Houses of the Future

Four years after the levee failures, New Orleans is
seeing an unexpected boom in architectural
experimentation. Small, independent developers are
succeeding in getting houses built where the government
has failed. And the city's unique challenges-among them
environmental impediments, an entrenched culture of
leisure, and a casual acquaintance with regulation-are
spurring design innovations that may redefine American
architecture for a generation.

Also see:

Map: "After the Flood" An interactive guide to New
Orleans' coolest new homes:
http://www.theatlantic.com/slideshows/neworleans/

A sturdy bike is a good way to get around the Lower
Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The roads are still pretty
rough, the distances between places tend to be too long
to walk and too short to drive, and on a bike you can
easily stop and chat with the residents who have
returned. I moved to New Orleans about a year after
Hurricane Katrina, and I've ridden my bike out here
every month or two to see how the rebuilding has been
faring. Also, I've heard that Brad Pitt likes to bike
around when he's in town. Folks tell me he's a pretty
regular guy. "Brad was here yesterday," a woman sitting
on the front steps of her new and very modern house
told me one day last fall. "He was talking to everyone,
just checking things out."

He has a lot to check out, as it happens. Next to the
levee along the Mississippi River sits the experimental
"project house" of Global Green, a nonprofit Pitt has
been working with that's trying to replace homes lost
in the flood with energy-efficient ones. From there, it
takes about 10 minutes to bike to the northern edge of
the Ninth Ward, where the Industrial Canal flood wall
collapsed in August 2005. Along the way you pass
shotgun houses in various stages of repair and
disrepair; Fats Domino's home, from which he was
rescued; and a large sculpture of empty chairs
commemorating the hundreds who died in the storm. As
you get closer to the failed flood wall, the land
becomes more open and rural-looking, and the blackbirds
grow louder. Only concrete steps standing in front of
concrete slabs suggest the community that existed
before the rushing waters erased it.

And then, suddenly, amid heroically overgrown lawns,
you see a cluster of modern, colorful, and modestly
sized homes, looking like a farm where they grow houses
for Dwell magazine. These are the fruits to date of
Pitt's other project, Make It Right New Orleans. New
Orleanians refer to these homes collectively as "the
Brad Pitt Houses," which gives them the pleasing ring
of an ambitious public-housing project from the
post-World War II years. But Pitt's ambitions are not
merely utilitarian. He hopes to offer displaced
residents affordable, cutting-edge, radically green
homes designed by name-brand architects like Thom Mayne
and Frank Gehry. And he seems to be succeeding.

Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans
is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with
the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize:
Brad Pitt is the city's most innovative and ambitious
housing developer.) But it's hard to say what people
were expecting, given the magnitude of the disaster and
the hopes raised in the weeks immediately following.
Seventeen days after the storm, President George W.
Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised: "We will
stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their
communities and their lives."

The terms we, as long as it takes, and help turned out
to be fairly elastic. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about
six months later, after a squabble with the city over
who would pay for the planning process. Since then,
depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels
has been passive and slow-moving at best, or
belligerent and actively harmful at worst. Mayor Ray
Nagin occasionally surfaces to advertise a big new
scheme (a jazz park, a theater district), about which
no one ever hears again. A new 20-year master plan and
comprehensive zoning ordinance was being ironed out
early this summer, but it remains subject to city-
council approval. A post-Katrina master plan has been
under discussion since before the floodwaters were
pumped out.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the
rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent
neighborhood projects. And this has turned New
Orleans-moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems
to allow almost anything to propagate-into something of
a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An
assortment of foundations, church groups, academics,
corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people
with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been
working independently to rebuild the city's
neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing
master plan. It's at once exhilarating and frightening
to behold.

"If you look at the way ants behave when they're
gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most
irrational thing you've ever seen-they're zigzagging
all over the place, they're bumping into other ants.
You think, `What a mess! This is never going to amount
to anything,'" says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the
Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and
sustainability and has worked with neighborhood
organizations here. "So it's easy to look at New
Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What's
going on here?' But if you step back and look at the
big picture, in fact it's the most efficient pattern
possible, because all those random activities actually
create a very efficient sort of discovery process."

This process is unfolding in a city where the effects
of environmental disregard-from disappearing wetlands
to rising temperatures to encroaching seas-seem more
palpable by the day, and where sustainability seems
less like an annoying buzzword and more like a moral
imperative. Add to this the sudden collapse of the
credit and real-estate markets last year, and the
fleeting yet unnerving flirtation with $5-a-gallon
gasoline the year before, and one could be forgiven for
seeing a cosmic convergence taking shape.

The architectural historian James Marston Fitch wrote
more than a half century ago that great leaps forward
in architecture occur when three factors-theory,
material, and technique-come into alignment under the
pressure of social change. Such "golden moments of
equilibrium," as he called them, are "brief in time,
special in character, delicate in balance." He noted
that such moments produced the Crystal Palace, the
Brooklyn Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower.

We may be in one of those moments now, with notions of
modern design, advances in green materials, and the
technical imperatives of sustainability all converging
toward a great leap in urban architecture. The
architecture writer Andrew Blum has asked whether the
Brad Pitt Houses could "become for the single-family
green house what Seaside was for New Urbanism or
Pacific Palisades was for California Modernism"-that
is, a project that recasts the possible for the next
generation of architects and developers. As seems
fitting for such a moment, most of the construction
projects under way in New Orleans are informed by
seemingly conflicting strands of utopianism. But their
designers are coming to some common, and edifying,
conclusions.

This summer, I visited five of the new houses. I sat on
their porches-New Orleans's original green technology,
offering shade in summer and shelter during deluges,
connecting the home with the street-and I considered a
city in flux.

409 Andry Street

The front porch of the Global Green project house has
an agreeable geometric purity-it's supported by two
chopstick-thin columns angled outward on one side, and
a shading screen of horizontal wood slats on the other.
The porch roof slices at a slight downward angle into a
narrow, two-story, pea-green shoebox, which looks as if
its solar-paneled lid is being lifted by an unseen
hand. Save for two nearly identical houses under
construction next door, it resembles nothing else in
the neighborhood, which consists of older shotguns and
ranch houses.

Mike Lopez was sitting on the porch when I stopped by.
He's the construction manager for Global Green, and
he's been living in the house since it was completed
more than a year ago. Today, it's mostly used as an
eco-housing laboratory and visitor center, but
eventually a displaced Lower Ninth Ward resident will
move in. Until then, Lopez is figuring out what works
and what doesn't. (Humidity-triggered bathroom fans,
good; a grass roof in subtropical sun, not so good.)
This knowledge has already come in handy for the houses
next door, and will also inform some of the design when
the group breaks ground on an 18-unit green apartment
building later this year.

Shortly after Katrina, Matt Petersen, Global Green's
president and CEO, met Pitt at a Clinton Global
Initiative meeting in New York City. They got to
talking about New Orleans. Pitt, as readers of
celebrity profiles know, is nutty for architecture. He
has tinkered with models in Frank Gehry's studio,
bought and restored Craftsman-style bungalows in
Southern California, co-authored a book on a historic
home, and been asked to help design an eco-hotel in
Dubai. Regarding architecture, Pitt once told Oprah,
"I'm really gay about the whole thing." When he filmed
Interview With the Vampire in New Orleans years ago, he
developed an abiding fondness for the place. Peterson
and Pitt came up with an idea to stage an architectural
competition for a model green house. Pitt put up some
money and agreed to serve as the jury chairman, and
Global Green acquired a 1.2-acre tract in the Holy
Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. The
competition attracted 125 entries from around the
world. A young architectural team from New York called
Workshop/apd won, and Global Green set about building
its design.

The resulting house is a fine example of what you might
call the Better Living Through Modern Green Design
strain of utopianism, whose adherents argue that
contemporary design and technology will conspire to
free us from our grim, polluted past and usher in an
era of efficiency and cleanliness. And I have to say,
it's an appealing future. Several days a week, the
Global Green house opens for tours, and it's hard not
to marvel at all the applied ingenuity, from the dual-
flush toilets-number one gets a spritz, number two more
hydraulic vigor-to the "green screen" of Carolina
jasmine being trained to shade the south wall, to the
thousand-gallon cistern intended to supply captured
rainwater for toilet-flushing and plant care . The
house is designed to be "net zero" energy-wise-that is,
it produces as much electricity as it consumes each
year. The utility closets are filled with the synapses
that control the house's hi-tech appendages, and
downstairs near the door is a touch-screen panel-the
"Lucid Building Dashboard"-that monitors its brain
waves like an EKG. It seemed to me every bit as
marvelous as Disney's old House of the Future, but with
reclaimed wood rather than white plastic.

1631 Tennessee Street

Rosemary and Lloyd Griffin's front porch is low and
broad, wrapping around two sides of their house and
giving it a contemporary Creole-Caribbean feel. Their
roof, a shiny steel pyramid lined with solar panels,
looks slightly askew, like the Tin Man's hat. Rental
cars roll slowly down the street, car windows descend,
cameras emerge. A sign reading Private Residence has
been hammered into the front lawn to keep the curious
at bay-visitors occasionally mistake the house for a
pavilion at some sort of world's fair and walk right
in. Mrs. Griffin tells me she doesn't mind all the
gawkers and the picture-taking. "I thank God for this,"
she said, nodding at her new house. "This is something
to be excited about."

The Global Green project, it turned out, was just the
beginning for Pitt. After Katrina he moved his family
to New Orleans to film The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button (and bought an 1830s mansion in the French
Quarter). He saw the slow progress of the city's
rebuilding firsthand and, looking to do more, picked up
the phone.

"I got a call one day out of the blue from Brad Pitt,"
says architect Bill McDonough. McDonough is the co-
author, with the chemist Michael Braungart, of Cradle
to Cradle, an influential manifesto calling for
manufactured products and building materials that can
be fully reused when they no longer serve their initial
purpose. Pitt liked his thinking. "He'd read Cradle to
Cradle and asked me if I wanted to do something
together in New Orleans."

McDonough said yes. So did others who got the call,
including Graft, an architecture firm based in Los
Angeles, and Cherokee Gives Back, a North
Carolina-based foundation. Together, they established
Make It Right, with the goal of constructing 150 new
houses in the hard-hit area near the ruptured
Industrial Canal flood wall-enough housing to feel like
a neighborhood, they figured, as well as to entice
additional investment along nearby streets. Pitt put up
$5million, as did the philanthropist and movie producer
Steve Bing. They've since raised enough to build about
a hundred houses. Pitt contacted a group of noted
architectural firms and asked them to contribute
designs. Thirteen did, including Kieran Timberlake,
Pugh + Scarpa, Adjaye Associates, MVRDV, and Morphosis.
(Seven more firms have since signed on.)

The architects were given conditions hammered out in
part during community meetings, some of which Pitt
attended, where displaced residents described their
vision of a new neighborhood. Among the criteria that
emerged: use the city's existing narrow lots (that is,
no aggregating lots and building large complexes-rumors
had circulated after Katrina that Donald Trump wanted
to buy the whole Lower Ninth); elevate houses out of
the way of future flooding and include rooftop access
to simplify rescue; feature prominent porches or front
stoops for socializing; and use materials that are
tough enough to survive hurricanes but that also
approach "cradle to cradle" reusability. The standard
house was to be 1,200 square feet, have three bedrooms
and two baths, and cost no more than $150,000.
Homeowners would pay what they could, and the
foundation would help with the rest. In the meantime,
Make It Right started working with Lower Ninth families
to clear up property-title issues (historically, many
New Orleanians have acquired houses without paperwork
showing a clean line of ownership), and to help with
insurance settlements, payments from the federally
funded Road Home program, and new financing.

The firms presented their preliminary designs for
feedback. The people of the Lower Ninth voiced some
displeasure-in particular, they didn't care for the
flat roofs favored by modern designers. "A lot of
residents said they looked like FEMA trailers," said
Steven Bingler, the founder of Concordia, a New Orleans
architecture-and-planning firm, which designed the
house selected by the Griffins. "Don't get me
wrong-they were really hip. But the residents said: `A
house has a sloped roof.'"

As the process unfolded-with designers bouncing their
ideas off the people who would actually have to live in
their creations-Bingler sensed a welcome shift in his
style-obsessed profession. "Community has to be the new
titanium," he said.

Two houses drew extra attention. Thom Mayne's house was
designed to float out of harm's way in a flood.
(Mayne's prototype was built by architecture students
at UCLA, then trucked to New Orleans and reassembled.)
And the Dutch firm MVRDV proposed a high-concept V-
shaped house that looked not unlike the houses that had
collapsed after Katrina. It's the only design not yet
selected by a homebuyer.

Green high-design utopianism is virulent at Make It
Right, as at Global Green, and all the houses feature
sophisticated systems to achieve net-zero energy use.
At an open house last year, a Make It Right organizer
insisted that I go down and watch the electric meter
running backward as solar energy coursed back into the
grid. I stood around with a few others, murmuring
appreciatively, as if witnessing a high-tech voodoo
ceremony.

New residents undergo training on the operation of
their homes, and receive a thick technical notebook and
a smaller user's manual. They also get a dedicated
phone number to call with problems; at the other end, a
staffer will troubleshoot or send out a technician. I
suggested to Tom Darden, the project's executive
director, that this didn't seem to have much in the way
of real-world application. But he shrugged and said it
was part of the plan. Make It Right's mission includes
testing new approaches and discarding those that fail,
a luxury few for-profit developers can afford.

Biking through the neighborhood recently, I was
heartened to hear all the hammering and sawing along
Tennessee Street-the raspy calls of blackbirds in the
overgrown lots of the Lower Ninth are woeful and
melancholy. With nearly 20 Make It Right houses
occupied or under construction, a certain critical mass
was forming. But I had to wonder: Why the need to
cluster so many boisterous structures side by side? Any
one of these homes would make for a striking
neighborhood landmark, but together they just make
noise, like an orchestra of timpani. But I suppose it's
churlish to raise aesthetic concerns. Brad Pitt for
Mayor T-shirts are not uncommon around town. And people
marvel at what Pitt has accomplished where so many
others have failed, even if they admit, in a footnote,
that the houses aren't their style.

"What we call historic design arose out of necessity,"
said Darden, "and that's happening again."

3428 Dauphine Street

Not everybody is so circumspect. "Oh, it's all
bullshit," Andres Duany said to me last fall, when I
brought up Make It Right. "The high design? That has
nothing to do with reality. That's just architectural
self-indulgence."

Duany, it may come as no surprise, subscribes to
another utopian worldview. He is a co-founder of the
Congress for New Urbanism, and a persistent advocate
for traditional small-town design. A generation ago,
Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designed
the landmark village at Seaside, Florida, and made a
seemingly historic beach town suddenly materialize on
an empty stretch of seacoast. (It was the setting for
the movie The Truman Show.) He built his reputation in
part on his porches; at Seaside, all houses were
required to have them, to encourage community
interaction.

The porch at 3428 Dauphine Street-in the historic
Bywater neighborhood, just across the Industrial Canal
from the Lower Ninth-is not very Duany-esque. It's more
like a small deck, accessible only from the living room
and enclosed by a tall wood-plank fence. This is a bit
odd, since Duany designed it, but in a historically
blue-collar neighborhood of stoops rather than porches,
it makes contextual sense.

Duany has been involved with the rebuilding since just
days after Katrina, most recently as part of Cypress
Cottage Partners, a group that was awarded $74.5million
by the state to come up with alternatives to the much-
loathed FEMA trailer. The idea was to build prototype
villages in communities along the Gulf Coast and see
how they work. But the search for sufficiently large
building lots has been fraught with headaches, so in
the meantime Duany went ahead and built the Bywater
houses on an empty corner lot with the help of an
investor, in part to learn about how to build quickly
and efficiently in New Orleans.

What resulted was a pair of duplexes, variations of
what are locally called shotgun doubles. The houses,
painted champagne yellow and olive khaki, have gables
facing the street and, across the facade, an overhang
that shields doors and windows against rain and sun.
Duany's overhangs, compared with the ones on older
houses in the neighborhood, are placed a bit too high,
like someone wearing pants cinched near his chest. But
they add a touch of grace to the streetscape, and
without them the houses would look as if they were
wearing no pants at all.

These homes illuminate the Your Elders Knew Best strain
of utopianism, whose adherents argue that historic
neighborhoods are sacred texts from which one can
learn, provided the language in which they were written
is accurately translated. The future and its fancy
technology distract from what's really important:
building human-scale environments with houses that
quietly add to the conversation of the street, rather
than yodeling and preening. Duany has largely succeeded
in weaving his new homes into the block. One can bike
past without noticing them, as I first did. As he
explained in a neighborhood-association newsletter, "It
is our hope that at least some parts of New Orleans can
be rebuilt in the style to which its residents are
accustomed-and not as a version of an Alabama trailer
park or a suburb of Venice Beach, California."

Duany is sometimes (and unfairly) likened to a monk
laboriously transcribing the texts of the ancients
without contributing new ideas for a new time. But
style wasn't what irked him when I brought up the Make
It Right project. It was the whole way New Orleans was
approaching rebuilding.

"When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was
conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely
ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a
great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal
of poverty," said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. "And when
I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things.
Then one day I was walking down the street and I had
this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba.
Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New
Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean
city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-
governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated
city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the
Geneva of the Caribbean."

Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New
Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of
people living in them today, and few of them meet
building codes. But no one worries about paying
mortgages or insurance. "The situation is that the
housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people
to accumulate leisure," he said. "What's special about
New Orleans is that it's the only place in the United
States where you can have a first-rate urban life for
very little money." What happened after Katrina, Duany
said, was that FEMA and others came to town with
detailed requirements for record-keeping and property
titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that
would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might
seem like common sense, he said, but it's "essentially
unworkable for a Caribbean city."

So the central problem, according to Duany: "All the
do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are
the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for
the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who
are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in
debt," he said. "They have such a profound
misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that
they're destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that
New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean
standards. It's being measured by Minnesota standards."

As an alternative, Duany argues for "opt-out zones" for
some of the hardest-hit areas, including the Lower
Ninth. Within these zones, residents could rebuild
their homes the way the city was originally
constructed: by hand, incrementally, and unencumbered
by what Duany calls "gold-plated" building regulations
or bank requirements. Such zones exist in rural areas,
he says, but haven't been tested in an urban context.
He suggested that the money spent on the Better Living
Through Modern Green Design homes would be far better
spent on a widespread, low-cost self-building program.
"The deal is, you can hammer something together any old
way, but you won't have debt. That should be an option.
Carrying debt requires a great deal of employment,
which undermines a culture of leisure. The key is self-
building," he told me, and added that it might arise
somewhere else in the city, perhaps among the Latino
construction workers who arrived on the heels of the
storm. "It always emerges."

3105 Law Street

From his front porch, Mingko Aba can look across the
street to the house where he was born 59 years ago.
Actually, he's looking slightly downward at it, because
his new house is built about five feet up, on piers. He
also has a pretty good vantage point for seeing the
progress in his Upper Ninth Ward neighborhood, which
flooded but was spared the tsunami that swept homes off
their foundations across the canal in the Lower Ninth
after the levee broke.

Aba rode out Katrina at home, clambering up to his roof
when the water reached his ceiling. The next day, a
neighbor came with a boat that had drifted by, and the
pair helped ferry other stranded people to the top
floor of a church, and then went looking for groceries.
They picked pink grapefruit and blood oranges from the
upper branches of Aba's citrus trees, and at a flooded
corner store, they discovered that packaged food has an
unadvertised advantage: it's airtight and bobs to the
surface.

After spending three years in Alabama, Aba came back
for his brother's funeral and decided it was time to
rebuild. On a neighbor's suggestion, he contacted Build
Now, a nonprofit founded in 2007 that helps homeowners
navigate the whole process, from arranging to demolish
your old house, to finding financing for the new one,
to the actual construction.

Aba's new home, which he moved into earlier this year,
is just 14 feet wide, but it has a restrained grandeur,
like a miniature Greek temple on a mount. On the
outside, with its rectangular columns and tall
triangular pediment, it's all but indistinguishable
from the Greek Revival shotgun houses found on narrow
lots throughout the city's older neighborhoods.

The historic design is not by accident. William
Monaghan, the architect and developer who founded Build
Now, is another representative of the utopianism that
sees salvation in the architectural grammar of a
historic city. "There's a place for everything, and
it's great that people are doing all kinds of design,
but I wanted to fit in with the neighborhood
character," he said. "I didn't want to try to get
somebody to move back to New Orleans and make all those
decisions and sink all that money into something, and
then say, `Oh yes, and you also have to be challenged
by unfamiliar architecture.'"

Monaghan, who grew up in New Orleans and is now based
in New York, had been appalled at the city's anemic
rebuilding efforts during his visits home after
Katrina. So he founded a nonprofit with the slogan
"Build new. Build high. Build now." The idea was to
provide one-stop shopping for traditional, reasonably
priced homes for the displaced. Complete houses,
including appliances, begin at about $100,000, without
land or foundation work.

Monaghan set out to create eight prototype homes based
on classic New Orleans styles. "Having lived there so
long, I thought I knew everything," he said. "I'm an
architect, I've done a lot of historic preservation
work. I thought I'd just design some houses that look
like New Orleans houses."

That proved trickier than he'd thought. He explored the
city with tape measure in hand, conducting a sort of
architectural phrenology to figure out the proportions
and details that make New Orleans houses so New
Orleans-the depths of the porches, the sizes of the
pediments, the angles of the hip roofs, the ratios of
height to width. It turned out that while these
measurements tended to be quirky and irregular, they
made a lot of sense for the culture and climate of New
Orleans. For instance, almost every old house has tall
ceilings that allow residents to live below the worst
of the summer heat. Single shotgun cottages lack
hallways, allowing for efficient cross-ventilation in
every room. And many center-hall cottages use transoms
to make the walls porous and keep the air moving. "You
sort of take this stuff for granted," Monaghan said,
"but it's a tremendous environmental response."

Monaghan built a model house and started staging
community events, like crawfish boils, to get the word
out. People found him; they've contracted for 16 homes
to date, and Monaghan has since designed six new models
based on requests from buyers.

The great appeal of Build Now is its utter simplicity.
Recreating a home from the past seems a needed balm for
this wounded city. Where Duany seems to want to harness
his projects to a broader crusade, Monaghan's mission
is more straightforward: build houses that New
Orleanians have shown, through a process of
architectural natural selection spanning more than a
century, that they love.

"What we're learning is that these traditions are not
just fashions," said Michael Mehaffy of Sustasis.
"They're rooted in the real adaptive evolution of a
place."

2036 Seventh Street

URBANbuild Prototype 04 in New Orleans's Central City
neighborhood was completed last spring. You might pass
Duany's or Monaghan's homes without noticing them. Not
this one. It's a gleaming white box sitting flush
against two streets on a corner lot, hung with large
sliding panels of polycarbonate plastic. It looks like
the package in which one of the Victorian shotguns
nearby was delivered, and the sheer incongruity of the
thing made me laugh when I first saw it. But loitering
on the back porch-basically a deep rectangular cut
taken out of one corner of the box-I found it
impossible not to feel part of the neighborhood,
perhaps more so than at any of the other new houses I'd
visited.

This is one of four homes developed since Katrina by
the URBANbuild studio at the Tulane School of
Architecture. (The third house was featured in a
reality-TV series on the Sundance Channel last year.)
Some 25 students worked to design and build it;
electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and drywall work were
contracted out. Standing on a crime-racked block of the
city, it has the feel of guerrilla architecture, built
in defiance of its surroundings.

The students started with the concept of sliding
plastic panels, which, in theory, will withstand the
pummeling of a hurricane. They then took some of the
common architectural vocabulary of New
Orleans-shutters, porch, front stoop-and distilled them
to their essential elements, adding exaggerations of
scale and splashes of color (the segments of the box
cut away for the stoop and porches are painted lime
green). Even so, the house is practical, like a cabinet
from Ikea-when not locked into position for hurricanes,
the panels can be moved around for privacy, or to shade
the porches from sun.

"We're trying to get the students to be inventive,
creating ideas that maybe other people can mimic," says
Byron Mouton, the Tulane professor who directs the
studio. All of the houses are aggressively contemporary
in style. Reaction has been divided among residents: in
general, the older generation hates them, and younger
folks think they're fly.

Scott Bernhard, director of the Tulane City Center,
which has worked with URBANbuild and other community
projects at Tulane, defended the style. "To me, it's
respectful of the old buildings to be attentive to
scale or urban pattern, but it's not respectful of
those old buildings to imitate," he said. "In some
ways, imitation and mockery are too close together. To
us, having a gabled roof at the front of the building
is far less important than engaging the street."

Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building
held at the New Orleans convention center, the
architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd
of contractors and architects to think about a basic
point. "The very core of sustainability," he said, "can
be found in a simple question: `Can it be loved?'"

All those solar panels from the first eco-boom in the
1970s, and those clunky, angular houses they sat atop?
Most are demolished and gone. "The carbon footprint of
a building is meaningless once its parts are carted off
to a landfill in a generation or two," Mouzon told the
crowd. The rebuilding of New Orleans by the people who
love it, he suggested, may provide the most lasting
green lesson of all.

New Orleans remains a traumatized city: 65,000 homes
still sit unoccupied, the population is still down by
about a quarter, rents are up by 40 percent, and
violent crime is endemic. But the strong and enduring
interest in rebuilding here-and the steady trickle of
residents moving back, along with the unabated flow of
volunteers coming to help out-shows that it is a place
people care deeply about. That fact should not be
overlooked.

Consider that Habitat for Humanity has nearly completed
its high-profile Musicians' Village in the Upper Ninth
Ward, including a cluster of 72 attractive, small,
traditional-style homes conceived by the New Orleans
natives Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. And
that another New Orleanian, the actor Wendell Pierce,
has established a nonprofit with plans to build
hundreds of environmentally friendly homes in badly
flooded Pontchartrain Park, where he grew up. In nearby
Gentilly, Project Home Again, founded by Barnes& Noble
Chairman Leonard Riggio, has put up $20million to build
elevated bungalows for former residents, and the
Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana has funded the
construction of 21 low-cost modern shotguns in Central
City.

Meanwhile, the city's 270 or so neighborhood
associations, once little more than social clubs
dabbling in the occasional crime-watch program, have
become increasingly sophisticated in the language of
rebuilding and partnering with outside experts-whether
from charities, the business world, or even Hollywood.
This isn't exactly the bottom-up self-building that
Andres Duany envisions. But neither is it Robert
Moses-style planning from on high. A community-driven,
middle-out planning style has emerged, and the kind of
housing it seems to favor fuses smart modern design
with the city's traditional notions of space, leisure,
and community. As with jazz, gumbo, and some remarkable
cocktails, this style illustrates the city's talent for
crafting extraordinary things from the ordinary stuff
it has at hand.

New Orleans can offer plenty of lessons in green
living-and it could have before the storm, had anyone
asked. How to build beautiful small houses on narrow
lots. How to build compact, walkable neighborhoods. How
to adapt buildings to the environment, with deep
porches and high ceilings and small, leafy yards. These
are the things that people loved about New Orleans-and
they're the things that architects interested in
sustainable design most want to build right now. The
past here has much to inform the future, not just for
New Orleans, but for an entire country that needs to
rethink the way it designs its cities and homes. New
Orleans won't be rushed-it never is-but the chances are
good that whatever results here will be loved.

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