Project summary for THE CAMPUS EDGE: MEDIATING UNIVERSITY AND CONTEXT Tulane University School of Architecture, 2006–2007   |   Advisor: Prof. Graham Owen (Revised May 2010) Conventional ideas about the proper role and form of higher education — and, in particular, the sanctity of the academic campus as "a place apart," as Robert A. M. Stern puts it — are being challenged from multiple directions. As degrees increase in cost, so does competition from other forms of higher credentialing, such as online universities and other means of disseminating knowledge independent of any sort of campus. Also contributing to the challenge is the disconnect between the purported social mission of academic institutions, which typically finds itself expressed in lofty utopian rhetoric and glossy brochures, and the perceived reality of said institutions' self-marginalization and introversion. Colleges and universities surrounded by urban contexts have a special opportunity to reconcile their usual desire for campus expansion with the necessity of affirming both their faithfulness to their mission and their relevance to society. To that end, this project explores the possibilities of "hybridizing" a neglected edge of an urban campus, creating a multi-purpose buffer zone that does not merely exist between campus and city, but that is simultaneously campus and city. Such a zone would immediately and continuously connect on-campus students and faculty to the city as a whole; provide the city with more apparent access to the intellectual and economic benefits derived from proximity to a campus; and, more specifically, revitalize a blighted neighborhood adjacent to the campus. Student and market-rate housing, various facilities shared by the university and the city, parks and public spaces activated by commercial enterprise originating from within both the university and the city, etc., can all work in concert to create this hybrid zone. The proposal attempts to provide such a zone for Tulane University, in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans. As its formal 19th-century entrance on St. Charles Avenue suggests, Tulane is a relatively self-contained academic enclave. However, Tulane's neglected, under-utilized frontage along South Claiborne Avenue — a central high-speed transportation artery — provides the university with an opportunity to make its role as an agent of change more apparent to its damaged city. The resulting intervention lends itself not only to the changing nature of higher education, but also to the general character of New Orleans, a city of "hybrid zones" of all kinds. The proposal does not aim to radically subvert the idea of a university as a stable and necessarily sheltered bastion of learning and (hopefully) civilized debate, but rather to aid its survival by creating for it a sort of safety-valve, and potentially a realistic model for its future growth.