Which design will residents like?
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Over at Walkable DFW, there’re two collections of photographs of new detached dwellings recently constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans. One group shows dwellings designed or inspired by new urbanists and the other dwellings designed by architecture enthusiast Brad Pitt’s Make It Right program. One’s architecturally innovative and one’s traditional and cutesy pie. One has the potential to be embraced with affection by residents and the other perhaps not.
I know which type I think the residents of New Orleans would prefer. Is it asking too much to expect the look and feel of housing to be about what the residents like rather than what the designers like? Would having a sense of place and history be too much to ask? It’s fair to say though that not all of Make It Right’s designs look like this one, but many do.
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Second-guessing your audience is fatal. I’d want to see what each offered internally. Were I a maintenance-minded resident, I’d be looking at all that traditional detailing and thinking – painting every ten years. Nice if you’re middle class and can afford to employ someone, or have the energy to do it yourself.
Its easy to second guess because traditional-style houses are very common in the US from what I see on real estate websites, tv, etc. Amazing compared to here actually, new house builds are invariably a traditional style of one sort of another, even new town houses have a trad look. Makes our suburban offerings look radically modern ! (though not as radical as Mr Pitt’s ones)
Oh, and on which roof would you rather wait for a helicopter?
I favour number 10 in the first photo I dont like 2nd photo for on older streets with a bit of character. These old streets need to have conversation orders placed on them as is done in several LGAs. If that old street has enough renovated older homes, with federation double and triple colour schemes who needs Toorak 6 packs or two story Mac Manshions.
Not nearly enough information to make informative comment. Even on the linked sites. Cost of the different types would be an important factor. It is also not entirely clear to me if they are comparing the same thing, eg. are the Katrina Cottages in the Lower Ninth Ward? All of the MakeItRight ones are and there are 73 of them as the makeitrightnola.org site with positions and photos of each on the interactive Google Map.
At first I suspected that the MakeItRight houses might have been factory fabricated and hauled in on a truck. But apparently not since the site shows them at various stages of construction and they are built in pretty much standard fashion on site.
One thing seems clear about the MIR houses is that they are sitting on concrete stumps (actually poured in situ, which seems an expensive way to do it) and seems primarily designed so that the main living floor(s) are above flood level. If you look at several of those cutesy New Urbanist houses, it seems unlikely they are flood proof (again not enough info about location etc; I have a suspicion the New Urbanist houses are in the ‘Desire’ and ‘Florida’ Development which is the district on the western side of the canal/border to the Ninth, and on slightly higher ground and behind better levees. And thus more expensive district.).
When you see the style of construction employed they really NEED to be above flood level, even more so than the old houses they replaced. Because they are all built with modern industrial materials, eg. engineered-timber I-beam joists, and particle-board walls etc. None of this stuff survives water immersion as shown in the 2011 Brisbane floods: the houses don’t fall down and ostensibly recover however the I-beams lose 50% of their strength and the house becomes uninsurable and technically not fit for habitation! (Note the difference with 1974 floods which I lived through, and almost 100% of houses were intact, if needing work. Real timber survives floods.)
At any rate I trust readers realize that this is the Lower Ninth Ward, and “lower” may be intended to mean “further downstream” but it also could mean lower topography. This area was probably never originally sanctioned for housing because of its lower level and probably originally swampy/marais nature–note it has a canal thru it leading to the Main Outfall Canal (which forms the northern border of the L Ninth Ward), which looks like it might be a Sewage Treatment works. (It is, I just Googled it.)
All the fancy French stuff we see in movies–including in Pitt’s Interview with the Vampire–are in the Garden & French Quarters way upstream and beyond flooding.
I have read a little more about Brad Pitt’s Make It Right (MIR) foundation. It has the goal of building 150 low-cost and green houses in the Lower Ninth Ward. Pitt vowed to make some contribution when he toured the still-devastated area several years after Katrina. He used his own star power to attract starchitects (eg. he is personal friends with several including Gehry) to design for free some green houses for the project. He also attracted some prominent rich people to donate, eg. Steve Bing (father of Liz Hurley’s child) gave $5M.
The houses are not donated but … well, read the conditions:
That last bit (my bold) is reminiscent of French rules applied to home mortgages; we in the Anglo world tend to get all huffy about “nanny state” regulation but they are designed for sustainability (re finances and housing markets).
In fact the New Urbanist “Katrina Cottages” had a similar origin but slightly different objective: to serve the same function (but better visually & greener) to replace the FEMA trailer-homes that were rolled out to solve some of the Katrina homeless. Most of them are prefabricated and brought in on trucks, and most are not intended as permanent though everyone knows that many of these things end up being semi-permanent so this was an attempt to improve over the depressing FEMA efforts.
Incidentally it is not clear if those pictures of K Cottages are in New Orleans at all. Although much of the material is frustratingly vague, a lot of the pictorial material seems to be of showcase small communities such as Buena Vista, Colorado and Ocean Springs, Mississippi (this latter looks an awful lot like those pics). Katrina Cottages have become popular all over where inexpensive housing is needed (and where trailer homes are often the choice). The New Urbanist connection is of course that it was initiated by Andres Duany who with his wife (Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) designed that cutesy town of Seaside on the Florida panhandle coast (which was used for the Truman Show movie), and in so doing defined the New Urbanist agenda. Somehow I doubt there are any Katrina Cottages in Seaside because one of its criticisms is that it is really a little privileged community for the rich.
michael r james @ #5 & #6
That’s right – the houses at Seaside are much bigger
I’ve been browsing my book on Seaside (by David Mohney; I am a bit shocked to see it was published 1991). They may have small lot sizes but some houses are a bit ridiculous in going to 4 stories, and some still with those widows walks on top, and timber houses. Nevertheless I think one really needs to see the town –and walk it — to properly appreciate/critique it. It’s true that the cutesy nature of the houses is not really the main point but of course tends to dominate any visual analysis. The main design philosophy was to escape the zoning laws that came in after WW2 that made everything totally subservient to the car. Including the ugliness of those double door garages in front–the ultimate/endpoint being the so-called “snout house” of macmansions built on narrow lots. (There is plenty of car parking in Seaside just no garages allowed.)
And the plan on the page, while having some interest, still has an awful lot of roads and still has the main coastal highway cutting it off from the ocean front which no one seems to mention.
Kurt Andersen (the book’s co-editor) writes:
Oops, I forgot to mention that I found Andersen’s use of bread as a metaphor was a bit odd considering how America forgot about real bread since Wonder bread was developed in the 20s; whatever industrial gunk it is, it barely deserves the name bread. Outside of the major east and west coast cities, most Americans still eat this stuff and have yet to rediscover real bread. The soft pasty buns of the burger chains is a variant (with added sugar!)
So it goes with urban design. And of course Australia is little better.
AD, do you know there is a Town of Seaside on the Sunshine Coast; but it is just a few streets/small development to the north of Marcoola before Coolum. And somehow I doubt they banned garages!
Michael: Thanks, I had no idea. It’s more interesting than most of the housing estates I recall on the Sunshine Coast. Looks like they’ve sought to put the garages on the side of the houses rather than have them face the street. AD
Here’s another tip, in today’s AFR (reading at a Cafe, I’m too mean to subscribe either online or print, and there’s why newspapers are going down the gurgler; on the other hand I have never been paid a dime from the dozens of articles in Crikey or Age/NT so I also subsidize multimillionaires like Eric Beecher! In response to an offer from J. Green once, I once made up a design for a T-shirt that said “I wrote all this stuff for Crikey and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” with the attractive Crikey logo on the rear. Jonathan Green promised me my T-shirt but I never even got that! Too close to the bone?)
This is free access at AFR: (Mares wrote that housing report for Grattan Institute.)
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