A rendering of a home designed by Pugh + Scarpa Architecture for a project to build 150 new houses for those left homeless in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. A sun screen made of recycled wood wraps the building. (Pugh + Scarpa Architecture)
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One of the best international stories currently making the rounds in the international press has to do with movie star Brad Pitt's outstanding housing initiative in post-Katrina New Orleans. It's partly a tale of interesting residential design. But what Mr. Pitt is up to is also an example of good, realistic urban citizenship.
Architecture fans may remember that designers from around the world swooped down on New Orleans in the wake of the 2005 hurricane disaster, bringing bold and occasionally visionary plans for renewing the devastated parts of the city. The practical results of all that cogitation, however, were virtually nil. That's when Mr. Pitt decided to do something down to earth.
"Our idea was, okay, these people need help rebuilding, so let's bring in the great minds that we can find," Mr. Pitt tells a reporter in the current issue of Metropolis Magazine. Why? "Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they're still suffering that injustice. So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that's equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here."
So it was that Mr. Pitt and Hollywood producer Steve Bing put in $10-million of their own money to kick-start the non-profit housing scheme Make It Right (MIR), with the aim of providing 150 new houses for people made homeless in New Orleans' flood-ruined Lower Ninth Ward. (The foundation has so far raised another $10-million.)
Mr. Pitt then asked each of 13 architects from the United States and abroad to create a 1,200-square-foot house that would cost around $150,000 to build.
The list of architects includes international high-flyers such as Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban and James Timberlake, in addition to several less well-known firms.
MIR invites homeless deed-holders in the traditionally Afro-American Ninth Ward to engage in a process of one-on-one counselling meant to determine the client's ability to pay and available financing schemes (including MIR loans). Once approved, the client is asked to pick a house from the 13 prototypes provided by the architects.
As we find them illustrated at the MIR website (makeitrightnola.org), these model houses range in style from the quite conventional (BNIM Architects) to modernist (David Adjaye) and wackily post-modern (the Rotterdam firm MDRDV).
It will be interesting to see which of these buildings is selected by clients. Will it be BNIM's mild-mannered update of the single-storey Louisiana urban cottage? As the Metropolis reporter suggests, that's likely to be the odd-on sentimental favourite. I wonder, however, whether Mr. Adjaye's minimalist composition will find any takers. It's certainly too stark for me, and I am fond of sharply reductive modernism. And while I appreciate architectural flights of fancy, MDRDV's proposal — it looks like a shed squashed by the storm — is altogether too flippant about the devastation the Ninth Ward has endured. But that's me. What the Ninth Ward thinks of these and the other projects remains to be seen. We may all be surprised.
The prototype designed by the Los Angeles firm Pugh + Scarpa, however, strikes me as just about right for an old inner-city neighbourhood of small single-family homes. Like some other MIR projects, it alludes to a familiar New Orleans and south Louisiana architectural type: the shotgun house, one storey high and one room wide, perched on stilts to save it from rising water.
But the architects also deliver a pleasant jolt of contemporary inspiration and ecological conscience. The roofline is jaunty without being jagged, and the interior plan is attractively open and sociable. (It may be a bit too sociable for all but a single person or the smallest family. Private rooms have been minimized to encourage gathering in the central area.)
In perhaps their best design move, Pugh + Scarpa moderate the intense Louisiana sunshine with a screen made of recycled wooden planking that is wrapped around the whole building. Their comfortable little house speaks about a close-knit community, and it helps recreate a tropical streetscape where people like to stroll and congregate on front porches.
Mr. Pitt's scheme for New Orleans may just go down in American residential design history. He certainly intends it to do so. But whether or not it eventually becomes a landmark in the story of architecture, Make It Right is already a remarkable gesture of compassion toward a great injured city that deserves all the loving care it can get.
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