New New Orleans

In Urban Design

Until the 1890s, New Orleans was an estuary. As land developed, it was in order of its elevation from high to low. Not until the early 1960s were the lowest-lying areas of marsh and wetlands drained to accommodate housing. This type of development, coupled with the reality of rising water levels and a sinking land base, presents a serious threat, both socially and technically, not just for New Orleans but also for coastal cities around the world where man-made defenses must withstand nature’s forces in order to preserve unstable communities on inhospitable sites. These broader environmental implications require radical solutions.

Posted: Sep 7th, 2011 / Last Edited: Sep 14th, 2011 Print

Description

Until the 1890s, New Orleans was an estuary. As land developed, it was in order of its elevation from high to low. Not until the early 1960s were the lowest-lying areas of marsh and wetlands drained to accommodate housing. This type of development, coupled with the reality of rising water levels and a sinking land base, presents a serious threat, both socially and technically, not just for New Orleans but also for coastal cities around the world where man-made defenses must withstand nature’s forces in order to preserve unstable communities on inhospitable sites. These broader environmental implications require radical solutions.

The challenge for this project was immediately apparent: how do we occupy the land of the Lower Ninth Ward given its ecological condition? We developed a new urban strategy and architectural prototype to address these issues. At the micro scale, we wanted to maintain the street culture of New Orleans—the interaction among residents that has traditionally taken place at the stoop level. At the macro scale, we wanted a house that would respond to changes in its surrounding landscape by engineering it to break from the city grid and switch to emergency mode, at which time it becomes completely self-sufficient. The result is a highly performative, one-thousand-square-foot house that is technically innovative in terms of its safety factor—its ability to float—as well as its solar performance and its ability to collect water. The FLOAT house is prefabricated and as a result is socially accessible and cost-efficient. It is high quality and low cost, and it can be mass produced. In addition, the FLOAT house can detach from the city’s infrastructure to exist “off the grid” for up to twenty-one days.

We believe that this new way of occupying the terrain between land and water will reposition coastal cities like New Orleans to be at home on the edge.

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture
Until the 1890s, New Orleans was an estuary. As land developed, it was in order of its elevation from high to low. Not until the early 1960s were the lowest-lying areas of marsh and wetlands drained to accommodate housing. This type of development, coupled with the reality of rising water levels and a sinking land base, presents a serious threat, both socially and technically, not just for New Orleans but also for coastal cities around the world where man-made defenses must withstand nature’s forces in order to preserve unstable communities on inhospitable sites. These broader environmental implications require radical solutions.

The challenge for this project was immediately apparent: how do we occupy the land of the Lower Ninth Ward given its ecological condition? We developed a new urban strategy and architectural prototype to address these issues. At the micro scale, we wanted to maintain the street culture of New Orleans—the interaction among residents that has traditionally taken place at the stoop level. At the macro scale, we wanted a house that would respond to changes in its surrounding landscape by engineering it to break from the city grid and switch to emergency mode, at which time it becomes completely self-sufficient. The result is a highly performative, one-thousand-square-foot house that is technically innovative in terms of its safety factor—its ability to float—as well as its solar performance and its ability to collect water. The FLOAT house is prefabricated and as a result is socially accessible and cost-efficient. It is high quality and low cost, and it can be mass produced. In addition, the FLOAT house can detach from the city’s infrastructure to exist “off the grid” for up to twenty-one days.

We believe that this new way of occupying the terrain between land and water will reposition coastal cities like New Orleans to be at home on the edge.

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

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