Social justice, by design
Index
SketchCity + Construction Site Visits
Sketching on location is a great way to both engage a city while simultaneously learning about what makes a community a place. NOMA Louisiana designed SketchCity to encourage artists, architects, and anyone interested in picking up a pencil, to get out into their city to learn about histories of its Black designers, developers, neighborhoods and communities, and the histories of other people of color who have shaped our city’s built environment. Our goal is to foster, support, and cultivate community in New Orleans through hosting sketching-based events.
Construction Site Visits are partnerships with architects, developers, contractors and others involved in the production of our built environment to highlight specific buildings and sites, especially sites of significance to Black communities and other communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and others whose stories often go untold in histories of New Orleans and Louisiana. These events offer a behind-the-scenes look at a project for professionals in architecture and other fields, as well as middle and high-school students in our Project Pipeline mentoring program and their parents.
January 2023: Dew Drop Inn SketchCity + Construction Site Visit
Our first SketchCity since 2015, and our first Site Visit, was a combined program at the historic Dew Drop Inn on LaSalle Street in Central City. Our tour was led by developer Curtis Doucette and communications specialist Lauren Usher of Level Ground LLC, and featured appearances by architects Miwako Hattori and John Mouton of Studio Kiro, the project’s architect of record, along with members of the Ryan Gootee Construction team.
Read more about the Dew Drop Inn, a landmark of New Orleans’ Black, Queer, music and civil rights movement histories, here:
WWOZ A Closer Walk: The Dew Drop Inn
