| As we go to press, a potentially devastating hurricane, Rita, is headed for the Texas or Louisiana coast, and millions of people are evacuating their homes. Less than a month before Rita, Katrina destroyed coastal towns and cities and flooded New Orleans, one of America’s most beloved cities, killing more than a thousand people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
While such a double calamity is rare, disasters of epic proportions have occurred before in US history — the 1871 Chicago fire, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the often overlooked 1927 Mississippi flood all come to mind. All of these occurred prior to disaster insurance or FEMA, yet somehow our ancestors managed to rebuild cities, towns, neighborhoods, houses, and their lives.
Even as lives are being saved and hundreds of thousands of families remain homeless, we can and should look to the future. After every one of the catastrophes from 1871 to 1927, our ancestors not only replaced what was lost, they generally built it back better than it was before.
Today, though, we have lost our confidence to create settlements of the quality that we once were able to build. Sure, we can build houses, stores, and businesses. But how can we imagine rebuilding New Orleans — an architectural and cultural jewel that draws tourists from the world over — better than it was before? How can we replace the old houses that were lost in Biloxi, Gulfport, and other communities?
HERE'S HOW
We learn from the past and combine those lessons with our powers of observation and creativity to find the best way to move forward. That doesn’t mean copying the past, but it does mean being unafraid to plunder its riches. That’s called tradition, a time-honored method of looking first to see what problems have already been solved and using those ideas creatively. New ideas can be tried when they appear superior to the old, when the old solutions don’t quite fit, or even for the hell of it. But when we refuse to look at the past, when old ideas are dismissed merely because they are old, we have lost our way.
Yet that’s precisely the approach advocated by many of the architectural elite. National Public Radio recently interviewed Reed Kroloff, dean of architecture at Tulane and former editor of Architecture magazine, about rebuilding New Orleans. Kroloff warned of the “terrible danger” of New Urbanism. “Some of what they talk about is terrific,” he said. “But it’s wrapped far too often in this treacly, sugarcoated, neoprecious architecture that tries to recreate your grandmother’s hometown for no reason, other than that Americans are just besotted on historicism.”
When Kroloff says “historicism,” he doesn’t mean the million houses that are built each year with vaguely traditional architecture. They don’t qualify as historicism, because there is little or no history in the design of tract houses. It’s only when someone actually does research and elevates the quality of traditional architecture that Kroloff and others like him become upset. So this is really an attack on learning from the past.
And that’s why Kroloff dislikes New Urbanism. It has rejected the delusional belief in the creative genius — the position that new design ideas are always superior to tradition, both functionally and morally. This belief — call it the Howard Roark syndrome — is particularly dangerous when dealing with the powerless, be they the poor, the homeless hurricane victims, or both, in the case of many of New Orleans’ displaced.
Remember Pruitt-Igoe, the award-winning low-income modernist housing complex in St. Louis that was demolished as uninhabitable two decades later. New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast are being rebuilt for their citizens, not for the architectural elite.
This article is available in the October/November issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |