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I found this an interesting read, though I do consider myself an amateur architecture geek. Chicago Tribune Architecture Critic, Blair Kamin, wrote an interesting article on rebuilding New Orleans. Though I think his damage assessment of some areas are a bit sugar-coated, his premise is right on. (Remember, this comes from a newspaper in a city that was decimated by fire in 1871, so in Chicago, we know a little about rebuilding. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] )
<font size=4>Why New Orleans must be rebuilt</font>
Cities are collective works of art, and this is one of America's masterpieces. How it should rise from the floodwaters is a tougher decision.
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published September 14, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Four words describe the New Orleans that has been socked by Hurricane Katrina: disaster, yes; apocalypse, no.
The horizontal tableau of entire neighborhoods swamped beneath stinking, sewage-infested waters is as stunning as the vertical drama of the collapsing twin towers in New York. Big cities are symbols of human achievement. We do not expect them to be humbled by nature and evacuated anymore than we expected terrorists to fly jets into skyscrapers.
But the relentless focus of the media eye on New Orleans' sunken areas and the unprecedented dispersal of its residents obscure the bigger picture: The real issue is not whether to rebuild the Big Easy, but how.
Cities are collective works of art, and New Orleans is one of America's masterpieces -- a delectable multicultural gumbo whose value is only more pronounced in a nation where the same stores, banks and malls make every place feel like every other place.
For that reason alone, the much-hyped "should we rebuild New Orleans?" debate is preposterous. Of course we should save New Orleans. To abandon it would be like Italy abandoning Venice. Besides, anybody who sets foot in this town knows that the best parts of New Orleans don't need to be rebuilt. They're still there.
You could hold a Mardi Gras parade tomorrow in the bone-dry French Quarter. The modern office towers and hotels of the central business district, graceless though they are, remain standing, poised to resume their role as hubs of commerce. Some of the city's extraordinary neighborhoods, such as the Garden District, with its white-columned antebellum mansions, came through the storm with little more than downed trees.
There is a difference, the surviving structures make clear, between mass evacuation and mass destruction. New Orleans is not a new Atlantis, at least not all of it. Its physical heart beats on. Its neighborhood architecture is as stylishly seductive as ever. It will continue to cast its intoxicating charm.
Yet the question of what to do with the worst-flooded areas of New Orleans is real, prompted in part by the remarks of House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who generated a brief controversy when he seemed to question whether they should be rebuilt.
Hastert quickly said his remarks had been twisted, a wise move.
You don't abandon cities if they are plagued with deadly infrastructure problems. You solve those problems, which is precisely what Chicago did in 1900 when it reversed the flow of the Chicago River. That prevented a recurrence of the typhoid and cholera epidemics that resulted from the river spewing sewage into Lake Michigan, source of the city's drinking water.
It already is a cliche to say that the flood gives New Orleans a chance to turn disaster into opportunity and to build a truly 21st Century city. But the most progressive rebuilding plan of all may be based on a new interpretation of an old idea: Building with respect for nature rather than arrogantly dismissing it.
To venture into the abandoned city is to experience the guilty pleasure of enjoying its extraordinary collection of everyday buildings while the people who once lived and worked there are gone. It is a stage set without actors, shrouded in an eerie blanket of quiet that is interrupted only by the chop-chop of military helicopters, the roar of Humvees or the pitiful barking of abandoned dogs swimming through germ-filled waters.
At Pete Fountain's club in the French Quarter, there is no Dixieland clarinet music wafting out onto Bourbon Street. But the two-story red brick building and its lacy black-iron railings appear to be in good condition.The same is true throughout the Quarter, which is simply the most prominent example of New Orleans' polyglot architecture (the Quarter was laid out by the French, who founded New Orleans in 1718, but rebuilt by the Spanish, who took over in 1763 and put up all that fancy ironwork).
Elsewhere around the city, you find the simple, raised cottages built by the Creoles who came here from the Caribbean, brick rowhouses constructed by Easterners who came from Philadelphia and Baltimore, and Southern plantation houses that look like movie sets from "Gone With the Wind."
To walk the Quarter is to freshly appreciate how New Orleans prizes oldness in a way that Chicago values newness, and how its architecture is as sensual and playful as Chicago's is toughly, but beautifully, Calvinistic. Like San Francisco, New Orleans is not a city of great individual buildings, as Chicago is, but a place that derives its charm from harmonious groups of buildings -- le tout ensemble, as the French call it.
And the buildings are real; the city is no theme park.
These intoxicating visual pleasures can be found throughout New Orleans.Even the ubiquitous shotgun houses -- so-called because a shotgun blast through the front door would reach the back wall of the narrow house without interruption -- are painted in a rainbow of lively pastels and festooned with roof brackets and other gingerbread. In neighborhoods filled with these houses, such as the flooded but now partly dried out Bywater District northeast of the French Quarter, something delights the eye at every turn.
The city almost surely has a higher percentage of its neighborhoods honored by inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places than any other major city. Some of these historic districts clearly have fared better than others, with those on the relatively high ground near the Mississippi River typically enduring far less flood damage than those in the middle of the bowl-shaped city.
Take the Garden District, which begins southwest of downtown and is as distinctly American as the French Quarter is European. Here, in the 19th Century, hustling entrepreneurs built monuments to their success, with the mansions ranging in style from understated Greek Revival to over-the-top Victorian. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar runs through the district; like San Francisco's cable cars, it's a moving National Historic landmark.
Today, the Garden District looks beaten but unbowed. Katrina walloped some big trees, which are piled up in the boulevard where the streetcar runs, yet the buildings--houses, churches, synagogues and businesses -- appear to have suffered no major damage. Given the wealth of the owners, money for whatever repairs are necessary should be no problem. This gem of New Orleans should continue to shine.
But in other historic neighborhoods, such as Gentilly Terrace, home to early 20th Century craftsman bungalows and Colonial Revival homes, the picture is the one you've seen on TV: Homes remain trapped in a floodwater that reeks of sewage, with a slick of oil running atop the water's surface. It's hard to imagine them escaping a date with the bulldozer.
"Once they've been in water a few days, it's impossible to save a house," says Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, a citywide non-profit preservation advocacy group.
About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, so it would be easy to conclude that 80 percent of the city will have to be razed. But to recall the words of those eminent architecture critics in the musical "Porgy and Bess," it ain't necessarily so.
The floodwaters rose to different heights in different areas and some houses were far better equipped to defend themselves than others because their living areas were raised off-ground, anticipating the very disaster Katrina created.
In the post-World War II subdivision of Gentilly Woods, where the one-story tract homes on concrete slabs look like something out of northwest suburban Cook County, the floodwaters could just race right in. The houses had no chance of taking a punch from nature.
But in the Carrollton area near the Garden District, where homes were built the old-fashioned way, with raised living areas and crawl spaces beneath, the houses were able to ride above floodwaters that reached 3 to 4 feet high, judging by the water lines on some buildings.
The homes appear to be in good condition, even though the streets between them are a mess of downed trees.
The contrast between the prewar and postwar neighborhoods is revealing: Time went forward, but building practices went backward. Postwar builders of subdivisions such as Gentilly Woods undoubtedly advertised their homes as the latest in modern conveniences. But Katrina revealed just how primitive they really are.
How should New Orleans be rebuilt, then? And how can it avoid the pitfalls of the massive effort at ground zero, where the often-competing interests of politics, business, culture and survivor families have dramatically compromised Daniel Libeskind once-promising master plan?
At first glance, there is reason for optimism: rebuilding shotgun houses in New Orleans seems a far simpler task than designing new skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. There will likely be no conflict between memorializing the dead and going on with living. The city has plenty of room for both. They don't have to be crammed onto 16 acres, which is the fundamental problem at ground zero.
And yet, so much could go wrong.
Absentee landlords eager to collect flood insurance could bulldoze salvageable homes rather than restoring them. The city's business leaders could concentrate their efforts on flashy symbolic events, like holding a scaled-down Mardi Gras at the end of February or trying to woo one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions, rather than nuts-and-bolts matters such as building better neighborhoods and infrastructure. And the Bush administration could continue to fight the flow of federal money that would protect New Orleans through the restoration of Louisiana's eroded coastal wetlands.
That last one may be the most important.
After 9/11, the federal government did not prohibit the construction of skyscrapers; it safeguarded skyscrapers by correcting the more fundamental problem of lax security at airports. Now, it has a chance to do the same for New Orleans, helping to bring back the eroded coastal marshes and barrier islands that could have acted as shock absorbers against the jolt of a hurricane. Without such defenses -- and the construction of massive floodgates that would provide another line of defense against hurricane-spawned storm surges -- New Orleans will be defenseless and future damage will be inevitable.
But if the essential problem is one of civil engineering, there is still a role for urban policymakers and architects to play in shaping New Orleans' future.
The city can immediately change its building codes, requiring new homes to sit higher above the street than the ones they replaced. State and federal officials can pass tax credits that would encourage property owners to rehab instead of raze.
The traditional town planners known as the New Urbanists, who have been studying Southern vernacular architecture for years, could lend their skills to a pro bono effort that would determine how the city's neighborhoods could be quickly rebuilt with a thread of continuity that would weave the best of New Orleans' architectural past into its future.
The point is: New Orleans' housing stock is one of its singular strengths. Don't throw out the baby with the floodwater.
Looking at the side-by-side pictures of New Orleans -- extraordinary devastation paired with miraculous survival -- and considering the special place that New Orleans holds among America's cities, it is hard to take seriously the arguments of those who say that spending billions of federal dollars to rebuild the city would be throwing good money after bad.
To do so would be the ultimate anti-urban snub -- a loss for New Orleans, but, more important, a loss for the nation.
This is not the time to tell New Orleans to drop dead.
<font size=4>Why New Orleans must be rebuilt</font>
Cities are collective works of art, and this is one of America's masterpieces. How it should rise from the floodwaters is a tougher decision.
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published September 14, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Four words describe the New Orleans that has been socked by Hurricane Katrina: disaster, yes; apocalypse, no.
The horizontal tableau of entire neighborhoods swamped beneath stinking, sewage-infested waters is as stunning as the vertical drama of the collapsing twin towers in New York. Big cities are symbols of human achievement. We do not expect them to be humbled by nature and evacuated anymore than we expected terrorists to fly jets into skyscrapers.
But the relentless focus of the media eye on New Orleans' sunken areas and the unprecedented dispersal of its residents obscure the bigger picture: The real issue is not whether to rebuild the Big Easy, but how.
Cities are collective works of art, and New Orleans is one of America's masterpieces -- a delectable multicultural gumbo whose value is only more pronounced in a nation where the same stores, banks and malls make every place feel like every other place.
For that reason alone, the much-hyped "should we rebuild New Orleans?" debate is preposterous. Of course we should save New Orleans. To abandon it would be like Italy abandoning Venice. Besides, anybody who sets foot in this town knows that the best parts of New Orleans don't need to be rebuilt. They're still there.
You could hold a Mardi Gras parade tomorrow in the bone-dry French Quarter. The modern office towers and hotels of the central business district, graceless though they are, remain standing, poised to resume their role as hubs of commerce. Some of the city's extraordinary neighborhoods, such as the Garden District, with its white-columned antebellum mansions, came through the storm with little more than downed trees.
There is a difference, the surviving structures make clear, between mass evacuation and mass destruction. New Orleans is not a new Atlantis, at least not all of it. Its physical heart beats on. Its neighborhood architecture is as stylishly seductive as ever. It will continue to cast its intoxicating charm.
Yet the question of what to do with the worst-flooded areas of New Orleans is real, prompted in part by the remarks of House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who generated a brief controversy when he seemed to question whether they should be rebuilt.
Hastert quickly said his remarks had been twisted, a wise move.
You don't abandon cities if they are plagued with deadly infrastructure problems. You solve those problems, which is precisely what Chicago did in 1900 when it reversed the flow of the Chicago River. That prevented a recurrence of the typhoid and cholera epidemics that resulted from the river spewing sewage into Lake Michigan, source of the city's drinking water.
It already is a cliche to say that the flood gives New Orleans a chance to turn disaster into opportunity and to build a truly 21st Century city. But the most progressive rebuilding plan of all may be based on a new interpretation of an old idea: Building with respect for nature rather than arrogantly dismissing it.
To venture into the abandoned city is to experience the guilty pleasure of enjoying its extraordinary collection of everyday buildings while the people who once lived and worked there are gone. It is a stage set without actors, shrouded in an eerie blanket of quiet that is interrupted only by the chop-chop of military helicopters, the roar of Humvees or the pitiful barking of abandoned dogs swimming through germ-filled waters.
At Pete Fountain's club in the French Quarter, there is no Dixieland clarinet music wafting out onto Bourbon Street. But the two-story red brick building and its lacy black-iron railings appear to be in good condition.The same is true throughout the Quarter, which is simply the most prominent example of New Orleans' polyglot architecture (the Quarter was laid out by the French, who founded New Orleans in 1718, but rebuilt by the Spanish, who took over in 1763 and put up all that fancy ironwork).
Elsewhere around the city, you find the simple, raised cottages built by the Creoles who came here from the Caribbean, brick rowhouses constructed by Easterners who came from Philadelphia and Baltimore, and Southern plantation houses that look like movie sets from "Gone With the Wind."
To walk the Quarter is to freshly appreciate how New Orleans prizes oldness in a way that Chicago values newness, and how its architecture is as sensual and playful as Chicago's is toughly, but beautifully, Calvinistic. Like San Francisco, New Orleans is not a city of great individual buildings, as Chicago is, but a place that derives its charm from harmonious groups of buildings -- le tout ensemble, as the French call it.
And the buildings are real; the city is no theme park.
These intoxicating visual pleasures can be found throughout New Orleans.Even the ubiquitous shotgun houses -- so-called because a shotgun blast through the front door would reach the back wall of the narrow house without interruption -- are painted in a rainbow of lively pastels and festooned with roof brackets and other gingerbread. In neighborhoods filled with these houses, such as the flooded but now partly dried out Bywater District northeast of the French Quarter, something delights the eye at every turn.
The city almost surely has a higher percentage of its neighborhoods honored by inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places than any other major city. Some of these historic districts clearly have fared better than others, with those on the relatively high ground near the Mississippi River typically enduring far less flood damage than those in the middle of the bowl-shaped city.
Take the Garden District, which begins southwest of downtown and is as distinctly American as the French Quarter is European. Here, in the 19th Century, hustling entrepreneurs built monuments to their success, with the mansions ranging in style from understated Greek Revival to over-the-top Victorian. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar runs through the district; like San Francisco's cable cars, it's a moving National Historic landmark.
Today, the Garden District looks beaten but unbowed. Katrina walloped some big trees, which are piled up in the boulevard where the streetcar runs, yet the buildings--houses, churches, synagogues and businesses -- appear to have suffered no major damage. Given the wealth of the owners, money for whatever repairs are necessary should be no problem. This gem of New Orleans should continue to shine.
But in other historic neighborhoods, such as Gentilly Terrace, home to early 20th Century craftsman bungalows and Colonial Revival homes, the picture is the one you've seen on TV: Homes remain trapped in a floodwater that reeks of sewage, with a slick of oil running atop the water's surface. It's hard to imagine them escaping a date with the bulldozer.
"Once they've been in water a few days, it's impossible to save a house," says Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, a citywide non-profit preservation advocacy group.
About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, so it would be easy to conclude that 80 percent of the city will have to be razed. But to recall the words of those eminent architecture critics in the musical "Porgy and Bess," it ain't necessarily so.
The floodwaters rose to different heights in different areas and some houses were far better equipped to defend themselves than others because their living areas were raised off-ground, anticipating the very disaster Katrina created.
In the post-World War II subdivision of Gentilly Woods, where the one-story tract homes on concrete slabs look like something out of northwest suburban Cook County, the floodwaters could just race right in. The houses had no chance of taking a punch from nature.
But in the Carrollton area near the Garden District, where homes were built the old-fashioned way, with raised living areas and crawl spaces beneath, the houses were able to ride above floodwaters that reached 3 to 4 feet high, judging by the water lines on some buildings.
The homes appear to be in good condition, even though the streets between them are a mess of downed trees.
The contrast between the prewar and postwar neighborhoods is revealing: Time went forward, but building practices went backward. Postwar builders of subdivisions such as Gentilly Woods undoubtedly advertised their homes as the latest in modern conveniences. But Katrina revealed just how primitive they really are.
How should New Orleans be rebuilt, then? And how can it avoid the pitfalls of the massive effort at ground zero, where the often-competing interests of politics, business, culture and survivor families have dramatically compromised Daniel Libeskind once-promising master plan?
At first glance, there is reason for optimism: rebuilding shotgun houses in New Orleans seems a far simpler task than designing new skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. There will likely be no conflict between memorializing the dead and going on with living. The city has plenty of room for both. They don't have to be crammed onto 16 acres, which is the fundamental problem at ground zero.
And yet, so much could go wrong.
Absentee landlords eager to collect flood insurance could bulldoze salvageable homes rather than restoring them. The city's business leaders could concentrate their efforts on flashy symbolic events, like holding a scaled-down Mardi Gras at the end of February or trying to woo one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions, rather than nuts-and-bolts matters such as building better neighborhoods and infrastructure. And the Bush administration could continue to fight the flow of federal money that would protect New Orleans through the restoration of Louisiana's eroded coastal wetlands.
That last one may be the most important.
After 9/11, the federal government did not prohibit the construction of skyscrapers; it safeguarded skyscrapers by correcting the more fundamental problem of lax security at airports. Now, it has a chance to do the same for New Orleans, helping to bring back the eroded coastal marshes and barrier islands that could have acted as shock absorbers against the jolt of a hurricane. Without such defenses -- and the construction of massive floodgates that would provide another line of defense against hurricane-spawned storm surges -- New Orleans will be defenseless and future damage will be inevitable.
But if the essential problem is one of civil engineering, there is still a role for urban policymakers and architects to play in shaping New Orleans' future.
The city can immediately change its building codes, requiring new homes to sit higher above the street than the ones they replaced. State and federal officials can pass tax credits that would encourage property owners to rehab instead of raze.
The traditional town planners known as the New Urbanists, who have been studying Southern vernacular architecture for years, could lend their skills to a pro bono effort that would determine how the city's neighborhoods could be quickly rebuilt with a thread of continuity that would weave the best of New Orleans' architectural past into its future.
The point is: New Orleans' housing stock is one of its singular strengths. Don't throw out the baby with the floodwater.
Looking at the side-by-side pictures of New Orleans -- extraordinary devastation paired with miraculous survival -- and considering the special place that New Orleans holds among America's cities, it is hard to take seriously the arguments of those who say that spending billions of federal dollars to rebuild the city would be throwing good money after bad.
To do so would be the ultimate anti-urban snub -- a loss for New Orleans, but, more important, a loss for the nation.
This is not the time to tell New Orleans to drop dead.
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