Heroes Fiddle While Home Burns

Post-Katrina New Orleans - Illustration © 2006 Tulane University Magazine

WE'RE coming up on 1 year and 3 months since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city that time forgot. Almost two-thirds of the former residents of the city still have not returned, and many areas of the city continue to lack services as fundamental as working traffic lights. Houses sit empty, because few house payments have been made by FEMA, Louisiana and the insurance companies.

The School of Architecture at Tulane University should be a center of the rebuilding of its great city. Instead, its Dean, who wrote a much-ridiculed article entitled Black Like Me (photo above), is on TV hosting a program designing "the future" of New York, a city so thriving that apartments routinely sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. Still to come are programs on Los Angeles and Chicago, two more cities overflowing with people so eager to be in them that the cities have rarely looked better or had better economies.

Of course Tulane does devote time to the present in New Orleans as well. You can see links to some of the efforts here, like Project New Orleans. But the current avant-garde ideologies of the architectural establishment make them ineffective and even counter productive. The Dean was so outspoken in his cries for avant garde solutions (and his disdain for those who disagreed, like Governor Blanco), that he was forced to resign his position on Mayor Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission.

The Project New Orleans show of "all" student work doesn't include traditional designs from students at the University of Miami (where I'm teaching this semester) and Notre Dame (where I'm teaching next semester). And having been banished from the real work going on in New Orleans, the Dean organized an architectural think fest in Amsterdam (of all places) and ArtForum. In the public forum of New Orleans, the work sank like a stone.

The latest news is that Mayor Nagin, often criticized for moving too slowly and doing too little, has listened to the architects who say that what New Orleans needs in its year of crisis is more avant garde architecture. Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and other celebrities are being brought in to "reinvent the Crescent" and help make New Orleans safe for developers who want to build big glass boxes. The myth of the Howard-Roark-style architectural hero lives on, despite five decades of ego-driven invention making our cities worse places to live.

Will Starchitects be the salvation of New Orleans? Or are Modern architects squabbling about style instead of rebuilding the city?