A battered beacon

THE staggering images of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, whether shot from helicopters or with cellphone cameras, suggest a relationship between humans and architecture stripped bare, much as the landscape along the Gulf Coast has been. When hurricanes strike and floodwaters rise, as when an earthquake or a tornado hits, what’s crucial in the immediate aftermath is simply shelter in the most basic sense.

That effect is common to nearly every significant natural disaster. What has been unusual in this one is the extent to which those images also suggested a fundamental disturbance in the way people use and rely upon architecture, turning its traditional, expected functions upside down or inside out. Particularly in New Orleans -- where, in contrast to the most dramatic Mississippi damage, rising water meant houses were flattened from below instead of from above -- the flood made folly of the very idea of what architects call “program.” Buildings became useless by the thousands, but also useful in ways that their designers never intended or likely ever dreamed possible.

The roofs of houses became floors, as people stood atop them awaiting rescue, or billboards for the letters SOS in white spray-paint. Highway onramps and overpasses became boat docks and, in one case, a holding pen for handcuffed prisoners watched over nervously by deputies gripping shotguns. Their torsos emerging from windows tucked under eaves and gables, residents spoke with reporters who were passing by in boats. Up had become down just as, in the case of fully flooded Canal Street, sign and symbol had turned literal.

If there was a single piece of architecture that has summed up those depressingly otherworldly conditions, it was surely the Louisiana Superdome. A 30-year-old stadium that holds 72,000 fans for football games and hosted the 1988 Republican National Convention, where in his acceptance speech George H.W. Bush called for “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky,” was turned by Wednesday into a humid, squalid holding pen for an estimated 23,000 displaced hurricane victims.

Before our eyes, a piece of architecture marked by the muscular optimism of postwar America, a building for broad-shouldered linebackers and a broad-shouldered nation, morphed into a macabre cross between Noah’s Ark and Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel “Blindness,” a stark allegory whose most harrowing scenes of societal breakdown take place in an abandoned mental hospital that has been turned into a quarantine center.

Those at the stadium -- designed in the early 1970s by a pair of unreconstructed Modernists, Nathaniel “Buster” Curtis and Arthur Q. Davis, architects whose motto was “serving function memorably” -- found at least a measure of protection from the elements. There was a roof above, even if it had been shredded by the storm. (Beams of light pouring through the holes in the ceiling suggested iconic images of the Pantheon in Rome, the basis of all western dome architecture.) But they also were left to fend for themselves in a building with overflowing toilets, no air conditioning and dwindling supplies of food and water.

At least three deaths were reported, and there were unconfirmed reports that several girls had been raped in the stadium’s bathrooms. More common was a growing sense of desperation and entrapment in a place designed for leisure and distraction -- bread-and-circus architecture turned into a place where the desire was simply for bread and water, or other kinds of basic relief.

“We pee on the floor. We are like animals,” one 25-year-old woman told The Times, holding her 3-week-old son in one arm and a dwindling bottle of baby formula in the other.

The scene inside the Superdome was only a bigger, contained version of the shantytowns that had begun emerging around New Orleans by Wednesday in the oddest of places -- on a covered stretch of freeway not far from the stadium, for example, where television news cameras captured a combination of poverty and despair that suggested nothing so much as Dust Bowl-era imagery.

The news Wednesday that officials would bus those in the Superdome -- and thousands of other residents holed up elsewhere in the city -- 350 miles west to Houston’s Astrodome only deepened the architectural irony at the center of the story.

The Astrodome, finished in 1965 and designed by Hermon Lloyd and others, was in every way the model for the Superdome -- and, indeed, for an extravagant vision of what the architecture of entertainment might look like in an age of American hegemony. Together, the two domes represent the high point of what might be called hermetic Modernism. The approach combined the massive concrete of Pier Luigi Nervi’s postwar stadiums in Italy with a late-Roman Empire sense of grandeur and an American obsession with perfect climate control.

With its location in Houston, not far from the NASA offices, links between the boldness of the American space program, then racing to put a man on the moon, and the optimism of the Astrodome’s architecture were inescapable. The city’s baseball team, originally the Colt 45s, was renamed the Astros. Ushers at the stadium were called the Spacettes.

Indeed, the Astrodome was as tightly sealed as a rocket ship. It was promoted by the Astros’ colorful owner, Judge Roy Hofheinz, not just as the Eighth Wonder of the World but also as an “all-weather stadium.” The air conditioning system kept the temperature fixed at a pleasant, innocuous 72 degrees -- quite a change from the team’s previous home, an open-air stadium where insect repellent was sold at the concession stands and fans routinely fainted in the stifling heat.

As Douglas Pegues Harvey put it in Texas Architect magazine, the Astrodome aimed to do nothing less than free the sporting event “from its dependency on Nature’s caprice and God’s sky.” Its designers even thought they could use real grass inside, despite the closed roof. But glare through the window panes at the top of the dome was so distracting to fielders that the ceiling was soon painted over. The grass died, leading directly to the first appearance of AstroTurf, another icon of controlled nature.

The Superdome never had any of that space-age glamour; its architecture was always more about using brute structural force to create a huge, column-free interior space, known at the time of its opening as the biggest room in America. It is not a pretty building, but it has always been able to rely on its sheer capacity to attract events like the Super Bowl and the GOP convention.

Still, it has been experiencing a long, slow decline. In recent years, the Superdome’s primary tenants, the NFL’s Saints, have been seeking a new home, and the stadium has been an easy symbol of the team’s misfortunes on the field. The Astrodome, meanwhile, which the Astros fled at the end of the 1999 season and now sits empty most of the time, suffered an even steeper fall from grace.

It is not just the architecture of the two domes, however, that is looking outdated this week. It is the very idea they embody so fully: that modern buildings -- and, by extension, modern cities -- can offer perfect protection against the elements, that Mother Nature is neither a vital source nor a threat but simply a nuisance. That notion is one victim of Katrina that none of us needs mourn.