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.
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I think it's silly when a modern young city builds things that are designed to make it look like it has tenure and classic roots. It can be pretentious by definition.
But, you see, the reason for that is twofold: First, because one of the main tenets of Modernist thought (especially with regard to art) is that it must be innovative in some way, or it is trite. Thus, the greatest sin in Modernism is to ever stay the same.
This unnatural avoidance of the recognizable is not the same as the normal human urge to continually improve. We don’t avoid inventing the wheel because it is innovative; but feeling that one has to continually re-invent it, in order to keep using it, is patently ridiculous, and tends to lead to absurdities like square and elliptical wheels.
That doesn’t mean that wheels can’t be improved, or even replaced by something better. It just means that a wheel doesn’t have to be either a Rem Koolhaas nightmare OR an overdone 19th century Gothic Revival Confection. It’s a wheel, for cripe’s sake.
Which brings me to the second reason: because our means of building no longer embodies the traditional methods of building--meaning that, in order to look “traditional”, it’s often necessary to build a modern steel and concrete cage and smear on a fake façade. No wonder it feels fake and pretentious. It is.
But it actually doesn’t have to be. Believe it or not, it is actually possible to design buildings that look neither fake nor pretentious—they just look like they’ve been there forever. Of course, monster convention centers tend to pose a very difficult problem to traditional architecture, since giant open spaces don’t work well with anything but steel trusses or enormous masonry vaults…but does that tell us more about the limits of tradition, or the unrealistic expectations we place on modern buildings…just because we can…?
That question lies at the heart of traditional architecture. It’s not a matter of copying old buildings as if we can’t think of anything better. It’s a matter of not doing things just because we can. Tradition says that the ability to build a 110 story building is not necessarily a good thing. Did nobody see what a problem 110 story buildings pose on 9/11? Parthenons crumble, temples get taken apart to make churches, but what does one do with a 110 story building once it’s outlived its usefulness? How many cities in Italy used to have towers all over the place…until they started collapsing? Does anyone realize that building codes only require a building’s structure to be able to withstand 75 years of use? What happens as the steel and concrete age past that point? Nobody knows.
That is the benefit of tradition. It’s a seamless garment. It doesn’t try to be something that it is not. It forms part of the fabric of life. A few hundred years ago, the concept that a young city should avoid “counterfeiting” a sense of history was unthinkable. You built things according to tradition. Inventing arches and domes, changing Doric columns to Corinthian, even changing columns into tenuous gothic vaults or organic, plant-shaped tendrils a la Art Nouveau—these are all possible within the same umbrella of “tradition”, because they’re all just different expressions of the abilities of man to work with nature.
Incidentally, this is what made some of the early “Chicago School” Architecture really interesting. It was a time when wood and masonry were being replaced by steel and glass, and the architects of the time worked to make a new aesthetic that echoed the structure while not discarding traditional modes like so many old clothes. In other words, they understood both the importance of things like scale and ornament, which humanize a building, and of allowing the new capabilities of the structure to inform that scale and ornament. It was when the two became entirely divorced that all meaning began to be lost and replaced with the ever-more-titillating.
To be traditional is not to reject innovation (though some traditionalist architects seem to miss that one). It means to understand that innovation ad nauseam cannot take the place of the good, sensible, well-built, and, yes, beautiful.
New Orleans is a unique culture in this world. Her history makes it so. French, Spanish, Indian, African, and American. New Orleans has rich, poor, middle class; black, white, and every shade in between the two. Americans have such a simplified vision of a very complex city. New Orleans lives today, not from government help, but because her citizens have fought hard for her and people like Brad Pitt and others like him, have fought hard for her. New Orleans lives, different but the same. Her spirit is strong.
Rod, I'm surprised at you. IIRC, there's a quote from Liebling at the beginning of A Confederacy of Dunces
Aside from Pitt's acting, which I've mocked for years (and, you know what, his acting is actually getting better. I think working on a couple of films with a fine actress like Kate Blanchett probably helped) Brad Pitt seems like he is an all-around good, stand-up guy.
I can't judge New Orleans architecture, never having been there. (I hope to visit someday.)
I believe several citizens have banded together to get Brad Pitt elected mayor of New Orleans since the actor’s Make It Right foundation has provided green and affordable housing for displaced residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
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