholder feedback and site design concepts, all of which were utilized in the successful grant application.”
The redevelopment sketches for the Magnolia Gardens project developed by Volkman’s students can be viewed online at:
http://archone.tamu.edu/archcom/
InsideTrack/MagnoliaGardens/index.html.
