After Katrina, New Urbanists make mark
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Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk launched into her talk by saying she and Andres Duany, her partner in life and work, never accept speaking engagements together.
"But for David Lewis we will," she said, calling him "the American hero of wise planning and urban design."
And so the fifth annual David Lewis Lecture began Monday night, the New Urbanists from Miami honoring the old urbanist from Pittsburgh via England via South Africa. Sponsored by the firm Lewis founded 42 years ago, Downtown-based Urban Design Associates, it was presented to a house full of architecture students at Carnegie Lecture Hall in Oakland. The white-haired legendary lion himself, 84 now and only recently retired from teaching, sat with his wife Judith near the front row. His UDA partner, Ray Gindroz, noted that when Mr. Lewis came to Pittsburgh fresh out of the University of Leeds in 1962, it was on a freighter by way of Cuba.
"He delivered a talk which electrified Carnegie Tech students because it connected people with design," Mr. Gindroz said. In those days, the idea of an architect engaging regular folk in the design process was revolutionary.
Ms. Plater-Zyberk and her Cuban-born husband were in town to talk about their firm's post-Katrina work in Mississippi and New Orleans, where they involved regular folk in the plans for rebuilding, or tried to. Their Mississippi design charrette, for which they gathered 110 New Urbanists from around the country, had to make do with 70 public officials as local folk, because residents had scattered.
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., shorthanded to DPZ, had experience in the Hurricane Andrew rebuilding in the Miami-Dade region and a national reputation for designing new, walkable communities like Florida's Seaside. So when they offered to bring their New Urbanist pals to Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour accepted.
Because they already shared basic principles, the New Urbanists were able to work together quickly, if not without external controversy. They broke up into teams and designed plans for 11 towns that would be built not where they had been -- everything had been swept away or flattened -- but where the Katrina wave stopped.
Criticism came from critics and architects fundamentally opposed to New Urbanism, which they believe encourages sprawl and regimented design.
Duany said he "was able to deal with it by saying, 'Who has the most experience?' " in staging charrettes and creating pattern books, which were developed for Mississippi by UDA.
"Every place that we dealt with was in deep trouble before the hurricane," Mr. Duany said. "There were towns that flooded every single year," so they introduced "Florida engineering": raising the land by digging canals.
To satisfy the urgent need for housing, they designed simple cottages and hired Lowe's to provide all the components in a single package.
"The 'Katrina cottage' we generated when we heard FEMA trailers were costing $70,000 to $110,000" and were disposable, he said. After Hurricane Andrew's well-built trailers hung around so long they were considered blight, FEMA began building them more cheaply. Now they're falling apart.
Because "$70,000 can easily buy a fantastic house," the Katrina cottages, with kitchen/living room, bedroom and porch, can be permanent and added on to over time.
Of the 11 towns in Mississippi, eight are moving forward with their New Urbanist plans. Biloxi flat-out rejected theirs.
"Biloxi's mayor fought any kind of design or aesthetic control," Ms. Plater-Zyberk said.
In New Orleans, Mr. Duany has confidence in the new levees.
"New Orleans is in a tub that will hold," he said. But "those who come back will inhabit sparsely for many, many years." He believes about 25 percent of the people eventually will return, despite severe labor shortages for rebuilding. To encourage community, they took inspiration from James Oglethorpe's 1770 plan for Savannah and placed houses around squares.
What to do with the existing houses? In St. Bernard Parish, there are eight ways to rebuild depending on the style and era of the house. Some older houses anticipated frequent flooding and were built to be hosed down and dried out. Shotgun houses and McMansions can be raised on stilts. One-story houses built on slabs can add a second floor for living. Houses from the 1950s are too outdated and not worth the reinvestment, Mr. Duany said.
The planning continues; they will hold a charrette for Downtown New Orleans in two weeks.
With a "smart code" that encourages mixed use, public transit and walking, New Orleans could be the city of the future. But he's concerned about making it too perfect and losing a culture that depends on leisure time, so he's advocating a "code-free zone" where people can build their own houses.
"New Orleans gets a bad rap" for crime and incompetence, Mr. Duany said. But one day, "as I was walking down a street I had this vision that I was in Havana. Once you realize it's a Caribbean city, you realize it's the best Caribbean city."
First Published October 11, 2006 12:00 am
