What They Want, What They'll Get

A Rendering for the Biloxi Plan from the New Urban Charrette
And A Rendering Of A Condo Approved By Variance Yesterday

ONE OF THE THINGS the academics and starchitects criticizing the New Urban plans for the Gulf Coast of Mississippi don't realize is the difference between architectural design and urban design. When making emergency plans for towns devastated by a hurricane, the starchitects can't sit down and design 8,000 new buildings. But instead of trying to custom design entire towns, the urbanist designs blocks, streets and squares — the public realm — and then uses codes and urban building typologies to produce predictable and desirable results.

At Ground Zero, most of the starchitects competing in the final round designed unusual custom buildings and then fit the streets around them. The winner, Daniel Liebeskind, designed normal New York blocks and streets, and that's one of the main reasons he won — New York developers recognized they could work with his blocks. But instead of coding the buildings on the blocks, Liebeskind drew his own quirky designs, which the same developers simply ignored. The results are miserable.

The designs shown above are for Biloxi, Mississippi, where most of the Gulf Coast casinos are. As a result, while most of the Gulf towns have no money for rebuilding, Biloxi is under heavy pressure from casino owners and other developers, who are offering relatively high prices for small houses. These they'll tear down and replace with the tallest buildings they can persuade the city to build. Since most of the owners of the ruined houses still haven't seen any insurance money (four months after the hurricane) and know the FEMA regulations will be a mess that may not be straightened out for another year, many are happy to sell.

Thus Biloxi may end up the only one of the eleven towns and cities in the charrette that doesn't adopt the New Urban codes, and it may get a lot of mediocre buildings like the one pictured above (approved under the old zoning with a variance for size). But if the academics and starchitects had their way and got to plan the Gulf, the majority of the towns and cities would get equally mediocre results. The architectural establishment simply isn't set up to produce towns and cities full of buildings, and they have no idea how to do it. The biggest problem with their criticism of the New Urban charrette is that they offer no alternative.

BTW, there is no reason why the New Urban blocks and streets can't contain simple Modernist versions of the building typologies, like the ones in the charrette by Allison Anderson, John Anderson and Tony Sease. Or more complex ones by starchitects like Frank Gehry, who already has a new museum in Biloxi (of course after Katrina threw a casino barge as big as the mueum at it, it wasn't always easy to tell what Gehry designed and what Katrina deconstructed).