Nora Navra Wins AIA Design Award

Nora Navra Wins AIA Design Award

We are celebrating Nora Navra Library for winning an AIA New Orleans design award! You can view the entire awards ceremony here.

We celebrate it too for its community focus, sustainable features, interaction with the site filled with long-standing oaks, and its status as a symbol of the community’s resiliency. The reception of the project by the community and its use as a neighborhood gathering hub is what we take most pride in being a part of.

Sponsor Chuck Perret of Lettermans opened the architectural awards segment with this:
"The most precious recognition . . . will be when we can come together as one again as a community and use these spaces . . . and bring with that use a kind of renewed joy and appreciation for the simple act of coming together as a community."

The Nora Navra Library exemplifies this sentiment on multiple levels.

  • Completed in 2018, it was also a reopening of the original 1954 library that had served the community for over 50 years prior to Katrina.
  • The project opened to great fanfare and joy in the community that had missed its hub since Hurricane Katrina
  • The library continues to serve neighbors (even if on a limited basis) during the isolation of COVID-19

But it’s nice to be rewarded for exemplary design, especially considering the wealth of admirable projects under consideration. The library was awarded the AIA New Orleans Honorable Mention in Architecture.

We will celebrate again, once the library can fully open and neighbor can meet neighbor at the Nora Navra Library.

Project Team:
William R. Manning: CEO | President
Dominic Willard: Principal in Charge
Ryan Bertucci: Project Architect
Michelle Carroll-Barr: Interior Designer
Nicholas Perez-Alvarez: Urban Planner

Consultants:
Library Planning Associates, Inc.
Library Interiors, Inc.
Julien Engineering & Consulting, Inc.
Crumb Engineering, LLC
Creative Engineering Group, LLC
patch LA, Landscape Architect
lospecs, LLC
Rider Levett Bucknall

General Contractor:
CDW Services, LLC