It is hard to envision just what the proposed Interstate 49 connection through the heart of Lafayette will look like, let alone how the land around the infrastructure could be utilized.

That’s why the University of Louisiana at Lafayette architecture and design students took on the task of creating street-view renderings of how spaces around I-49 could be transformed.

“We worked on I-49 back in 1999 and 2003 and 2004,” Thomas Sammons, director of UL’s Department of Architecture and Design, said. “Stantec and AECOM had asked us to do very similar things.”

The renderings include alternatives such as using the existing Evangeline Thruway as a service road, cultivating a green space that creates a “densely vegetated buffer” from the I-49 corridor and removing downtown, 2nd, 3rd and Johnston streets as interchanges.

Imagine a park along a mile-long stretch of the I-49 connector that serves as a location for an amphitheater, fine dining restaurant, a promenade over Johnston Street, a kayak launch and multipurpose pavilion.

The design, titled Decouverte Park, is one of several student projects currently on display at Abdalla Hall. They may make appearances soon before three committees assigned by the state Department of Transportation and Development to design the connector, said Stephen Wallace of Stantec, a consulting firm for I-49.

“His (Sammons’) design students have put together a visualization of what each of these options would look like at street level,” Wallace said. “They do provide ideas of what could be done in and around the connector. So we are talking about what we can do to integrate them to the meetings or make them available. It’s good stuff.”

Sammons said the projects will be open for public display sometime in June in the university’s gallery in Fletcher Hall.

“We certainly want to exhibit it in our gallery and allow people to look at it,” he said on Tuesday.

The Evangeline Corridor Initiative, the TIGER grant funded agency leading the planning process through neighborhoods along the corridor, will hold a public design workshop for downtown and the Freetown-Port Rico neighborhoods on Thursday. The workshop begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Rosa Parks Transportation Center, 101 Jefferson St.