Architecture Students Prep Miss Gloria’s Kitchen

FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. — Professor Greg Herman and 19 architecture students are celebrating the season by swinging hammers and ripping up floor joists. The University of Arkansas School of Architecture group is in New Orleans Dec. 11-16 to work on Miss Gloria’s Kitchen, a New Orleans restaurant that has been shuttered since Hurricane Katrina.

Last spring architecture students redesigned the restaurant from foundation to rooftop. Their proposals for outdoor seating, new signage and other improvements will amplify the restaurant’s role as a social anchor for Gert Town, a New Orleans neighborhood struggling to recover from Katrina.

“We plan to carry out strategic demolition and prepare the site for construction — if time permits we may build some of the new interior walls,” said Greg Herman. “This blitz build takes us one step closer to getting Miss Gloria back in business.”

The students will not receive course credit for the week of heavy labor, just the satisfaction of getting the project a little closer to completion.

“We wanted to help people who need it,” said Caitlin Stevens, a student from Canon City, Colo., who left for New Orleans after finishing her last final exam Monday.

“It will be good building experience for us, too,” added Stephanie Bedinghaus, a third-year student from Springfield, Mo.

Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects Ltd., Temple Shalom of Fayetteville and individuals in New Orleans and Fayetteville have provided $38,600 for the project. An additional $48,400 is needed to renovate and reopen Miss Gloria’s Kitchen.

The weeklong build is financed in part by the students themselves, who raised $650 for travel expenses by selling tickets for a raffle and silent auction. Prizes were donated by Shine Salon, Renaissance Tans, Jim’s Razorback Pizza, Penguin Ed’s Barbeque, Qdoba Mexican Grill, the Corner Grill, the Pesto Café, Rick’s Bakery and Lokomotion Golf. Tatu Gatere, an architecture student from Nairobi, Kenya, designed and crafted Lucite key chains etched with the students’ design for Miss Gloria’s Kitchen. The key chains, which cost $5, may be purchased by contacting Judy Stone at (479) 575-2399 or jkstone@uark.edu.

Peter Trapolin, a principal with Trapolin Architects of New Orleans whose nephew Daniel Kuehn is on the Arkansas work crew, worked with New Orleans Fine Hotels to secure low hotel rates for the students. University of Arkansas alumnus Casey Adams, who is director of real estate for the New Orleans chapter of Habitat for Humanity, arranged for the loan of a trailer and tools for the project.

The project to rebuild Miss Gloria’s Kitchen was inspired by the December 2005 Arkansas Summit on the University of Arkansas campus. Organized by a university student group, Re_Vision, and the architecture service organization Project Locus, the conference brought together 50 designers, engineers, historians and students from across the country to discuss how design schools could help New Orleans. Participants formed a coalition, CITYbuild, which has launched design-build projects in New Orleans by the University of Arkansas, the University of Kansas, Tulane University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities.

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools recently won the 2007-08 Collaborative Practice Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. CITYbuild will be the focus of a special session at the annual meeting of the association, to be held March 27-30, 2008, in Houston. The project also will be included in a book on the 2007-08 education awards to be co-published by the ACSA and the American Institute of Architects.

For more information on Miss Gloria’s Kitchen, visit http://www.citybuild.org/schools/glorias.html. Cash and in-kind contributions are still needed to ensure completion of Miss Gloria’s Kitchen. To support the project, contact Charlotte Taylor, director of development for the School of Architecture, at (479) 575-7384 or chtaylo@uark.edu.