The New Isle Cultural Center

I am a high schooler going into my freshman year. This project proposes a cultural museum and hurricane shelter for the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, sited at The New Isle in Schriever, Louisiana, a community resettled after decades of catastrophic land loss on Isle de Jean Charles.

The building is designed to serve two purposes; preserving the tribe's history of fishing, trapping, palmetto basket weaving, and oral tradition, and providing a hurricane shelter when storms threaten the community.

The structure is a single-story, raised on pilotis above the flood plain. The roof is a hyperbolic paraboloid shell which doubly-curved concrete form that gives the structural resilience it needs to survive on a site with high wind exposure, extreme heat stress, and regular flooding risk.

The design was developed using Autodesk Forma for site analysis and Fusion 360 for detailed modeling.

The online softwares you need to make this project are Fusion for 3D designing and any photoshop tool. I used Adobe Photoshop.

Isle de Jean Charles is a narrow strip of land in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, 90 miles southwest of New Orleans. For nearly two centuries, it was home to the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, descendants of Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw peoples who first settled there in the early 1800s, many of them refugees from the Trail of Tears.

At its peak, the island supported around 80 families across roughly 22,000 acres. Today, only about 320 acres remain. Oil and gas companies dredged canals through the surrounding marshland, accelerating erosion. Levees built to protect other communities left the island outside their boundaries. As sea levels rose, the land sank and hurricanes got worse. By the time Hurricane Ida hit in 2021, the island was effectively gone.

In 2016, the federal government awarded Louisiana $48 million to resettle the community — the first federally funded climate relocation in U.S. history. The tribe named their new home The New Isle, near Schriever, about 40 miles north. In their resettlement plan, they asked for a cultural center and museum to anchor the new community and preserve what the island represented.

The state cut it. They got houses. When the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation agreed to leave their island, they had a plan which included a cultural center and museum where their history, language, fishing traditions, and identity could be preserved and passed on. The state of Louisiana took control of the $48 million grant and cut it. What got built instead was a subdivision. Thirty-seven households in a row of new homes on flat former sugarcane farmland near Schriever. The tribe's chief called it a second Trail of Tears. The main problem is that the elders are dying and the oral histories, the fishing knowledge, the language is all disappearing.

The tribe's resettlement plan included a cultural center. The state cut it. What got built was a subdivision. So the question this project starts from is simple: what would that building actually look like?

The building I designed is a combined cultural museum and hurricane shelter at The New Isle. The museum gives the community somewhere to store their culture while he shelter means the building is useful when a storm hits.

The goal was a building that's permanent enough to anchor the community and tough enough to actually survive where it's built.

The New Isle sits on 515 acres of former sugarcane farmland near Schriever in Terrebonne Parish, about 40 miles north of Isle de Jean Charles. It is flat, inland, and exposed which was nothing like the bayou landscape the community came from. To understand what the site demands from a building, I ran a site analysis using Autodesk Forma.

Wind Dominant wind comes from the north. Average daily wind speeds are low, but the site sits in coastal Louisiana hurricane territory — the same storm systems that destroyed Isle de Jean Charles can reach Schriever.

Sun 100% of roofs and 77% of facades receive direct sun for at least 3 hours per day.

Microclimate At 2pm on a summer day, air temperature reaches 87°F with 64% humidity. 100% of the ground area registers as strong heat stress. Direct solar radiation hits 541 W/m².

The Forma analysis points to three clear requirements for this building.

It needs to survive hurricanes. Schriever is not on the coast, but it is not safe either. The same storms that erased Isle de Jean Charles pass through this region. The structure needs to be elevated above flood level and shaped to handle wind loads.

It needs to create shade. 100% of the ground registers as strong heat stress in summer. 87°F with 64% humidity is dangerous to stand in. The building needs to produce covered outdoor space.

It needs to handle solar gain. 541 W/m² of direct solar radiation means the roof and facades absorb enormous heat. Materials and roof geometry need to reflect or deflect that load rather than transfer it inside.

The roof of this building is a hyperbolic paraboloid. It is a doubly curved surface generated from straight lines, sweeping upward at two corners and downward at the other two. The result is a roof that looks organic and is structurally efficient.

The inspiration comes from the Mexican architect Félix Candela, who spent the 1950s and 60s building thin concrete shell roofs across Mexico City. Candela proved that a hypar shell could cover enormous spans with minimal material because the curvature itself carries the load. The shape is the structure. There are no heavy beams, no complex trusses. The geometry does the work.

That logic applies directly to what Forma showed about this site.

Against hurricanes, a curved surface has no flat face to catch wind. Pressure that would slam into a flat roof gets redirected around and across the shell. The load distributes across the entire surface rather than concentrating at weak points.

Against heat, the shell's wide overhanging edges cast shade on the ground below, creating the covered outdoor gathering space. The curved geometry also means less roof surface faces the sun at a direct angle, thereby reducing solar heat gain.

Against flooding, the building sits on pilotis which are concrete columns that elevate the entire structure above ground level. Keeping the interior dry when water rises and allowing floodwater to pass underneath without pushing against walls.

Go to autodesk.com/education.

Pick the product you need, select the student plan, and sign up using your email address. You will need to submit a proof of enrollment to verify you are a student.

Once verified, you get free one-year single-user access to all software in the Education Community, renewable annually as long as you're still eligible.

After approval, download and install from the Autodesk Account "All Products and Services" page.

Create the platform In the Solid workspace, go to Create → Box. Set dimensions to 24m × 16m × 1m. This is the raised floor slab — the entire building sits on top of it.

Create the pilotis Go to Create → Box again. Set dimensions to 0.5m × 0.5m × 3m. This is one column. Use the Move tool (M) to position it under a corner of the platform. Repeat for all six columns — four at the corners, two spaced along the long sides for mid-span support.

Combine into one body In the browser panel, Ctrl+click the platform and all six columns. Go to Modify → Combine → Join. This merges everything into a single solid.

Why 3 meters The New Isle sits in a FEMA flood zone. Three meters of clearance puts the floor above base flood elevation and above the height where storm surge causes structural damage.

Enter the Form environment From the Design workspace, go to Create → Create Form. The toolbar turns purple indicating you are now in the T-Spline sculpting environment.

Create a subdivided box Inside Form, click Create → Box. Set dimensions to 30 x 20 x 1m. Change Length Faces to 2 and Width Faces to 2. This creates a box subdivided into four sections, giving you individual corner vertices to manipulate.

Sculpt the hypar shape Go to Modify → Edit Form. Click one top corner vertex. Using the Z axis arrow, pull that corner upward. Then select the diagonally opposite corner and pull it up by the same amount. The other two corners remain low. This creates the characteristic saddle shape — two corners high, two corners low — that defines a hyperbolic paraboloid.

Finish the form Click Finish Form in the toolbar. Fusion converts the T-Spline surface into a solid body.

We first add a box and place it above the support and below the roof.

Go to Create → Box. Click directly on the wall face where you want the opening. Draw the box to your desired opening dimensions — for the entrance approximately 4m wide by 2.8m tall, for windows 3m wide by 2m tall.

In the Box dialog, change the Operation dropdown from New Body to Cut. This tells Fusion to subtract the box from the wall instead of adding a new object.

Make the box deep enough to cut all the way through the wall — at least 0.5m deep. Hit OK.

Create a box Create → Box. Dimensions: 12.5m wide, 12m long, 3m tall. Operation: New Body.

Apply Draft Modify → Draft. First click the top face to set the Pull Direction. Then click the front face as the Face to Draft. Set angle to 14 degrees. Hit OK.

This angles the front face down to ground level creating a clean ramp slope.

Applying appearances in Fusion With the model complete, open the Appearance panel under Modify → Appearance. Two materials were applied from Fusion's built-in library:

1. Concrete — applied to the platform, pilotis, walls, and ramp. Reflects the reality of flood-resilient construction in coastal Louisiana.
2. Glass — applied to the window openings, replacing the placeholder cuts with transparent panels.

Touchup in Photoshop The Fusion render was exported and brought into Photoshop for final adjustments — sky, ground plane, lighting, and context were refined to show the building in its Louisiana setting, framed by the live oak and Spanish moss landscape of the New Isle site.

On the single floor, a central entry and reception area welcomes visitors and connects to all spaces within the building. From here, visitors can move directly into the main exhibition hall, which runs the full width of the building at 48 meters. This hall houses the core of the museum which are displays on the tribe's fishing and trapping traditions, palmetto basket weaving and oral history recordings. It is the largest space in the building, designed to hold the community's memory.

To the left of the entry, the archive and library provides a quieter space for documents, photographs, maps, and language preservation materials. This is where the tribe's written and recorded history is stored and accessible to visitors and researchers alike.

To the right, the multipurpose and gathering room serves the community for events, ceremonies, meetings, and cultural programming. In a hurricane emergency, this room becomes the primary assembly space for shelter occupants.

The Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has been displaced twice. Once by the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and once again by the resettlement that was supposed to save them.

What heals is not just the building. What heals is having a place that says your history matters, your culture is worth preserving, and the people who came before you are not forgotten. This museum does that. It holds the fishing knowledge, the basket weaving, the oral histories, the photographs and the language. It gives the tribe a place to gather that is theirs.

And it is built to last. The hyperbolic paraboloid shell has survived the same forces that destroyed Isle de Jean Charles. The pilotis lift the building above floodwater. The elevated platform keeps the interior dry when storms hit. When the next hurricane comes, the building will act as a shelter. The community gathers inside it the same way their ancestors gathered on the island, protected by the land they called home.

That is how it heals.