Design Concept

In turn, the site of the new museum, on the border of the city's commercial district and overlooking the lake, has inspired Trahan Architects to embrace this profound history and this historic landscape in its design. The museum’s exterior is clad in sinker cypress planks - (sinker cypress comes from cypress logs that have been buried for years in the soft muddy bottoms of rivers, lakes, swamps, and bayous) - a reference to the region's rich timber legacy.

The spacing and manipulation of the boards control light, views and ventilation and create a sense of porosity, articulation, and texture that will animate the facade and mediate the building's scale; these louvers are also a reference to the cladding at nearby Oakland Plantation, where wood planks were used for the purpose of mitigating the climate.

The articulation of the building's facade maintains the datum line established by the wrought iron balconies that define the elevations along Front Street. In addition, on the interior, the firm derived the building's geometry from the area's distinctive geomorphology and aspects of the river's hydromorphology. The design concept was guided by the fluid shapes of the braided corridors of river channels separated by interstitial masses of land - this idea becomes the organizing principle for visitor circulation and gallery arrangement.