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Destination Ecological Park01-21-25 | Feature

Destination Ecological Park

Louisiana Children's Museum
by Christian Runge

Developed as a new way to develop children's museums, the Louisiana Children's Museum was designed by Mithun, a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle, WA, to act as hub of holistic solutions and educational example. The 56,000-square-foot site features mature live oaks, shore and stormwater management, a museum building, sensory and edible gardens, play hummocks, a floating classroom barge, and a freshwater marsh. Pictured left is the bridge arrival that features fog that invites visitors in. The New Orleans, LA project was completed in 2019. PHOTO CREDIT: WEBB BLAND
Developed as a new way to develop children's museums, the Louisiana Children's Museum was designed by Mithun, a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle, WA, to act as hub of holistic solutions and educational example. The 56,000-square-foot site features mature live oaks, shore and stormwater management, a museum building, sensory and edible gardens, play hummocks, a floating classroom barge, and a freshwater marsh. Pictured left is the bridge arrival that features fog that invites visitors in. The New Orleans, LA project was completed in 2019. PHOTO CREDIT: MITHUN
Here, imagination play at the Hummock Hop is pictured. The water management amenities include sewer covers, drain inlets, and cloud grass misters. The play space is made of precast concrete. Photo credit:Kevin Scott
This diagram shows the elevation change found across the project and how the design team combatted the challenges faced through plantings.
The design team added an outdoor kitchen, a runnel, and vegetable beds to a sluice gate at the Hummock Hop for an added play element.

Louisiana Children's Museum envisioned a new model for children's museums: a place where children and families in one of the nation's most underserved regions would have many ways to explore the artistic, sensory, and natural worlds. The museum is a part of City Park, which features a collection of civic institutions sitting on the edge of a lagoon teeming with wildlife, and provides an ideal living classroom. The site design integrates mature live oaks, the new museum building, and experiential outdoor spaces that demonstrate solutions to some challenging issues facing New Orleans and the world, including coastal shoreline loss, water management, food insecurity, and climate adaptation.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Louisiana Children's Museum (LCM) re-envisioned its mission to holistically address the health and development of children in a state that often ranks 48th in educational outcomes. The health benefits of intentionally connecting children with nature led the museum to relocate from an indoor-focused experience in New Orleans' Warehouse District to a new campus encircling a lagoon alongside other museums and attractions in City Park, where families have been going for generations. The new campus presents a transformative model for children's museums, one that weaves together indoor and outdoor learning opportunities along with literacy, parenting, early childhood research, and environmental education activities to create a holistic and supportive environment for children and their families.

Live Oaks, Hummocks, and Hollows
The building and site were designed to accommodate periodic flooding and mitigate the hot, humid climate. The layout prioritizes the shade of mature live oak trees on site, part of the world's largest grove of live oaks. The site harnesses the flow of a brackish lagoon as a local stormwater receiving area that relieves flooding in downtown neighborhoods. The choreography of the visitor experience connects families with these nature-based systems - moving through groves of live oaks, across the water, and through immersive exhibits and sensory gardens.

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The magic of child-centered play is reinforced with a simple expression reflective of the local landscape - the hummocks and the hollows. In the delta landscape, a six-inch topographic change enables a wholly different ecosystem. These slight variations in topography and dramatic ecosystem change are the backbone of the design concept. The hummocks and hollows concept unfolds in multiple ways across multiple scales - as small, medium, and large exhibit areas create varied play experiences and build healthy habitats.

Thriving with Water
Given the traumatic impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city and local youth, it was imperative to the client that the museum landscape tell a water story to visitors through infrastructure, exhibits, and intentional planting. These storytelling opportunities take many forms: boardwalks and bridges that allow kids to investigate the shoreline and wetland plants; an art installation that creates an immersive bridge of fog; a conspicuous, 9,000-gallon rainwater harvesting cistern that collects roof water and reuses it for irrigation; extensive bioswales; and a living lagoon shoreline that allows flood inundation and rainwater retention without impacting daily use. These features tell a resilience story that suggests a new way to live with water.

Learning Through Exploration and Play
The Reggio Emilia child development philosophy - a child-centered approach emphasizing multisensory nature play -guided the design of experiential and haptic elements that cast changing shadows and inspire interactive rainwater engagement while providing energy reductions and stormwater utility. The landscape is designed to engage children with each other and the natural world through play and multi-sensory expressions like the simple, natural phenomenon of shadow play, listening to birdsong, orchestrating water flow, cooling in gentle mist, hiding (and seeking) in the cloud grasses, building nests together, working together to reel the floating classroom across the lagoon, crawling through the burrowing tunnel, harvesting and making food together in the kitchen garden, and spotting sunning turtles and resting egrets.

Indoor and outdoor play experiences reinforce each other. A giant water play table inside the building, the Mighty Mississippi exhibit, tells the story of the river's journey from Minnesota, through Dubuque and Memphis, to the Port of New Orleans, and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The water experiences a transition to the outdoors through a child-operable sluice gate that releases water flow into a shallow scrim and ends where kids can jump between "hummocks" immersed in the surroundings of freshwater marsh plantings and newly planted bald cypress.

Plants as Storytellers
The planting design seeks to immerse visitors in environments that celebrate the variety of plantings found in local freshwater and brackish marshes, riparian areas, and uplands. As a port city over 300 years old, New Orleans is a place where botanic specimens were imported from all over the world, slowly becoming established in the city's storied gardens. At LCM, an upland strolling sensory garden highlights local garden favorites such as Butterfly Ginger, Jasmine, Gardenia, and Azalea alongside new favorites like Cherokee Sedge, Switchgrass, Echinacea, and Salvia. A coastal restoration company became an invaluable partner by growing and installing the marsh plantings - including Bulrush, Marsh Hay, and Pickerel Weed - that showcase their restoration practice. The diverse plantings provide many interpretive opportunities for daily educational programs.

Vertical vine columns in the main courtyard allow plants to stretch up cables, shading the building and hosting pollinators and larvae of the Gulf Fritillary Butterfly, a popular sighting on "Nature Adventure Walks" hosted by staff. The vines are visible on the second floor of the exhibit wing through careful alignment with "kindows" - child-scaled window nooks. At the edible garden, children can follow the growth of their food from seedling to harvest, reinforcing food exhibits inside the museum. Education program leaders use tactile landscape systems to help children interpret the site design.

A Children's Museum as A Catalyst
The new museum has changed the city and the state. Average monthly attendance from across the state has tripled. The Governor and the Mayor of New Orleans increased financial support for early childhood development, citing the Museum's example. A recent regional economic group survey identified early childhood development as the top priority within the region. As part of a suite of projects, LCM's resilient green infrastructure helped the city win a $141 million grant through the 2015 National Disaster Resilience Competition.

In a place defined by its complicated relationship with water, the integrated design of the LCM's building and landscape exemplifies the wonder and power of living with water. Through varied storytelling, experiential site design, and exciting nature play, children and families learn about the place they live and how to love and steward those places into the future.

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