Delgado Community College’s new home for Nursing and Allied Health is envisioned to showcase the sustained academic momentum and dynamic growth of many of the college’s most successful programs. For the first time under one roof, the new building will house the Delgado Charity School of Nursing and most of Delgado’s existing programs offered by the Division of Allied Health. Situated at the front of Delgado’s City Park Campus and prominently adjacent to the historic Isaac Delgado Hall, the new five-story, 120,000 sf building blends familiar aspects of the current campus together with a more current, progressive architecture that evokes the bright, aspirational future of careers in health sciences. Taking full advantage of the new building’s location, visually prominent from the corner of City Park and Orleans Avenues, generous expanses of exterior glazing will provide a high degree of transparency, revealing the sophistication of high-tech learning spaces for Nursing and Allied Health learning and innovation.
Shape
The new building’s program is built around a core of teaching spaces that range from traditional lecture to advanced lab spaces for detailed simulation of healthcare delivery environments. Classrooms, skills labs, debriefing rooms, faculty offices, and administrative suites are interspersed with Virtual Hospital spaces that provide high-fidelity simulation learning of actual care procedures, configured to maximize live observation and audio-visual capture. Though not included in this project, more spacious and modern Nursing & Allied Health classrooms and computer labs are envisioned for the adjacent Delgado Hall building to complement the new building’s landscape of applied learning spaces, extending the social-academic energy of 21st Century learning deeper into the existing campus.
Inspire
Site development will require removal of an existing concrete surface parking lot, as well as necessary backfill to meet BFE. Thoughtful and environmentally sustainable landscaping, including native grasses and flowers as well as raised planters and small study patios consisting of concrete pavers, will be used to knit the new building gracefully and contextually into Delgado’s existing campus. Existing live oak trees at the perimeter of the site will be protected throughout design and construction to maintain visual connection with Delgado’s pastoral inner campus as well as City Park and mature tree canopies lining Orleans Avenue.
This is where we are going to train the future heroes who are going to be there for us in the next 100 years, for whatever comes our way. Even before the pandemic, the state was in dire need of health care professionals and this will help meet that need both near-term and far into the future. And the future is looking up.
- John Bel Edwards Governor of Louisiana (via Nola.com article)
