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Architecture and Reality Collide in New Orleans

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 May 2008, 00:10 CDT

By Inga Saffron

NEW ORLEANS - The style wars between the modernists, the traditionalists, and the free-thinking blobists were the farthest thing from Vernessa Rogers' mind when she was asked to choose from a group of sleek house designs commissioned by actor/architecture buff Brad Pitt.

She just wanted her scattered brood reunited in a high-and-dry home on its old block in New Orleans' flood-ravaged Lower 9th Ward.

Rogers, a single mother of seven, knew picking the right house would be the most momentous decision of her 45 years, so she took her mother and sister along for counsel. They spent hours pouring over renderings and floor plans that 13 of the world's top architects had prepared for Pitt's Make It Right Foundation.

When they compared notes, the women agreed that an edgy update on the traditional shotgun house by Philadelphia's KieranTimberlake Associates worked best. It was a daring choice, but made for a most prosaic reason: This house had the most space.

Rogers' practical decision will surely give no comfort to the design world's opposing camps, which have traded verbal spitballs over the form the new Gulf Coast architecture should take, modern or traditional.

Nor is she likely to appease New Orleans' planning gurus, who question the wisdom of rebuilding low-lying areas such as the 9th Ward. Her sole focus is getting her family out of its $2,000-a- month New Orleans rental and back to the property she owns at 1714 Tennessee St.

When Pitt conceived Make It Right last year, he saw it as a marriage of social responsibility and design - a way to redress the neglect of New Orleans' storied black 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina while showcasing cutting-edge architecture. But avant-garde designers will be chagrined to learn that most participating residents have gravitated to familiar-looking styles with peaked roofs and pastel exteriors.

Rogers is one of the few to opt for KieranTimberlake's less conventional, asymmetrical concept. But that's because she liked the way the designers fit three bedrooms plus a studio apartment into the drum-tight footprint of a typical New Orleans cottage.

"It has a nice high porch and a trellis," Rogers swooned. "And it's going to be a green house, and that will save me a lot of money on electricity."

The fact that KieranTimberlake won this year's gold medal from the American Institute of Architects, and that New York's Museum of Modern Art will feature its work in an exhibition this summer, held little sway for Rogers.

So much for architectural star power.

For James Timberlake, Rogers' enthusiasm is the next best thing. He feels validated that his firm remained faithful to its design philosophy and still appealed to local tastes. It helps that it cleverly offered residents both a flat roof - a hallmark of modernism - and a peaked one, in the form an angled sunscreen over the roof deck.

"We went into the project feeling a contemporary house could represent history without being a pastiche," Timberlake explained. "We've interpreted traditional elements," like a lacy balcony railing.

From the start, it has been clear that the real supernova of the effort is Pitt, who is almost as famous for being an "architectural junkie" as for his relationship with Angelina Jolie. On his Web site, he speaks passionately about the "great injustice" of America's response to Katrina.

"Make It Right is not about a handout, but it's about a hand up," Pitt says.

Thanks to his high-wattage name, Pitt's organization has raised money for 81 houses since the project went public in December. Construction of the first batch is due to start next month, and residents could move in by August. Pitt hopes to complete 150 homes in a compact four-street section of the 9th Ward and eventually bring prices down to $150,000.

Yet the project's quick success hasn't prevented architects and planners from second-guessing the enterprise - or questioning their ability to solve real-world problems.

Can architects come up with a house design that will help heal a wounded city? Are big-thinking urban planners up to the task of responding to a disaster of Katrina's magnitude? And which should come first: the housing or the planning?

"I think the focus has been too much on architecture," argued John Beckman of Wallace Roberts & Todd, the Philadelphia firm that fashioned New Orleans' first major recovery plan after the storm.

After a fierce debate in 2006, the city's residents rejected that plan. They objected to the proposal to "shrink the footprint" of the city to reduce the cost of serving the smaller post-Katrina population, now half its previous 484,000. Once the idea of managing contraction was spurned, the rebuilding became scattershot.

As one drives around neighborhoods like Lakewood, the effects of that random strategy become clear. On one block, a charming Craftsman-style home has been jacked up on a 12-foot-high crawl space and lovingly restored. But its neighbors sit empty, their front doors forlornly ajar. Barely half are occupied.

"People are trying to go back and create what was there before, without having learned a lesson," Beckman said. He noted that statistics show New Orleans is using twice the water for half the population because so many pipes cracked under the weight of standing water. Yet replacement is beyond the city's means.

As much as Beckman admires Make It Right's commitment to sustainable design, he's troubled that the environmentally friendly homes will border the Industrial Canal.

When the canal's levee broke, the rushing water washed away the Lower 9th Ward. The ward now resembles a vast field, strewn with rusted cars and old rosebushes.

Some believe receding waters also left invisible menaces, such as high levels of arsenic. Why not rebuild, Beckman asks, on higher, cleaner, more central ground?

Though not completely dismissing his concerns, architects counter that 9th Ward residents don't have the luxury of time. They're desperate to escape oppressive Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers and expensive rentals, yet many have trouble getting mortgages to rebuild despite owning their land. That leaves them in housing limbo.

"WRT's opinion is very indicative of the way planners think. It's very paternal," said Steven B. Bingler, a New Orleans architect who designed one of Make It Right's top choices.

Like the other designers, he spent hours talking to the ward's residents. He quickly learned they had their own design ideas.

Not only did they expect to use the 8-foot raised spaces below the houses to park their cars and boats, but they also wanted them nice enough to hold crawfish parties. And they overwhelmingly rejected modernist tics, such as flat roofs.

The project's 13 architects all started with an identical form, the narrow shotgun house. An architect can't do much to vary the floor plan, with the living room in front and bedrooms in back. Yet the results are an inventive compendium of today's design trends.

They range from an offering, by Graft architects, that is indistinguishable from a typical Jersey Shore rental to a high- concept design by the trendy Dutch firm MVRDV. A pointed commentary on Katrina's upheavals, it resembles a giant rural mailbox.

Not surprisingly, it's the Graft design that's hugely popular. No one has yet picked MVRDV's mailbox or its alternative version, which looks suspiciously like a boat upended by Katrina.

Several architects said they were appalled by MVRDV's proposals, which play more to the academy than the needs of displaced residents, and may be uninhabitable.

"That's graphic design, not architecture," Timberlake said. Bingler was more blunt: "When are we going to reach the point when architects say, 'This is unprofessional?' ... It may even be unethical."

KieranTimberlake pushed a bit more, with its angled sunscreen, solar panels and rainwater-collection barrels. The firm also hopes to apply its pioneering work on off-site construction to reduce costs and allow "mass customization." It wants to set up a house- building factory in New Orleans to create jobs.

New Orleans architect David Waggoner worries the quest to reinvent the shotgun misses the point. "The type of architecture we were building here in the 19th century was pretty darn good," he said.

Until the postwar fad for tract houses, no one built on flat slabs in low-lying areas. Waggoner argued that the city should let landscape guide settlement patterns, the way it once did.

"If we expect to be here another 300 years, we can't keep denying the natural reality of the land. Our government should have bought people out and relocated them" so they wouldn't be forced to rebuild in inappropriate areas, he said.

But the necessary federal legislation never materialized, WRT's plan failed, and rebuilding New Orleans became an overwhelmingly private, individual effort.

Instead of tight-knit neighborhoods, the danger is that the city could end up with countrified areas dotted with a few houses. Pitt's plan calls for a tight grid of 150 houses, but only 15 are in the pipeline. What happens if only 75 are completed?

Rogers insisted she'd rather live on a country lane than not return to Tennessee Street. Her 10-year-old daughter, she believes, will never recover from the trauma of Katrina until the family is home again.

"Sometimes, my baby says to me, 'Let's go ride by the house.' And I say, 'It's not there anymore.' But then I drive her over anyway," Rogers said with a chuckle. "We park on our land, and she does her homework in the car. It makes her so happy."

Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail

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