That question will come to dominate the post-relief discussion of New Orleans, as exemplified in that Tuesday NYT story discussed here earlier. But as the urbanist-architect-construction industry circles hungrily over what they think is the exciting blank slate of a city waiting for their well-paid ministrations, here's the best argument for doing as little as possible, aside from wiping those projects away forever, to the lowland of New Orleans.
September 11, 2005
New Orleans after Katrina
An Architect's Thoughts On Rebuilding
Calls to rebuild New Orleans in the wake of Katrina alarm me as a New Orleanian, an architect, and long-term observer of our local scene. They alarm many, if not most, New Orleanians, not that that is relevant to the many experts elsewhere who voice such opinions. Rebuilding could bring something far worse than what we now have. Or it could bring a kind of Disneyland caricature of New Orleans housing. Either way, it is largely unnecessary.
New Orleans doesn't need rebuilding for the simple reason that most of it was not destroyed. What it does need, urgently, is cleaning up, repairing, and preserving.
Most New Orleans housing stock is of a highly flexible, resilient construction that has proved to be amazingly durable for a century and a half. It is built largely of cypress, cedar, and virgin pine, the first two being both iinsect- and water-proof . Balloon frame and other simple but effective construction methods were used, all of them involving hundreds of pieces of similar materials held together by many nailed joints. The resulting structures are self-reinforcing, allowing the building to shift with the wind and thereby survive. The typical New Orleans shotgun or camelback may creak and groan occasionally but they provide surer protection against gale-force winds than many a masonry structure. Like their inhabitants of all incomes and backgrounds, they will bend but not break.
Unlike middle class houses from the 1960s that were flooded near the Seventeenth Street Canal, these earlier vernacular houses were perched on block-like piers that enable them to dry out quickly after rains and floods, and protects them from rodents and infestations infestation coming up from the soil. Equally important, this raised construction helps cool the interior, which is also
promoted by the very high ceilings and large windows. Many a flood has lifted such houses off their piers but they are quickly reinstalled and made ready for another century. They are, like their residents, survivors.
Experts liberally quoted in the national press would suggest that much of the city will have to be rebuilt. This is not the case. Having worked as an architect in New Orleans for over 30 years, I know that the vast majority of the now submerged buildings will be useable after the water subsides. They must be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. Some of the secondary wood may need replacing and the wiring may need attention as well. But this is repair and restoration, not demolition and rebuilding.
Make no mistake: most residents of New Orleans' vernacular wood structures, and I am one, want to return to their old houses, repaired and renovated, rather than to some improved version. They already miss the high ceilings that give even the meanest shotgun an aura of grandeur that most McMansions lack.
They miss the front porches that become social centers during the milder month. They miss the neighborly intimacies that are inevitable when people live so close to one another.
I fear the approaching teams of experts with their enlightened schemes for rebuilding New Orleans. There will be a huge influx of cash and well intentioned intelligence but I fear the fantasies of planners, developers and yes, architects. Absent from this equation are the view of current residents, large numbers of whom are also house owners, notwithstanding their statistical; poverty (another virtue of these structures is that they are inexpensive). Do their views not count? Will insurance companies and federal and local bureaucrats listen to them? Or simply tell them?
New Orleans architecture as it has evolved over two centuries is not perfect, yet it has been shaped by the culture and has in turn shaped it. Thanks to small lots, barely 30 feet wide, the houses are nestled together, giving an urbanity to what is essentially a suburban model of individual houses. Add to this basic model the penchant for making the ordinary operatic through decorative brackets, columns, odd paint jobs or fancy trim and the ensemble becomes something quite wonderful: a dense, unified urban model of many people living tightly together but all of them on their own terms.
These thoughts are being written after an exodus to my sister's almost rural house in Salt Lake City. To get here my wife and I drove across the American southwest. We saw the desolation brought by chain stores and rampant suburbanization. New Orleans, at least much of it, is a living antidote to such a model. It must be preserved, not as a theme park, or as a laboratory for twenty-first century urbanists (many of whom are themselves suburbanites), but as a place where people have long lived side-by-side, densely, and in what have traditionally been racially mixed streets and neighborhoods.
Real segregation in housing, and the highest crime and drug-use, fanned outward from the federal housing projects built after the 1940s. Locals refer to them dismissively as the bricks, i.e., something far less attractive than the solid old wooden houses pundits elsewhere deride as shacks. The rehabilitation and preservation of New Orleans' vernacular possible is possible since most of it has net been destroyed. Let the bureaucrats and planners adopt the Hippocratic Oath sworn by every doctor: First, do no harm. This should be the first step towards conserving what is best about my city.
Errol Barron FAIA
Favrot Professor of Architecture
Tulane University School of Architecture
New Orleans, Louisiana