Critical Regionalism | selophane.blog

An Urban Plan for a New New Orleans

I submitted the op-ed below to the editorial desk of the New Orleans Times Picayune two weeks ago. I have not received any response to my inquiries, so I assume that they are not interested; if that changes I may have to remove this post. In any case, I would like to present my solution for a sustainable redevelopment of New Orleans:

An urban plan for a new New Orleans.

Although New Orleans avoided Gustav’s wrath, we need to learn as much as we did the hard way from Katrina. Instead of rebuilding the city and the levees as they were, we need to make it so that New Orleans will never worry about a hurricane again.

New Orleans has had a past fraught with disasters: twice fires wiped out the bulk of the French and Spanish colonial city and there have been numerous floods and levee breaks which have altered the city’s shape. Over the last century we believed that we had bent nature to our will by controlling the course of the Mississippi River and preventing the annual flood. At the same time developers drained the surrounding swamps to make new low-lying easily flooded subdivisions. The damage caused by Katrina showed this control to be fleeting.

The rebuilding after Katrina was done with the wrong methodology: we treated the symptoms, not the problems. What we needed to do was create a plan to address the environment, the economy and the unique identity of New Orleans, and we still can. The levee system by itself is not sufficient; overtopping and crevasses are always a possibility. The city needs a two tiered approach to safety, one which selectively prevents and allows controlled flooding in to create a city that can function with six feet of water in the streets of evangeline. New Orleans is also facing a similar struggle with its economy; it relies on the tourism industry and the port to survive. With the current downturn in the national economy there is less money to be spent which will eventually hinder both the shipment of goods and services and the attraction of money to the tourist trade. The city needs a new sustainable identity.

To save the Crescent City we need to recreate it as a new Creole city by blending the local culture with building concepts from around the world. The Dutch city of Amsterdam and an area of Peru called Belén both have novel strategies to handle flooding; one is a city that walls off the water and the other is a community that floats atop it. The older urban areas of New Orleans should learn from Amsterdam and create more raised levees and canals to bring high water from the river and the lake to designated overflows, much like the Bonnet Carré Spillway. These areas, the former swamps and low lying neighborhoods devastated by Katrina, could be built anew using updated concepts based on the Peruvian strategy; buildings and public plazas that lay on the ground during parts of the year, but float on the surface of the water during flood periods. These buildings would be anchored in place but allowed to move vertically to adjust to rising and falling water levels. This strategy could serve as a water recharge basin and allow all rain water to be pumped from the low lying city streets into the new controlled flood plains where it can be treated and released down river or into the lake. This constant movement of water will work like a bayou and prevent mosquito borne diseases. These levees and canals will create a more efficient mass transit systems with in the city with boat traffic running atop the water and an enclosed rail system below.

New Orleans should look beyond structures and embrace a new urban identity. By improving upon the model of Greensburg, Kansas – creating all platinum LEED buildings and aiming for carbon neutrality – New Orleans could brand itself as the heart of the Green movement. Most of its power needs could be met through hydro electric, solar and other non-polluting forms of energy production. Water that is collected in the recharge flood plains should be used for plant irrigation, cleaning the streets after parades and other non-potable water needs. Tax breaks and incentives should be offered to companies that achieve carbon neutrality, manufacture alternative energy products and research new environmentally friendly technologies. By encouraging organizations like the USGBC and Green Globes to make New Orleans their headquarters, the Big Easy could be the leader at the heart of the green movement. These new businesses would supply New Orleanians with jobs and the city with a consistent source of revenue that would enable a more locally funded rebuilding process. In addition, the greening of New Orleans will help the tourist industry by making it a destination for cultural and environmental tourism. The city may have missed the tech boom of the late twentieth century, but it could easily embrace the twenty-first as a model green city.

This redevelopment plan is a bold stroke and some may argue that it is unrealistic; but wasn’t draining almost 100 square miles of swamp for more dry real estate just as bold? It is my belief that without daring aspirations the Crescent City will always be teetering on the edge of destruction. Yet, by allowing controlled flooding and by bringing in the industry of the twenty-first century, Creole culture and adaption can once again save New Orleans.

-Spencer Lepler is a graduate of the Tulane School of Architecture (’05) with a Master of Architecture and a certificate in Preservation Studies. He lives in Northern Virginia and is working towards his architectural license. His blog can be read at http://www.selophane.com/blog

Architecture School – Preliminary Design Review

While reading other responses to Architecture School, i stumbled upon the conversation at Veritas et Venustas and felt compelled to add my 28 cents. I have reprinted my response below.

As a Tulane School of Architecture alumnus (’05) I feel a need to chime in with a few points.

1) There was, and I assume still is, an underlying conflict in the school and architecture as a whole. There are those modernist professors who put an emphasis on partis and design over neighborhood scale and character and they are continually in conflict with the preservationists/critical regionalists who emphasis context and character over grand design strategy. This studio would have been better suited being under the purview of a non-modernist professor, whose emphasis would have been on neighborhood development instead of personal architectural statements.

2) The problem with the existing houses and the neighborhood’s reaction is multifaceted. There is a severe air of distrust in New Orleans between the poor black neighborhoods and the rich (mostly) white gentry for very good reasons. The horrendous housing projects that were built during urban renewal were dehumanizing spaces (many not much better than stacked slave cabins), the construction of which allowed for the forced removal of people and buildings to build I-95, the Superdome, City Hall, and other municipal projects. In addition to this, for many of the neighborhood’s residents these new houses are parallel to the original critical failure of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” This is the first time they are seeing new housing forms and they have no language or filter through which to interpreting them, so they default to ugly. But does this make their reaction wrong? Not really. They are partially right, these houses are 21st century islands amongst a sea of 20th century houses (most of the houses shown were craftsman shotguns with some Victorian shotguns), and in a sense do not belong. Maybe if they were renovating the 9th Ward or New Orleans East and starting fresh these would make sense, but as urban infill they are failures.
Now, that may be a bit harsh. The policeman’s house does borrow from a traditional New Orleanian form, the shuttered louvered window. The opening in the front responds to the louvered shutters, but instead of being a method of screening and protection, this window is an actual door. This kind of gesture works; it is a means of natural ventilation and it also helps bring a front porch to the project which engages the neighborhood and may help encourage more safety and security.

3) The student proposals do not show an understanding of New Orleans’s traditional housing forms. Yes they are all long and narrow, but this is site generated, not design. None of the designs shown in the first episode take into account that most 2 story houses in this part of the city are Camel Back shotguns (one story dwellings with a “hump” in the rear). Instead they are all fully massed 2 story buildings, and one student was pushing for a three story house. Now that may work on St. Charles, Magazine street, or other dense areas uptown, but in this neighborhood that would be gigantic.
I blame the school for this; very few studios focus on housing, my entire portfolio, save my preservation classes, focused on public use buildings. Even though they have lived in the city for at least 3-4 years by the time they are in this platform, most of these students have has less exposure to the city’s architectural character than a typical tourist. The usual source of inspiration for most architecture students are the glossy magazines, and rarely do these focus on any traditional built form, be it New Orleans or Baltimore.

So in summary, yes there is an issue here, but it is greater than students producing substandard work. The emphasis should be on providing housing that will fit the needs of the neighborhood and help to strengthen the existing identity of this place, instead of being about providing housing in a grand gesture of contemporary thought.

Critial Olympianism

SCOTT BURNHAM has a realy good post about the Beijing Stadium. He contends that the now ubiquitous “Bird’s Nest” shows a striking similarities to the improvised safety screening that Chinese migrant workers erect in buildings. This woven mesh of slates IS eerily similar to the form of the outer skin on Herzog & de Meuron’s Stadium.

[Image via SCOTT BURNHAM.]

Personally I find this to be a wonderful thing, with just one caveat. This is a great example of critical regionalism. An architect is taking a native form and filtering contemporary design through it. The mesh could easily have been some less derivative form, but through the interpretation of the wooden slats it becomes essentially Chinese. The big warning I have here is that this is critical regionalism because the artistic direction for the Stadium comes from someone who is OF this culture, unlike the architects who are outsiders.