After returning from Washington DC with the coveted Market Viability and People’s Choice awards, the BeauSoleil Home is now permanently sited on the campus of UL Lafayette. At the dedication ceremony, TEAM BeauSoleil will thank all of their partners in the project by unveiling a dedication plaque mounted on the home featuring all the partner’s names. There will be an open house for the public to view the interior of the home after the dedication. The dedication of the BeauSoleil Home is a part of the fourth annual Festival of the Arts being held March 22-27. The festival’s honoree will be the late architect A. Hays Town. The festival will include week long festivities, featuring student works from the four departments within the College of the Arts, an architecture symposium with several prominent speakers, and a Festival Finale!celebration.
Plans for the BeauSoleil Home are still developing. Architecture and engineering students will monitor and record data (temperature, humidity, power consumption, etc.) over at least one year and report the findings. During the spring 2010 semester, the home will be open for self guided tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1-3 p.m. Some of the possible future uses of the home are: an artist-in-residence home, a graduate student home (part of a scholarship,) a visiting faculty home and/or a coffee shop run by students.
Meanwhile, TEAM BeauSoleil is beginning negotiations with a local modular home manufacturer to license the name and design for production of the home. It will probably take a year to develop three versions of the home, test the prototypes and go into production. It is still the project’s goal to have the base model available to the median income family in Louisiana which currently makes $50,000 per year and thus can afford a $120-150,000 home.
The dedication takes place on the park side of Fletcher Hall on the UL campus, beginning at 1 p.m. Parking is available in a gravel lot off of McKinley Drive or in the campus visitor parking lot off of McKinley Dr. or in Girard Park. Call 482-6225 for info for handicapped access to the house.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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