APEX Youth Center “Playmaking”

APEX Youth Center is a community-based youth center that offers neighborhood teens and young adults mentoring, tutoring, community service opportunities, recreation, and a host of structured activities designed to prepare them to become productive citizens in New Orleans and the world. This small project has allowed for APEX to increase its outdoor programming and has created a place for youth to gather in a previously underutilized space.

This quick design+build intervention for the APEX Youth Center provides necessary seating, shade, and joy to the almost 100 youth that visit the center every day. Working with APEX staff and youth participants, we identified placemaking goals and implemented them together. Colorful silhouettes of the youth who contributed to the design were mounted on the fence and brick walls of the center to give an identity to the space and give the youth a sense of place and ownership.

Project Leads
John Coyle, Emilie Taylor Welty

Design+Build
Katherine Allen, Hillary Bocash, Rachel Boynton, Kayleigh Bruentrup, Victoria Cohen, Sara Conner, Elizabeth Himmel, Tanya Hockney, Kelsey Howard, Stuart Hurt, Matthew Lamm, Stephanie Mears, Tatyana Moraczewski, Matthew Ngo, Heather Tischler