This project functions not only as a technical college, but as a parking garage for the New Orleans Central Business District: skyscrapers along Poydras Street and elsewhere surrounded by older, smaller-scale urban fabric in various degrees of fragmentation. Rather than treating the obligatory parking component as a necessary evil, this proposal wraps it as a double-ended spiral around the CAD/CAM lab and the auditorium, the two major assembly spaces. This has several advantages. On a pragmatic level, it provides more convenient access to classrooms from parked automobiles. Also, it defines a central common space, which eases navigation through and maximizes passive cooling for this very large building. This space is best characterized as an 'urban quadrangle,' a space which creates a visual dialogue between two monumental, albeit 'wrapped,' program elements in a way similar to that found on a traditional campus — witness the quadrangle at Tulane which connects McAlister Auditorium to Newcomb Hall — while remaining open simultaneously to the street and to virtually every space in the project. By night, the parking structure and the assembly spaces work in tandem. Light from evening events in the glass-enclosed auditorium and demonstration lab plays off of the concrete parking structure and spills onto the streets, transforming the building into an urban beacon. Tulane University School of Architecture Instructor: Scott Bernhard Fall 2004