wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  PlanetArk 31 Aug 06
Rebuild New Orleans Wetlands, Architect Suggests
Story by Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans should embrace its watery environment and restore wetlands as it rebuilds, suggests a prize-winning architect hired to design a modernistic central park in the city's downtown.

Thom Mayne, known for maverick designs, urged New Orleans to treat the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina last year as a chance to re-imagine the city, adding both technology and a dollop of the nature that has been erased over the years.

"If you build it again, would you do it the same way?" Mayne asked. "The answer is absolutely no."

New Orleans is known for the wrought iron and stone of its narrow French Quarter streets and wooden mansions on oak-shaded Garden District avenues, both in higher areas of town.

But most of New Orleans is below sea level, and many of the areas hit hardest by Katrina were developed from land reclaimed from wetlands -- or swamps.

State officials and activists are also focused on restoring coastal wetlands to help soften the blow of future storms. Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005 and killed about 1,500 people in four states, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans, where entire neighbourhoods are still nearly empty.

Putting up fewer buildings, more densely packed with much more open space could help prevent a recurrence, Mayne said.

"What would the open space be? You could even leave huge tracts of property that would return to its original state, a swampland or the estuary, wetlands and they would become sort of future preserves, that actually would draw tourists, by the way," he mused in a phone interview from his office in Santa Monica, California. "You are literally starting over," he said.

Mayne, who last year won the Pritzker prize, architecture's highest honour, designs aggressively striking buildings of neon, steel and concrete, with moving window shades and elevators that skip floors to encourage people to visit and walk.

There is nothing resembling his work in New Orleans, where arguably the most iconic modern structure is the Superdome football stadium opened in 1975, but his firm Morphosis has been hired to design a Jazz Park that will remake the centre of downtown and he is judging a competition to build green affordable housing in the city.

NO PLAN YET

The city has not drafted a plan for the new New Orleans. It is relying on neighbourhood groups to put forth proposals that will be integrated into a master plan around the end of the year.

No neighbourhoods are off limits to rebuilding so far. Many structures were about 50 percent destroyed and are likely to be rebuilt the same way, but many are tear-downs.

Mayne urged residents and the city to avoid trying to rebuild in styles of past centuries. New Orleans has clung to its historic architectural styles in the older areas and built typical suburban housing in much of the former swamp land pumped dry over the last century.

The downtown area adjacent to the French Quarter bristles with skyscrapers that could be in any Sunbelt city. The Jazz Park plan under development would tear down some government buildings to erect a park stretching from the Superdome toward the Quarter. The four-block area could be "re-glued" with the jazz park into a "social incubator" that promotes the city's music, Mayne said.

Similarly, New Orleans should be rebuild for the current generation, he argued, comparing a modern building to a mobile phone or hybrid car -- a modern instrument made from different materials and used in a different way than past versions.

Many elements of Mayne's buildings are practical, for all their experimental look. His bells and whistles, such as metal grill window shades that move with the sun to provide the right mix of heat and light at different times of day, are intended to save costs as well as provoke interest.

In search of the practical, New Orleans could take inspiration from European skyscrapers that are surrounded by parks. Skyscrapers need less space for more people, freeing up land for forests and other needs. "It gets to be really simple -- your kids get to walk through the forest and pick berries," he said.

Estuaries preserved and recreated along the coast of southern California might be a model, he said, recalling pictures of a New Orleans wetlands before it was drained for housing. "It just startled me how beautiful it was," he said.

But Mayne was not focused on the restoration of wetlands so much as new kinds of buildings for the traditional city.

The Global Green housing competition Mayne is helping to judge could be one example of that. (Entries are at www.globalgreen.org)

Early indications from some participants showed New Orleanians may be open to newer architecture. "People can be quite open -- they just have to be part of the process," Mayne said.
links
Related articles on Global issues: general
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com