The USGBC's 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition re-orients recovery by building and measuring the sustainability of new homes.
Broadmoor is a late-1920s New Orleans neighborhood south of Mid-City and west of the French Quarter. It's distinctive not just because it is a socio-economic microcosm representative of the rest of the city, but also because Broadmoor is considered the "bottom of the bowl." As one of New Orleans' lowest-lying areas (it was a former marshland), Broadmoor was infamously identified as a "green dot" just after Katrina--the neighborhood was deemed not worthy of rebuilding. This direct challenge to the neighborhood's future mobilized the community to change their designation, and what resulted was an astonishing example of grassroots organizing that symbolizes the power and resiliency of community. Last week, during the five year anniversary of Katrina, I was lucky enough to meet these resilient residents of Broadmoor.
For the past five years post-Katrina, New Orleans has been portrayed as a mixed story of great successes and glaring failures. A spectacularly inept response from federal government paired with a lack of a functional local government opened up the city as a zone of experimentation. New Orleans has become a place where social entrepreneurship and innovation have abounded, yet not all of the programs have yielded great success, particularly those around the built environment. Despite some admirable philanthropic gestures like Brad Pitt’s Make It Right program, the lack of contextual relevance of the newly built homes has led to a landscape pock-marked by exceedingly out of place, sculptural buildings that have no communication with their New Orleans neighborhoods. These efforts to embrace the future have been made at the expense of the past, alienating local communities and ignoring New Orleans heritage.
The USGBC has been acutely aware of this situation and structured their 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition to directly address this challenge. For this competition, students and emerging professionals from all over the world tried to balance affordability, access, sustainability, and livability. Each submission to the competition needed to provide the design for an 800 square-foot home in traditional "shotgun" style (on a 30' x 100' parcel of land). The designs had to be ADA compliant, follow the tenets of Universal Design, and meet the requirements for LEED Platinum rating--all managed within a $100,000 construction cost. Perhaps even more challenging though was the requirement that the homes had to fit well within the Broadmoor neighborhood--after all, the Broadmoorians themselves would be evaluating the designs.
via www.fastcodesign.com
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