The New Orleans Art Council held a competition for an art installation located in an underdeveloped corner of the Lafitte Greenway in Mid-City, New Orleans. Bloom is MADE’s competition entry, a fully integrated proposal that melds principles from the Dutch Dialogues™ and Green Street movements into an artistic and urban vision that complements the Greenway’s natural environment and community needs. Our team envisioned Bloom as an art installation that might receive additional grant funding from the EPA’s Clean Water State Revolving Funds, as we integrated both water treatment and green infrastructure into the design. Literally and metaphorically, the project reflects New Orleans' everlasting relationship with water and the need for introspection by both the masses and the individual. As a living art installation, Bloom symbolizes the symbiotic relationship between water and nature, water and people, and water and the city of New Orleans.

Bloom is a project composed of three distinct elements. Our central figure, Bloom, is a highly polished, mirrored vessel that serves as the project’s focal point, namesake, and a nod to Chicago’s Cloud Gate. Bloom functions as a large cistern that collects water for the surrounding Basin and bioswale. The second element, Berm, is a buffer zone with a Corten steel façade and vegetation back, separating the surrounding streets from the third element, Basin, a gently sloping, permeable, and heavily textured vegetated bioswale. The Basin, emulating the region’s surrounding wetlands, slopes gently down behind the Berm buffer toward the central Bloom, alternately revealing and concealing raised areas of sediment and native plants. In one of New Orleans’ typical summer downpours, for example, the level of water in the Berm will rise, permanently marking the steel with a line. Over time, these lines will form striations, illustrating a history of rainfall events. Working together, the disparate parts will turn a residual parcel of urban land into a verdant, living wetland. By using water as a catalyst to affect changes in the landscape, Bloom illuminates the effects of this powerful, life-giving force and inspires self-reflection in the viewer. In short, Bloom reveals the power of water by harnessing it in vast quantities that will feed the vegetation, mark the steel, and form islands in the basin.

Team:

Principal in Charge:
Charles Jones

Project Manager:
Charles Jones

Project Team:
Robert Mosby, Matt DeCotiis