New Orleans must look back to move ahead

BY almost any measure, the rebuilding effort here stands in disarray. With a new hurricane season set to begin in June, the levees ringing the city have barely been restored to half their shaky pre-Katrina strength. The neighborhood planning sessions that were supposed to start Feb. 20 have been postponed while the city figures out how to pay for them. And 10 days ago the embattled mayor, C. Ray Nagin, officially endorsed the controversial idea that residents will be allowed to rebuild -- at their own risk, as he put it -- even in the most perennially flood-prone parts of town.

That continuing uncertainty suggests that the recovery, even with Congress having earmarked an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, will be driven more by private initiative than coordinated public support. Lawrence Powell, a professor of history at Tulane University and a frequent commentator on civic life here, calls the emerging process “bootstrap redevelopment.” It’s one that inevitably will favor families with means over the poor -- which in New Orleans generally means whites over blacks -- and well-connected developers over planners.

Strictly from an architectural perspective, though, the larger confusion may yield a surprising benefit. Without Category 5 levees, wetlands restoration along the Gulf Coast or a forward-thinking planning strategy in place, homeowners who choose to rebuild will have to acknowledge the possibility of future flooding in every design decision. And if they approach the reconstruction process with that level of wariness -- with their eyes wide open -- they will be tapping into a rich architectural tradition in this city, odd as that may sound.

It’s no coincidence that the most distinctive neighborhoods in New Orleans date from the decades when residents, architects and planners were most keenly aware of the city’s vulnerability. Repairing that close connection between the natural and the built environments -- which was replaced in the 20th century by a blind, ultimately catastrophic faith in modern infrastructure -- may be the most direct way to recapture the vitality that once made residential neighborhoods in New Orleans among the most admired in the world. It also may help change how Americans in other cities threatened by natural disasters, Los Angeles chief among them, think about the relationship between architecture and risk.

*

Respecting nature

IT’S a little difficult to imagine now, with tens of thousands of ruined houses still encased in dried mud and with even the birds continuing to avoid the most badly damaged neighborhoods, but New Orleans was the first green city in America. Not green as in leafy or sylvan, though residents enjoy two of the finest such areas in any American city with Audubon Park and City Park, along with several famously broad avenues lined with spreading oak trees. And not green as in sustainable, at least as we define that architectural movement these days. There aren’t a lot of solar panels or straw-bale houses in the Garden District.

This was a green city simply because, from about 1750 to 1920, when its landmark buildings and neighborhoods were constructed, architecture in New Orleans showed both a healthy respect for nature and a demonstrable fear of it. Development in those decades clung closely to the natural levees along the river and a few isolated ridges running above sea level. It was that very same high ground that escaped the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Indeed, professors, planners and critics have developed a kind of lecture-circuit parlor game in the months since the hurricane. They begin by showing audiences a map of New Orleans as it existed in the late 19th century, when the city still dared not expand much beyond the high ground stretching a couple of miles inland from the river. Then they superimpose a satellite photo showing the city at the height of Katrina’s flooding. The built area in the first image matches, almost perfectly, the land that stayed dry in the second.

Individual houses also made visible allowances for the city’s climate and precarious location. In the most dramatic example, fishermen hammered together temporary shacks each year along the banks of the Mississippi, knowing they’d be washed away when the river rose. Even many modest single-family homes here included broad, well-used front porches and effective natural ventilation, and were raised a few feet off the ground to help protect against flooding from hurricanes and heavy rains. Many 18th and 19th century buildings in New Orleans (as elsewhere in the South) were constructed with inner and outer brick walls separated by an air pocket, allowing floodwater to seep through the porous brick and drain away simply by gravity.

The result was a stock of residential architecture of wildly divergent appearance -- so-called shotgun houses derived from African styles in some parts of town, tall Victorians and imposing Greek Revival mansions in others -- whose consistency flowed from their rather effortless combination of up-to-date architectural styling and honesty about the city’s singularly odd natural setting. It was precisely that mixture that helped make New Orleans at once so atmospheric and so redolent of place.

What upset the balance between natural forces and urban growth -- and wound up making modern New Orleans look like pretty much any North American city -- was the invention, in 1913, of the so-called Wood pump, named for the engineer who developed it, A. Baldwin Wood. Churning away inside newly built stations across the city, the huge circular pumps -- in tandem with new levees and canals -- allowed the so-called backswamp, the large area between the old city and Lake Pontchartrain to the north, to be drained and readied for development.

What had been the city’s rather muddy backyard became the site of its suburbanization: block after block of new construction that was technically inside the city limits but looked just like new housing all over America. This is how neighborhoods including Lakeview, Gentilly and, later, the huge subdivision called New Orleans East were born.

By the 1940s, the pump had turned the city’s relationship between the natural world and the built environment on its head. “Just as high-speed elevators changed the geography of New York City by making skyscrapers possible,” the geographer Peirce F. Lewis writes in his indispensable “New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape,” “the Wood pump revolutionized the urban geography of New Orleans by suddenly opening to settlement areas which were thought forever closed.”

Houses in the new neighborhoods, following the fashions and technologies of the day, and in the name of progress, sealed themselves off from the environment, replacing front porches with central air and trading the exuberant architectural styles of the older sections of New Orleans for a plainer, vaguely ranch-style aesthetic. By the 1950s, most were being built, in construction jargon, “slab on grade”: Instead of being raised on piers, that is, they were laid flat at street level. Symbolically and literally, these new houses were rigid where the earlier ones had been flexible.

It was no surprise to anybody who understands the city’s history that the neighborhoods most damaged by Katrina, with the exception of the lower 9th Ward, were the newest ones. It was in those low-lying areas, after all, that planners and architects had turned their backs most dramatically on nature, flouting the notion that 20th century advances made it possible to build virtually anywhere. Residents of Southern California, who have built houses on equally dangerous plots of land despite the risk of earthquakes, mudslides and fires, can understand how that shift happened.

Now, as New Orleans struggles to rebuild, the owners of those ranch-style houses are paying the price for an earlier generation’s overconfidence. Although raising a 19th century house on piers to meet new flood-elevation requirements will be a straightforward task, lifting a slab-on-grade design will be significantly more expensive -- in many cases prohibitively so.

“This is sweet justice for those of us who saw those ‘ranchburgers,’ as I call them, as the advent of suburbia inside the city,” says R. Allen Eskew, a New Orleans architect.

*

Tradition meets foresight

THE architectural lessons offered by Katrina, therefore, are surprisingly straightforward: If you want to design buildings that mean something and have a chance to last in a city as physically exposed as New Orleans, you can’t pretend that nature isn’t a genuine threat, or that public foresight and infrastructure will provide anything close to absolute protection for individual neighborhoods. This is especially true as the hurricanes threatening the Southeastern U.S. grow more frequent and more powerful, and as coastal erosion becomes a worrisome long-term problem. The most alarming predictions suggest that there will simply not be a New Orleans in 200 years because it will have washed, along with a good chunk of southern Louisiana, into the Gulf of Mexico.

In that scenario, urban planners in New Orleans should be preparing designs for the first temporary city in American history, one expected to last from now until, say, 2200. But even if the future isn’t quite that hopeless for New Orleans, the only rational response to Katrina, from residents, politicians and architects alike, is to build a new generation of houses linked by an awareness of risk.

What might that awareness look like? It may make more sense to start by describing what it won’t look like. It doesn’t have to be armored or battened-down: As the raised Victorian houses in New Orleans suggest, architectural style and environmental smarts can be complementary, not one and the same.

It won’t look like the architectural confection known as the Katrina Cottage, a 350-square-foot temporary house designed by New York architect Marianne Cusato, a follower of the New Urbanist movement. The cottage is so dollhouse cute as to be both a little condescending and impractical for long-term residence. FEMA has already summarily rejected it as a replacement for trailers.

Nor, on the high-design end of the architectural spectrum, will it look like the proposals for New Orleans by a group of Dutch and American firms, including MVRDV and Santa Monica’s Morphosis, published in the March issue of Artforum. Oddly enough, the participating architects seem to have studied one another’s work more closely than they’ve thought about what flood victims might want or need. A design by UN Studio for a New Orleans library looks uncannily like a scheme by MVRDV for the Dutch pavilion at the 2000 European Expo in Hannover, Germany. And a plan for a new school by Huff + Gooden owes a huge formal debt to Morphosis’ Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona. The proposals suggest how insular the world of avant-garde architecture can be -- not exactly the message these firms ought to be conveying as they reach out to flood-damaged neighborhoods.

What’s needed instead is architecture that connects more directly to the traditions of New Orleans -- not in its architectural styling but in its thoughtfulness about site and the possibility of natural disaster. An excellent example of that approach can be found in Bay St. Louis, Miss., about 50 miles east of New Orleans, in a house that a pair of architects, Allison and John Anderson built for themselves and their family. They moved in a month before Katrina hit.

Executed in an appealingly straightforward, essentially Modernist style, though with a butterfly roof, the house sits about 1,000 feet from the beach. It survived the hurricane almost completely intact even as many around it were destroyed. It managed to keep the house next door standing by blunting the force of the onrushing water.

A few basic design decisions lent strength to the Andersons’ house, which cost just $110 a square foot. The couple built it to meet the International Building Code, which the city of Bay St. Louis adopted after watching Hurricane Andrew batter Florida in 1992, by adding interior buttress walls and using heavy-duty structural clips connecting the foundation to the walls and the walls to the roof. They used cement-board siding and simple concrete floors, which made cleanup immeasurably easier after a wall of water 8 feet high roared through the house. (The house stands on relatively high ground -- 20 feet above sea level -- which means that the storm surge was nearly 30 feet high when it hit the front door.) They also planted a sod roof, which hadn’t fully sprouted when Katrina arrived but gave the house some extra heft and stability.

Its performance during the hurricane has brought widespread attention in the months since, which the architects consider fitting. “We built it as a sort of demonstration house anyway,” Allison Anderson says. “We wanted to show clients that you can build like this without a premium cost.”

Along with its obvious stoutness, the Andersons’ house is green, attractively contemporary, cost-efficient and entirely aware of its setting. If you were looking for a list of the qualities that post-Katrina housing in New Orleans is going to need, you could do worse than start with that one.

*

Christopher Hawthorne is The Times’ architecture critic. Contact him at calendar.letters@latimes.com.