Here’s a great piece from the new issue of The Atlantic talking about all the experiments in green, affordable housing springing up in hurricane-devastated New Orleans. Bizarrely, the actor Brad Pitt is a huge player in this market. Sounds like he’s doing a lot of good there, though I personally side with the rebuilding aesthetic and ethic pushed by Andres Duany, who doesn’t go for the modernist and/or non-local-vernacular designs favored by those surrounding Pitt. Duany hits on a brilliant observation about New Orleans in this passage:
“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.”
I’m going to have to think about that for a while: New Orleans as a Caribbean city. More broadly, you could think of South Louisiana, even the non-Cajun parts, as essentially Mediterranean. This is especially visible in the non-Cajun parts, such as where I grew up. Most of us were Protestant, but boy, did we feel different from North Louisiana.
Anyway, this from the article is the best definition of sustainabilty I’ve ever seen:
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?’”
Think about that as you’re driving around your town, city or suburb today. Look at the buildings around you and think about which ones can be loved, and which ones can’t. The ones that can be loved are the ones likely to be there 50 years from now. Here in Dallas, we’ve just opened a couple of big, expensive, starchitect-designed arts buildings. I’ve not been to either, but neither one looks especially lovable. Cool, but not lovable.
