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This week the New Orleans Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the recipients of the 2009 Design Awards. Out of 70 entries, 12 were chosen for awards, 3 of which were awards of Honor and the other 9 were awards of Merit.

The theme for this year’s awards was “Responsive, Responsible, Timeless,” which was chosen to emphasis the importance of classical architecture and design. The awards were chosen by a Jury featuring Jim Evans, AIA; Andrew Vrana, AIA; and Kimberly Hickson, AIA and were presented in a ceremony presided over by Jeffrey Smith, AIA 2009 President of the AIA New Orleans Chapter and Design Awards Chair Michael Piazza, AIA.

Of the 12 winners there are only 6 firms represented; I have to wonder why this is. Is there a lack of architects doing good work in New Orleans, or is this phenomenon the result of the 70 project pool that was judged? If the former, then there seems to be an opportunity waiting for a young rising star to make their name, if its the latter I wonder why so few offices are entering work to be judged. I would hate to think that the results of the awards show a bias on the part of the judges towards these 6 firms, considering that 3 of which – Wayne Troyer Architects, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, and Bild Design – happen to be the top four winners from last year (see this article I posted last April). Of course, not knowing the rest of the applicant pool these could simply be the best entries who fit with the theme, and no one wants a jury choosing projects to give awards to based on a desire to show variety. In addition, I have to wonder how fast and loose the jury played with the stated theme. Many of these projects, with the exception of the historic preservation awards, do not seem to emphasis classical architecture or classical design proportions. While I would not disagree that they are good examples of contemporary or modern design, I have to wonder how the jury would defend the classification of them as “timeless.”

Listed below are the winners and their respective categories:

Above is the keynote address from the Tulane School of Architecture sponsored symposium: Preservation Matters by Tulane Alum and Editor of Architectural Record magazine, Robert Ivy, FAIA. The speech is a long overdue acknowledgement of the work of the Preservation Studies / Historic Preservation Program headed by my past professor, Eugene Cizek, FAIA and a discussion of the historic preservation movement within the city of New Orleans and Tulane’s role through the twentieth century. I have to laud the efforts of the new Dean of the Architecture School, Kenneth Schwartz, who introduces the conference and Mr. Ivy. Regional Modernism has a more detailed synopsis of the presentation.

Throughout my years at the school, I always felt that the historical importance of place and the efforts of the preservation program to bring this idea to the student body was too often bulldozed by a blind passion for high modernism and other international styles. Issues of climate and green design were handled in the structural technology classes, but too often they did not play a part in the critically explored design studio work.

As an aside, I spent a number of minutes trying to figure out where they held this symposium. This lecture hall does not remind me of any space within the building while I was there. The main lecture hall is sloped, while this is obviously flat. Eventually after much head scratching I reread the symposium invitation and realized that this was held in the new University Student Center. Now I’m glad to see that this building (which was under repair for most of my years at Tulane) is in use, but I have to wonder if this type of event shouldn’t have been held at Richardson Memorial Hall (the Architecture School) where it could have had a greater influence on the student body and faculty.

Tulane School of Architecture is hosting a one day symposium at the end of January focusing on Preservation. The keynote speaker will be Robert Ivy, FAIA and one of my favorite professors, Eugene Cizek, FAIA, will be providing commentary. This symposium is free and open to the public. If I was able to be in New Orleans, I would love to attend.
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[Image via Trumpet.]

Today starts DesCours, New Orleans’s second annual AIA sponsored public art installation festival. For the next five days the public spaces all over the French Quarter and Central Business District (CBD) will be transformed into interactive design installations. Not only is this a cool chance to inhabit spaces by up and coming artists and designers, but local fixtures such as Rebirth Brass Band and the Trème Brass Band will be filling the spaces with sounds that are distinctly New Orleanian. This “Architects Week” on an urban scale is free and open to the public.

I wish this festival was around when I was living in NOLA. This is the kind of architectural design culture that was missing. There was Art for Art’s Sake and White Linen, but nothing that really embraced new architectural thought. I would love to see a similar concept come to DC or NOVA, we could really use a public celebration and exposure to interactive architecture installations.

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 Gustavʼs 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 cityʼs 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 wasnʼt 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 (ʼ05) 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

A good friend of mine from architecture school who is involved in the process of building the new Charity Hospital sent me an update on the old building’s situation. Selections from her response below:

[A]s I work at the firm that did the storm damage and the new packages to get the work done to fix the MYRIAD of problems just from the storm itself with FEMA I can pretty much tell you this: that building will never again be a hospital. According to the codes necessary for health care there is no way for that building to reach code for less than a couple more million than they’re going to spend on the new one. In addition the amount of asbestos and mold inherent in the HVAC and wall systems, due to the materials used last time they renovated that building, stack another couple to 30 mil on. It’s not a cheap building to fix for anything, especially for something as specific as a hospital. Which is why they are pouring 10.2 billion dollars (most likely plus) into the new LSU/Charity Hospital …

[P]eople can make noise as much as they want about it being done faster with a [renovation] to the old buildings, but it took a team of over 100 people 3 years just to get the contracts out to bid to get the roofing fixed …

[N]o matter how much we may want them to save the old hospital don’t count on anyone ever having enough money to fix that building, count on the new one getting built…

It looks like the building might have more of a chance being bought by a developer and turned into condos than being brought back to life as a hospital. I have to wonder if it would be possible to turn this building into a museum focusing on health care and hurricanes – maybe house a couple of different museums? I hope that whatever happens, this building remains a part of the urban landscape. It is one of the few Art Deco Buildings in the city, and unless it gets some federal backing and protection as a historic property it may go the way of the Rivergate.

Its been over three years since I moved to Northern Virginia and said good bye to my friends and Alma Mater in New Orleans. How was I to know that 3 months later the world would end and everything New Orleans would be measured in relevance to Katrina. Now, as we welcome in year 3 PK, New Orleans is facing the possibility of another major disaster. It is my hope of hopes that Gustav does not undo all the rebuilding and planning that have happened in the past three years.

If the worst happens and the city is deluged again, I worry that the country will not be as generous as last time; I can already hear them crying on the senate floor for abandonment and rebuilding elsewhere. I can see the talking heads blaming New Orleans for not “learning its lesson,” as if the city had not been flooded numerous times in its past. If the money does come again, I can just imagine the repressive building codes to and flood plane restrictions, all methods of preventing future loss of property. Yet the city would become one big concrete block raised 40 feet in the air.

How can we have rebuilt an entire continent over 50 years ago and then proceed to fly to the moon, but we cannot rebuild or even protect one city from the tempests of fate? It is simple, we’ve gotten to arrogant and stopped innovating. Instead of looking at how to build flood proof buildings and levees to hold back the water, we should be looking at buildings that will adapt to flooding and remember that the yearly flooding of the Mississippi is what raised New Orleans above sea level. Imagine, a city that truly embraces the entity of being Creole; it could be a hybrid of Venice, Amsterdam, and its current state. Improved dikes would protect the most historic neighborhoods, and the newer/rebuilt lower lying areas could be designed to raise and fall with the tide.

As a former resident of New Orleans, Tulane School of Architecture alumni, a preservationist, and as a future architect I implore you to stop the destruction of modernist buildings in New Orleans.

Ever since the Vieux Carré Commission stood up to Robert Moses and the original planned route for I-10, there has been an understanding in New Orleans that its buildings are the presents physical link with the city’s history, and that history and tourists desire to explore it and embrace it has been the economic engine that has allowed rebuilding to be a possibility. If there has been one place that preservation has failed in New Orleans, it is in regards to Modernist architecture. The city was done a historical and architectural disservice with the destruction of the Rivergate, a building that was unique in New Orleans’s architectural landscape.

We now stand on a precipice, the bulk of the schools scheduled to be closed and demolished are some of the few examples of southern regional Modernism in New Orleans. With their destruction we stand to lose a huge part of our architectural and cultural history. In addition, by demolishing the schools we are only contributing more waste to the environment, and ever since Katrina New Orleans has contributed more than its fair share of construction and demolition waste. Instead these buildings should be preserved, even if their former purpose is lost. Let them be redeveloped into apartments and condos, civic centers and community centers, or supermarkets and office parks; all of which have been done with former warehouse and mill buildings within the city, why not schools?

It has been 5 years since I last set foot in my city, and I know the economic and cultural landscape have changed since I’ve left. But I cannot imagine driving down Claiborne and not passing Eleanor McMain High School nor will Carollton-Riverbend ever be the same without the voices of school children echoing from the Audubon Charter School (formerly Lusher Upper School). I know that I was not born and raised in New Orleans, but it is more my home than anywhere else I have lived. I may just be another Yankee who lost his heart to New Orleans, but I found my voice and my soul there. I hope that when my life brings me back to the only city I call mine, it will be to a place with a full sense of its past and present and a hope for its future.

After watching the latest episode of Architecture School I was struck with just how accurate of a portrayal the reviews seemed. I remember reviewers baiting students just like that, and verbally backing them into corners such that they were forced to say their design was bad. What was missing from this was the critics literally tearing apart models to express their disgust with the scheme.

I stand by my previous opinions about the student’s work, none of them responded to the scale of the neighborhood adequately. At least some of them were looking at filtering elements of New Orleans housing iconography through a modernist lens, specifically the front porch and the screening elements. Furthermore, most of the house strategies did not create any site strategies for creating a public/private separation outside of the house itself.

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.