Green ArchiTEXT

The Other New Orleans | Metropolis POV

By Martin C. Pedersen

Photo: Francesca Pedersen.

The conventional wisdom about New Orleans these days is for the most part positive: an engaged mayor (with the obligatory “60 Minutes” profile under his belt), rebounding neighborhoods, improving schools, young people flocking in.  All of this is true, as far as it goes, but it’s an incomplete accounting. What has gone largely unreported in the mainstream press is the condition of the neighborhood hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.  Much of the Lower Ninth Ward—despite the heroic efforts of Brad Pitt and Make It Right—remains desolate.

This past weekend I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth, sponsored by the local chapter of the AIA and hosted by John Williams, who in addition to his work as executive architect for Make It Right has taken on the role of unofficial master planner for the embattled neighborhood. While there are pockets of hope in the Lower Ninth—the Holy Cross section has seen about half of its residents return—the overall picture is troubling.

Photo: Alex Pedersen.

“Before Katrina, seventy-two percent of the residents owned their homes,” Williams says. “It was the highest rate of home ownership in the state of Louisiana. It was a dense neighborhood. There were blighted properties, but virtually no empty lots. Eighteen thousand people lived here. Today I’d put that number at thirty-two hundred.” Prior to Katrina, there were eighty businesses on St. Claude Avenue, a main drag running through the neighborhood; there are now five. There were once 72 churches; about 20 survived.  There is one school, but it largely serves students from outside the neighborhood. The children of the Lower Ninth live mostly elsewhere: Dallas, Houston, Baton Rouge.

For the past couple of years Williams has been fighting to get a school in the Lower Ninth. But it’s been a kind of chicken and egg game: the neighborhood asks for a school; the city says they don’t have the kids to support it (which is true); and the community responds, we would if they had a school to go to. According to Williams, Mayor Mitch Landrieu and his sister, Senator Mary Landrieu, have expressed support for a high school in the Lower Ninth. To her credit, the senator appears to be showing an interest in the neighborhood, conducting regular meetings with community activists there. READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

Make It Well: What architects have learned from rethinking and rebuilding in New Orleans

The third and final day of Reinvention 2010 began with a panel of New Orleanians discussing the city’s rebuilding efforts. Byron Mouton, AIA, noted that “since the storm, there’s been more willingness to try things in a different way.” He showed two residences by his firm, Bild Design, as well as projects by the student design/build program he directs, Tulane URBANbuild. A main local concern, he said, is figuring out “how we move away from the earth while maintaining some connection with the neighborhood.”

Wayne Troyer, AIA, presented several projects that aim to improve local communities and work within the city’s built context. These included a 3-acre mixed-use project, an adaptive reuse of an old mill building, and the rebuilding of a fraternity house in the Uptown neighborhood. A net-zero, mixed-use project that provides job training and a small housing component will be ready for the American Institute of Architects’ national convention in spring 2011. Architect and developer Marcel Wisznia, AIA, showed a series of the multifamily, mixed-use projects he’s been able to put together by navigating the byzantine systems of federal and state tax credits for historic preservation and alternative energy. “The common thread here is pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, and that’s really how we live our lives,” he told the audience.

Steve Dumez, FAIA, of Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, said his firm was beginning to “rethink a way in which we can develop a more significant connection back to the water … more like the Dutch model of connectivity to the water’s edge.” He pointed out that “Katrina, for us, has been transformative. Katrina was not a natural disaster. It really was a failure of imagination and a failure of design, and it’s our responsibility as locals to do everything we can to get it right this time.” READ MORE >>

via www.residentialarchitect.com

A New Plan for Making New Orleans Sustainable for Generations

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

Getting It Right: What Is Brad Pitt Really Doing for New Orleans?

To people who lived where the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood once lay, just east of the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, Katrina wasn't really a natural disaster. It's remembered more as a catastrophe of human design, the failure of poorly conceived levees and susceptible homes, the shoddy construction of one giving way to the complete destruction of the other.

"One of the architects we've worked with a lot, Bill McDonough, always says that design is the first signal of human intention," says Tom Darden, the executive director of the Make It Right foundation, which has been working to rebuild part of the neighborhood since 2007. "If you extrapolate that statement to New Orleans, what were we intending when we were building ranch-style slab-on-grade houses that were not elevated at all? That were below sea level? That were supposedly protected by man-made levees? Those houses had no chance of being protected."

The people at Make It Right, the organization founded by the architecture enthusiast Brad Pitt, have slowly been constructing a design solution to that original design problem. With the right kind of housing plans, they figure, you can design your way out of low-lying floodplains, out of 130-mile-an-hour winds, out of humidity, high heat, and higher electric bills.

via www.good.is

Tulane's URBANbuild Makes it Right

Construction underway on the first duplex at the Make It Right Project (March 2010)

By Ryan Rivet, Tulane

The School of Architecture's URBANbuild program was conceived before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region, but after the storm, the project has become focused on the recovery process. This year, URBANbuild 5 continued that mission by teaming with another group with the same focus, the Make It Right project in the Lower Ninth Ward.

URBANbuild project architect Byron Mouton says the partnership with Make It Right was a natural fit. Make It Right, conceived by actor Brad Pitt, embraces new technologies and energy-efficient materials in its homes, just as URBANbuild does.

"There are lots of people out here with similar ambitions, trying new systems and technologies and figuring things out together," Mouton says. "Since we're using all these new methods, all the builders are sharing what they learned." READ MORE >>

via tulane.edu

Flavorpill: Brad Pitt and the Trouble with Vernacular Architecture

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the designs of the Make It Right (MIR) houses in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward continue to transform the city and influence post-disaster vernacular in America. They also continue to stir discussion, and plenty of critique, from a broad spectrum of architects – certainly from preservationists, who complain the MIR designs are not New Orleans enough, and even from a few sustainability advocates who question whether these unique designs truly offer a cohesive sense of community, even whether they are replicable elsewhere.

In flavorpill, Kelsey Keith observes:

And though modern design enthusiasts (of which, generally, I am one) have been quick to praise the project — which is building ‘em lean, mean, and green, after all — design professionals with ties to New Orleans are hesitant. The Times quotes James Dart, a New Orleans-born, New York-based architect who describes the houses as “alien, sometimes even insulting,” adding, “the biggest problem is that they are not grounded in the history of New Orleans architecture.” Local broker Jennifer Pearl chimes in: “Brad has the very best intentions. However, had he come here with houses that looked like what had been here before, he probably could have had four times, five times as many houses up by now.

Still, it’s worth noting that the architects commissioned to deliver these single-family and duplex designs participated in a series of community charrettes with residents and potential homeowners to understand their needs and wants for this massive rebuilding effort. The Make It Right Foundation also provided guidance, asking that all designs reflect traditional New Orleans typologies; that homes are green, affordable, and storm resistant, and built using materials inspired by Cradle to Cradle thinking. “And finally, they were asked to design homes that were aesthetically-advanced.”

In Updates to a Classic, MIR summarizes the design intent at the core of this project:

The thirteen architects who contributed to single family home designs all hewed to the traditional New Orleans shotgun house format - simple, narrow and fashioned to fit the long skinny lots in the Lower 9th Ward. They also all include porches - a feature highly valued in the neighborhood that places a premium on sociability and connectedness to the community. All of the homes have more complex floor plans, solar panels, rain water collectors and other green features.

Twenty-five houses are now in place, many of them occupied by new homeowners, with another 25 under construction and the remaining 100 scheduled to break ground before the end of this year. No matter what happens next with Make It Right, a statement has been made: a statement of change, of passive survivability, of looking forward from a place rich in history.

Urban Resilience: Breaking New Ground on Understanding – and Preserving – Natural Ecosystems

By Maywa Montenegro

...to some scientists, what happened in New Orleans, while devastating, wasn’t very surprising or unexpected. They see a system that was insufficiently robust to handle the blow it was dealt. They see a highly ordered, complex state – commercial districts and neighborhoods, social networks and infrastructure networks, cycles of water, energy, and food consumption – reduced to a state of chaos and disorder. From this perspective, the problem wasn’t merely an incompetent leadership and not enough FEMA trailers. It was a fundamental question of resilience.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.

via seedmagazine.com

Preserving Green: Making History with a LEED Platinum Landmark in NOLA

Preserving Green, a project led by New Orleans' Preservation Resource Center (PRCNO), will transform an architecturally significant house in the Holy Cross historic district of New Orleans into a LEED Platinum community center that will be free and open to the public throughout the year. Preserving Green is the first project that has support of both the U.S. Green Building Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Along with the USGBC and the National Trust, other sponsors include Historic Green New Orleans and The Kresge Foundation. The community center located at 5200 Dauphine Street will serve as a critical "home" and meeting place for the local neighborhood association.

via www.prcno.org

IMAGE: Historic Green

Deconstruction of 5200 Dauphine, a historic shotgun/camelback, during Historic Green, March 2009. Reconstruction and reframing of the house will begin during this year's Historic Green, March 9 to 19, 2010.

New Orleans a test case for global warming

By Tom Darden, Executive Director of the Make It Right Foundation

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Copenhagen, Denmark, is 5,000 miles away from New Orleans, Louisiana. But representatives of the 192 nations gathering this week at the climate change conference need to keep the memory of a flooded New Orleans in mind.

Two years ago this month, the Make It Right Foundation was launched to help the families of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward rebuild their lives and community. That was already two years after Katrina, and the once-vibrant neighborhood was still in ruins, failed by government and frustrated by a lack of progress.

via www.cnn.com

Prototype Duplex Design for Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation

IMAGE: William McDonough + Partners

"The Flow House: Adaptive Modularity"

William McDonough + Partners, a core team member of the Make It Right revitalization project, has designed a duplex home created for families impacted by Hurricane Katrina who are now rebuilding in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward.  The design is one of a series of new green affordable homes for the Make It Right Foundation, founded by Brad Pitt to help rebuild the Lower 9th Ward.

via www.modular.org