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Designing
the Future of New Orleans
Architectural Record and Tulane University host two ideas competitions
7/10/2006
By
James S. Russell
Can houses and apartments rise gracefully
above floodwaters while maintaining New Orleans’s famous neighborliness?
Can higher ground successfully accommodate more of the city’s
citizens in an environmentally sustainable way? Both students and
professionals offered a wealth of answers in the 544 entries for
two competitions initiated by Architectural Record in a partnership
with Tulane University’s School of Architecture. The High Density
on the High Ground Competition asked professionals to propose a
160-unit housing project on an actual development site, while student
competitors in the New Orleans Prototype House Competition designed
a three-bedroom house that could adapt to a variety of conditions.
Tulane architecture dean Reed Kroloff presided over the judging,
while Scott Bernhard and Carrie Bernhard wrote the programs and
co-coordinated the competitions, aided by numerous student volunteers
from Tulane. For two days, the nine-member jury winnowed entries
in galleries provided by the New Orleans Museum of Art. Almost every
scheme took seriously the request to eschew visionary ideas in favor
of practical ways to address the city’s real housing crisis.
The winners, a group of citations, and additional selection of projects
proposed by the jury went on exhibition in New Orleans in April
and May at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Some will travel to
the AIA National Convention in Los Angeles this month and will be
displayed in the fall in the U.S. Pavilion at the 10th International
Architectural Exhibition, in Venice, Italy.
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High Density on the High Ground
Competition
New Orleans may need to incorporate
high-density housing if certain parts of the city prove unsafe
to build back. A city-block-size site in Bywater, a mid-19th-century
neighborhood downriver from the French Quarter, offered a
suitably challenging site for this competition. It’s
a bit elevated and hard against the Mississippi levee; north,
across Chartres Street, a mix of shotgun houses and Creole
cottages has only begun to see gentrification. The program
included 160 units, which could vary widely in size from 700
to 2,100 square feet, as well as 15,000 square feet of retail
and a 5,000-square-foot “city center” studio space
for Tulane. Open to everyone, the competition drew entries
from students and professional design firms. One team, among
those cited in the following pages, were simply three friends
who recently graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School
of Design and decided to collaborate. Juror Mario Gooden said,
“I was looking for moments that spoke to how people live
next to each other, how they watch out for each other.”
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New Orleans Prototype House Competition
As New Orleans faces a future in which
widespread abandonment is a real possibility, this competition,
open only to current architecture students, sought designs
for a three-bedroom house that responds to the city’s
new circumstances: one that’s easy to install on an infill
site, that rises above flood waters, and that respects the
local climate and environment. Since historic house types
in New Orleans have proved to be highly adaptable over time,
juror Patty Gay observed, “It’s tough to compete
with shotguns or Creole cottages” in the design of a
new prototype. That said, the five Honor Award projects on
these pages, submitted by students from Bozeman, Montana,
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, did an admirable job. The jury
felt five additional projects deserved a citation (below right).
“Lots of entries were interesting in the way they were
built,” commented Brian MacKay-Lyons. “This is surprising
because students don’t necessarily know much about construction.”
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