On the edge of extinction. Architectural criticism can be a productive and a creative literary practice. Its best practitioners challenge architects to examine their work while, at the same time, help them evolve their profession. Architecture and architectural criticism can be bound together in a mutually constructive association, each contributing to the other in reactive and proactive ways. Established as an ambassador of the built environment, the architectural critic began life as an exalted figure, revered by most practitioners and read by a relatively minor segment of society. With the advent of the more wide reaching design journals, architects breathlessly anticipated the next issue of their favorite magazine, looking forward to biting criticisms of other architects’ projects. Then came the Internet, and an even wider public had access to national newspapers, websites, and blogs. On a parallel but inverse evolutionary track, some would argue that the architecture community has become too specific, self-contained, and defined internally by specialty practices: architect, urban designer, interior architect, planner, community developer, design builder, academic, graphic designer.

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On my second week in New Orleans, on a sweltering August day, I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, sponsored by the local AIA chapter. It was a dispiriting experience. While much of the city had seen its fortunes rise, the Lower Ninth, the neighborhood most affected by Hurricane Katrina, was still a kind of lunar landscape, desolate and depopulated. There were, however, two notable exceptions: the Holy Cross neighborhood (which had seen about half of its residents return) and Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development, a bright cluster of about 75 houses, designed by a veritable who’s who of contemporary architecture: Kiernan Timberlake, Shigeru Ban, Graft, Morphosis, as well as a number of notable local architects.

Make It Right remains an active construction site, the ultimate work in progress. Led here in New Orleans by Tom Darden, the organization has set an ambitious goal: to complete all 150 houses by 2014. (They plan to break ground on a Frank Gehry-designed house soon.) While working on the Game Changers profile of Tim Duggan, Make It Right’s landscape architect, I interviewed Darden. The 32-year-old executive director talked about the background of this seminal project, its unforeseen challenges, and its potential for global impact. An edited version of our talk, conducted at the Make It Right offices, follows.

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The corner of Canal and Rampart Streets in 1954.

I’d been driving past the long abandoned Woolworth’s store on the corner of Canal and North Rampart Streets since I moved to New Orleans in July. And every time past I thought, in my typical New York naiveté (if such a thing exists), “That site desperately needs a building—the bigger, the better!” Later I learned that a somewhat controversial project was  in fact awaiting approval: a 190-foot, mixed-use residential tower.  Urbanistically speaking, this is just what the doctor ordered. The right building here on the upper edge of the French Quarter could act as a kind of gateway to both the quarter to the east and the downtown business district.

The historic preservationists in town almost reflexively opposed the project, citing its excessive height (seventy feet taller than current zoning). The truth is, preservationists here have a longstanding aversion to both tall buildings and (or should we say especially?) modern ones. This proposed tower, pushed by the local developer Praveen Kailas and designed by Harry Baker Smith Architects, was clearly a duel offender.

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Yesterday’s New Orleans Times Picayune carried a front page story—fittingly, I guess, on the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—about the Army Corps of Engineers’ new rating systems for the country’s levees.  The report gave a “near failing grade to New Orleans area levees,” despite the $10-billion effort to rebuild them after Katrina. The levees are designed to withstand surges from a “100-year hurricane,” or a storm with a one-percent chance of happening in any given year. For storms the Corps described as “500-year events,” all bets are apparently off. “Larger events, however, would cause flooding,” the piece stated, rather bloodlessly. “Reviewers estimated those events could kill as much of 3 percent of the area’s population, and inundate as many as 191,180 structures, resulting in $47.7 billion in damage.”

As a new transplant to the city, skittishly checking weather reports for any and all tropical depressions forming in the Gulf, my response? No kidding.

Katrina, after all, wasn’t a “500-year event.” It was a Category 3 hurricane. Bigger storms might hit the city in the future, when as the Times Picayune correctly pointed out sea levels are likely to be significantly higher. My problem with the Army Corps of Engineers’ report isn’t with its dire predictions. (Dealing with the specter of hurricanes is part of the bargain you strike living here; it’s a lot like Bay Area residents and the so-called “Big One”.) The Corps doesn’t seem to recognize—at least, not publicly—that its 100 year-plus policy of taming the Mississippi River by brute force might need a rethink. And this isn’t just a local issue. Towns and cities up and down the Mississippi face the same threat. Building higher walls, in the end, won’t solve the problem. As a number of landscape architects have been telling us for a while, we might have to let some of the water in, to keep the rest of it out.

To read the Times Picayune story, click here.

Recent Metropolis blog post about the Mississippi.

Metropolis article - “What’s Next”

Q&A with Dutch water engineer, Jan H. de Jager.

Homes in the Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina.

Contrary to some politicians’ beliefs, climate change has become an urgent matter. This urgency calls on everyone involved in the designed environment to critically re-evaluate her or his relationship with the Earth. Here I want to address one of our major threats and resources: water. Today in coastal cities worldwide planners and policy makers discuss flood mitigation strategies that can be flexible, multi-layered systems able to adapt to sea level change. Research reveals that passive systems, which can be both static and dynamic, are needed to accommodate the ever-changing relationship between land and water.

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Last week a local architect forwarded an interesting press release from Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic development alliance for the region. It announced, with great hyperventilating fanfare, that Gameloft, “one of the world’s largest publishers of digital and social gaming,” would establish a new video game development studio in New Orleans. This was one of those Richard Florida-type stories that seemed too good to be true. And maybe an indication that the Crescent City had indeed become a draw for the coveted “creative class.”

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Photo: Francesca Pedersen.

The conventional wisdom about New Orleans these days is for the most part positive: an engaged mayor (with the obligatory “60 Minutes” profile under his belt), rebounding neighborhoods, improving schools, young people flocking in.  All of this is true, as far as it goes, but it’s an incomplete accounting. What has gone largely unreported in the mainstream press is the condition of the neighborhood hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.  Much of the Lower Ninth Ward—despite the heroic efforts of Brad Pitt and Make It Right—remains desolate.

This past weekend I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth, sponsored by the local chapter of the AIA and hosted by John Williams, who in addition to his work as executive architect for Make It Right has taken on the role of unofficial master planner for the embattled neighborhood. While there are pockets of hope in the Lower Ninth—the Holy Cross section has seen about half of its residents return—the overall picture is troubling.

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NOLA native Sarah Markel on the levee bike path along the Mississippi. Photo: Catherine Markel.

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Madison, Wisconsin, where I sat through lectures by some of the world’s leading authorities on ways to make cities more appealing, functional, and sustainable. But the most valuable takeaways came not from inside the Madison Convention Center, but from the city itself; more specifically, from the helmeted, benevolent army that pedaled its way quietly and efficiently through the streets.

I’d heard about Madison being a bike-friendly city, but wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, never having been to Portland or Minneapolis or Davis, California, or any of those other places that usually get the highest praise for their bike-oriented principles. Read more…

Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune.

Not even a month after we wrote about the impending demolition of the Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, the battle over one of New Orleans’s last standing mid-century modernist schools has come to an abrupt but decisive conclusion. On Friday, bulldozers began their work on the dilapidated structure, two months before anyone had any reason to expect them. Read more…

The Mississippi floodplain after the floods, May 4, 2011. 

While the Mississippi River was flooding this spring and as the news coverage heated up, I tried to match the satellite before-and-after images to all the hyperbole I saw on TV.  It quickly became clear to me that there is a mismatch in what people are experiencing as individuals and what the river is experiencing.

The floodplain on April 29, 2011.

Take a look at the satellite images.  Observe the channels the river has carved back and forth on its natural floodplain.  And remember that the flooding today is well within the limits of the river’s historical bounds. To the river, this spring’s flood was not a remarkable event; it is simply part of the river’s natural lifecycle. Yes, this season’s high levels of runoff have been impacted by all our tinkering with the river’s basin through the years, but it has become clear, to everyone who cares to look, that in our diligence to change the contours of the river, we have cut it off from the floodplain that it needs to spread its copious waters.

Our historic approach for developing the river’s floodplain has been defined by short term goals.  We’ve built levees so we can farm its rich fertile soils; but these levees now prevent the river from replenishing that very fertility.  We moan about the farmers’ losses without considering the decades of gain the farmers have received from the fertile soil. We’ve built small communities and large cities in this same floodplain because the river provided an important transportation corridor, yet we aren’t willing to spend the money to relocate or harden critical infrastructure. Read more…