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Louisiana's Planning Moves Forward; Reveals Design Divide

(archrecord.construction.com - 03/14/2006)

By Sam Lubell

	click image to view larger A rendering from a DPZ Charrette in Lake Charles, Louisiana (Image courtesy Louisiana Recovery Authority)
	UN Studio's Ziggurat-inspired community center, proposed at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (Image courtesy UN Studio)

While New Orleans' redevelopment plans have lately seized the spotlight in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco has named her own "dream team" of state planners, who started work in February.

The team, named by Blanco on January 19, includes Calthorpe Associates, Urban Design Associates, and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). DPZ, known for promoting often-traditional New Urbanist planning ideals, has already played a major redevelopment role in the region, leading a Mississippi charrette last fall.

Blanco's 26-member Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) assigned planning team members different redevelopment activities. DPZ is leading design charrettes in towns and parishes throughout the state, helping them create model development plans. Urban Design Associates, utilizing information from those charrettes, will assemble "pattern books," featuring architectural designs that can be used by homeowners and businesses as they rebuild. Calthorpe Associates is helping develop a regional-planning vision. FEMA is working to set funding priorities and long-term redevelopment plans. Regional plans are expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Four of DPZ's week-long charrettes were held in February, and another began on March 7 in Arabi, just outside of New Orleans. Designers and residents shared ideas, sketched, and even drew up resolutions, forming a "collective intelligence," that Duany says has already been formally adopted by several municipalities. Participants proposed creating walkable neighborhoods, ensuring housing diversity, maintaining community character (including Antebellum, Colonial, and Victorian-style buildings), conserving open land, and using "smart codes." These unify zoning, design standards, road-types, and other elements.

Participants' proposals also reached beyond design. These included forming community development corporations to buy land for redevelopment, creating new industries, and even moving most residents in one town, Erath, to higher ground.

Some critics have complained about the active participation of the Congress for New Urbanism, which Duany helped found, in both Mississippi and Louisiana. In Record's March issue, Michael Sorkin called the CNU's methods "undemocratic," and labeled the group's historicist style "smiley-face architecture." Duany commented that such critiques are often based on lack of understanding. "It's a caricature. They still say New Urbanism is about picket fences," says Duany, who says he proposed some Modern-styled houses at one of the recent charrettes, albeit to a poor response.

A Different Plan For New Orleans

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission's (BNOBC) building committee issued its first planning report in January (Record, February 2006, page 26) after a lengthy investigation by Philadelphia-based architects and planners Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT). The plan, still in-development, incorporated environmental assessment of the region and noted prime rebuilding opportunities. Lacking rigid design guidelines, the report focused on a "neighborhood-center model," organized around central green spaces and main streets. The BNOBC will conduct subsequent planning workshops in several New Orleans neighborhoods.

Because its promised FEMA funding recently fell through, the BNOBC planning effort is now being funded largely by the LRA, and its non-profit LRA Support Organization. But Kroloff insists that the state's planning team will not play a role in New Orleans, despite Duany's expressed desire to take part. "We have a plan here that will work. We don't need anybody else coming in to be a part of it," he says. Kroloff says he agrees with many CNU planning ideas, like walkable downtowns and public transportation. But he dislikes the CNU's pattern books, which he says are too proscribed, and too often reference the past. "We can learn from the past to create a new vernacular. New Orleans has done that all along," he says.

Vanguard Schemes Reveal More Divergence

Kroloff moved to further support contemporary architecture in the region when he recently co-hosted a rebuilding exhibition, called "Newer Orleans: A Shared Space," at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam. The exhibition featured proposals by U.S. firms Morphosis, Hargreaves Associates, and Huff + Gooden, along with Dutch firms MVRDV, West 8, and UN Studio.

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MVRDV proposed a community center built into the side of a newly-constructed hill; UN Studio designed a ziggurat-like structure including a media library, city offices, and a large auditorium; Morphosis proposed a smaller New Orleans with a more intensified downtown; and Hargreaves drew up flood infrastructure connected to the community via parks and bridges. NAI director Aaron Betsky, who co-hosted the exhibition, hopes the plans will inspire designers in the region. Several Gulf Coast legislators and designers, he says, have traveled to the Netherlands, to discuss infrastructure and architecture.

Betsky disagrees with Duany that architecture has to be exactly what people there ask for. "The question is not giving people what they want. It's giving people more than they want. Giving them something to believe in. If you give people what they know- McDonald's architecture-you're producing a Wal-Mart version of urbanism. Creating a mythical path that never existed will not make it an attractive place to live."

Duany, in turn, is critical of what he calls such schemes' detached solution-making, saying "They don't meet with residents. Their thoughts have to do only with aesthetic concerns." He adds: "this is not a canvas for vanguard ideas. "

Kroloff says the Netherlands event was not a planning exercise, but was meant "to inspire architects and show that there are contemporary solutions for New Orleans."

Is there common ground?

Despite aesthetic and procedural differences, most designers working in the region say they share common ground in sound planning principles. But whether the sides will come together is in question. Kroloff, who admires the CNU's ability to implement its ideals in large-scale planning projects, calls the bickering "foolish," and says "we don't have time for it." Duany agrees, but insists that his group has to be invited to be part of the "elite" discourse.

Meanwhile, WRT Principal John Beckman suggests that perhaps any architectural debates are premature. "The most pressing needs in New Orleans remain city-wide, and neighborhood-specific, analyses and planning. I believe the results of this work are more critical to the short- and long-term sustainability of the city than specific architectural designs."