A newer Orleans: six proposals.

LAST FALL, when Artforum invited several prominent thinkers to contribute essays on subjects they considered of unique importance to our cultural moment, architect and historian Denise Scott Brown seized on a matter still fresh in the collective conscious: the rebuilding of New Orleans. "Even by the criteria of realism," she observed of the staggering task, "we will have to be visionary." As weeks and then months passed and still no vision for New Orleans's future emerged--locally or in Washington, DC--we were prompted by Brown's assertion to wonder what an art magazine might do to stimulate the conversation. With this in mind, we turned to REED KROLOFF, dean of the Tulane University School of Architecture in New Orleans, and AARON BETSKY, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, in hopes of soliciting innovative proposals for a city whose predicament, while singular, forces a reconsideration of urbanism well beyond the Big Easy. In the six projects that follow--by American and Dutch architectural firms, all selected by Kroloff and Betsky (MVRDV, HUFF + GOODEN, UN STUDIO, MORPHOSIS, WEST 8, and HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES)--the rebuilding of New Orleans is approached with a mind toward feasibility. And yet it is immediately clear that such "realism" has profound implications for our ideas about the shaping of community and social exchange, as well as about the necessary restructuring of metropolitan economies in the context of continuing globalization. What appears in Artforum's pages is merely the initial outline of each proposal--a more comprehensive presentation is the subject of a related exhibition at the NAI (through March 12), curated by EMILIANO GANDOLFI--and one must acknowledge the tacit unlikelihood of these projects being embraced by the public agencies and private developers who are ultimately responsible for New Orleans's revitalization. Nevertheless, we present these six visions--some broad, others quite specific--in the spirit of possibility and in a long-standing tradition of collaborative, idealistic endeavors in the arts, which have in previous eras provided the germ of inspiration for public works.--The Editors

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After the Flood

DESCRIBING THE AFTERMATH of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is difficult because it involves such a massive scale of destruction. But imagine it this way, and perhaps you'll get some sense of things.

Let's assume the town where you live just suffered the same kind of catastrophe. You decide to go for a walk to assess the damage. How bad is it? Well, every house on your street is abandoned. All the trees are dead (even those still standing); so are the bushes, lawns, shrubs, and any other landscaping. The streets around you are littered with debris--furniture, bedding, clothes, large and small appliances, art, books, personal papers. Cars sit in driveways, on sidewalks, in yards, on trees, on top of each other, anywhere and everywhere. They're covered, inside and out, in a fine layer of silt, and they stink. The streets are covered in the same toxic grime. So are the yards, which makes them look even more dead, almost ghostly. Houses have their windows bashed in, their doors missing, and much of their interiors torn apart. So do stores and offices and schools and hospitals and libraries and fire stations. Every building has a horizontal stripe along its facade at a height ranging from two to eight feet, depending on the area where you're walking; that line is the flood's high-water mark.

It looks as if the place has been abandoned for years. But it hasn't been: People lived here just a few months ago.

You walk and you walk and you walk. Past blocks of empty houses and abandoned businesses and boarded-up stores and churches with broken steeples. You keep on walking, and still the destruction doesn't stop. It's there no matter how far you go. Walk for an hour, two hours, three hours. You're still in it. How far? Well, if you headed east from the western edge of Orleans Parish, you could walk for five or six hours easily and still be in the killing fields. But you'd want to turn back before then, as by 4:00 PM the sun starts to set. And you don't want to get caught in the part of town (nearly 50 percent) that still doesn't have electricity or streetlights (or water or gas). These neigh-borhoods are spooky in the daytime. At night, the absolute darkness is terrifying. There's nothing out there. No lights. No people. No police. No sound. No horizon. No hope.

How much of New Orleans remains abandoned and uninhabitable? Right now, more than 70 percent. Think about that. What would it be like if you removed the people from two-thirds of your town? Think about Manhattan with no one living below Ninety-sixth Street. Slice most of the peninsula off San Francisco. Go ahead and empty Oakland and Berkeley as well. Throw in Marin County for good measure. If the footprint of New Orleans's devastation were laid over Washington, DC, the capital would all but vanish.

New Orleans is going to be a mess for a long time. And that's the context against which any rebuilding will begin. That's why Artforum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Tulane School of Architecture commissioned the work you see here. Simply put, this city needs bright visions to contrast with the bleak present that surrounds us. We need to see that there are alternatives to the calamitous inattention (or worse, attention) of the US government. We need inspiration and innovation, glimpses into a promising and expressive future.

Of course, New Orleans has long mined its past for spiritual--and economic--succor. And why not, in the city that invented jazz, perfected Creole cooking, and laced its streets with a breathtaking collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture? Some would have us believe our only future lies in that past. In neighboring Mississippi, the Congress for the New Urbanism, led by the irrepressible Andres Duany (of Seaside, Florida, fame), recently completed an extensive design charrette to provide guidance to that state, equally hard hit by the storm. The result is a neo-traditional plan book that is quaint and predictable, but also smart and marketable. It pictures the new southern Mississippi as a candy-coated dream version of the old southern Mississippi, the past as prelude, present, and future, thanks very much, and we'll take a dozen to go.

The New Urbanist Svengalis have now seduced Louisiana's hapless governor and been given the keys to the state. But the real goal, the very city on which their movement is based, is New Orleans. And until now, no one has offered an alternative to their toothache of a future. The proposals you see here, in the pages that follow, thus inaugurate an important dialogue. They bring fresh new vision to a city waiting to hear that its greatest days are not behind it, that it has an architectural future that will stride confidently beyond its past.

REED KROLOFF IS DEAN OF THE TULANE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

REED KROLOFF

Sites Unseen

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Faced with the overwhelming devastation of New Orleans, architects, urban planners, and civil engineers around the world have for months now been asking themselves that obvious question--and others implied by this confrontation between man-made form and nature. Can the art of building solve problems created not by nature alone but by the very ways in which we have historically tried to conquer its potent forces? And on a more practical level, can architecture provide structures that are more logical, just, and useful than those now seemingly ordained by the economic and political powers that be (and not just in the Big Easy)? These, at any rate, were the questions we asked ourselves as the possible contours of a rebuilt New Orleans began to emerge from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The situation in New Orleans, it seemed to us, was only an extreme instance of the quandary in which architecture in general finds itself. When the economic "realities" imposed on us by relentless market forces compel the proliferation of nonplaces leached of any individual or social meaning or coherence, how is architecture to respond? When the aim of building is merely to achieve the highest possible return on the smallest possible investment in the shortest amount of time, and when the very notion that urban development should be anchored by common services and communal spaces has all but disappeared, there seems little for architecture to do beyond slapping up prefab high-rises, cloning glass-and-steel office towers, and providing basic shelter for the masses (not to mention the occasional escapist fantasy for those who can afford it). But now, with the rebuilding of an entire city on the line, don't we need at least to ask whether architecture can do more?

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In New Orleans the greatest immediate need would seem to be for housing. Yet the provision of adequate dwellings for the displaced is not an activity in which architecture can play a role beyond making sure those houses are safe and sound and more or less aesthetically pleasing. Where the housing will be, how much of it there will be, how much it is likely to cost, and who will live there is currently being decided by politicians and, no doubt, real-estate interests.

Architects are assisting in the design of new housing, but no one seems to be asking why anybody would return to New Orleans in the first place, let alone what they would do once they came back. The question "What will the new New Orleans be?" is hardly an idle one. Cities around the world are today engaged in ruthless competition: Every urban area needs its "unique selling points," and when a city builds infrastructure it does so not just to improve the lives of its inhabitants but also to attract investment. New Orleans had been losing this battle for quite some time. After a period of growth as the service hub for the Gulf Coast oil industry, it began ceding energy-sector and shipping jobs to Houston and other cities in the region long before Katrina brought the city's economic life to a standstill. The only revenue producer New Orleans had managed to maintain was tourism, but it struggled to expand that industry's base beyond the lure of the French Quarter's mythic libertine attractions. Old New Orleans was in decline. Katrina turned that gradual--and, to those who never ventured into the poorer wards, elegant--decay into catastrophe. Why would anyone come back?

New Orleans is now clearly, in all likelihood irrevocably, one of the world's "shrinking cities"--large metropolitan areas that emerged in earlier stages of industrialization and have now lost their economic base and a significant portion of their population. Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo are prominent examples in the United States, the Ruhr Valley the best-known European instance. What is interesting is the fact that nature is coming back in many of these areas--by default in the US and by design in Europe. The vast voids left by deindustrialization and depopulation are turning back into forest and field. In Germany, old ironworks are being converted into beautifully landscaped parks, such as the one in Duisburg-Nord (1999). As these shrinking cities nevertheless continue to sprawl into the far suburbs, turning more and more nature into miasmic built form, nature is returning into the innercity, and it can draw people back to these burned-out cores. At the same time, old cities still retain the legacy of their past achievements, in the forms of museums, concert halls, movie palaces, universities, libraries, historic mansions, and other cultural attractors that cannot easily be moved. Finally, old city neighborhoods that have held on to their historical character become attractive again because of their density and their closeness to cultural amenities. And herein lie the elements for the rebirth of cities: new nature, old culture, and strong communities.

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We believe that these elements can also help New Orleans transform itself into a successful Newer Orleans--a smaller, more compact, and more beautiful city that would use its natural setting and cultural heritage to enhance viable neighborhoods and attract both new businesses and residents. To test this hypothesis and to provide concrete instances of what such a Newer Orleans might look like, we asked six architecture firms to consider these three core elements. We asked one Dutch and one American firm each to address the issues of how architecture could facilitate community, create an urban icon to house the city's cultural patrimony, and provide a way of connecting the city back to its landscape.

The decision to make this a Dutch-American effort was in part pragmatic, as the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Dutch Ministries of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment (VROM), Economic Affairs (EZ), and Transport, Public Works, and Water Management (V & W) supported the project. But at the same time we recognized that Dutch architecture has in the past few decades developed a conceptual approach to building that might be appropriate to the rethinking of New Orleans. The Dutch have become very good at seeing architecture not as the production of autonomous objects but as the gathering of information about a site, the reconsideration of forms from the past, and the application of technologies from other fields. These designers then synthesize the results of this amassing of material without direct reference to the immediate surroundings or surface issues like client programs. Instead, they use "deep planning" methods to understand the underlying issues at hand and in the end produce forms that articulate new structures of coherence. Thus Rem Koolhaas (the best-known proponent of this manner of working) can rethink the very idea of a library and produce the crystalline Seattle Public Library (2004). Furthermore, half of the Netherlands lies no more than a few feet above sea level--and significant portions lie below it. Dutch architects and engineers--who, after all, built the most complex system of dikes, levees, canals, and pumping stations in the world--are, then, well attuned to the difficulties New Orleans faces at a time when global climate change is raising sea levels and making weather patterns less predictable.

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American architects, on the other hand, are particularly good at producing strong forms. They know how to make iconic structures, from skyscrapers to mansions that stand tall and proud, showing off the wealth and skill that went into producing them. At their best, American architects can call up a legacy of craft and inventiveness to produce forms that amaze us with their beauty and interior spaces that awe us. And they do this while proclaiming the importance of the new and yet respecting the old. Frank Gehry may look as if he is producing forms out of nothing, but he is able to do this only because he is a master at controlling site, scale, material, and space.

These are, of course, broad generalizations, but they nevertheless describe general tendencies that have arisen from particular cultural traditions and economic realities. We sought to draw on the strengths of each to come up with new forms for New Orleans, on three different scales. On a local level, we asked two architects to design a new community focus for an impoverished ward separated from the Superdome (still under renovation due to storm damage) by a highway. In this neighborhood, Katrina only completed the disintegration caused by poverty, neglect, the breakdown of social structures, and the impact of drug use. Here, as in most inner-city neighborhoods, schools are--ironically, given the widespread failure of urban American public schools--the only mechanisms by which inhabitants can hope to escape. When schools work, they are havens that can create possibilities in the constricted world in which they are situated. Schools are not just places of education; they are community halls, meal programs, health-care providers, counseling centers, and even shelters in times of disaster.

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We solicited a proposal from MVRDV (Winy Maas, Nathalie de Vries, Jacob van Rijs), a Rotterdam firm with an international practice, which has distinguished itself through the design of compact, seemingly simple volumes that are extremely complex in their spatial configuration. At the same time, the architects are not afraid to break open those boxes, cantilevering living rooms out of apartment buildings and breaking up rows of houses to create a village of brightly colored pavilions rather than the more typical cookie-cutter suburban housing development. They have extended their formal investigations in theoretical treatises like their recent KM3: Excursions on Capacity (ACTAR, 2006), which begins with the premise that human and natural resources should be more rationally distributed. For the New Orleans project they responded to a child's drawing of a hill in the middle of the floodwaters by designing a stack of school and community spaces that would also be higher ground should the floods return. We also invited Huff + Gooden Architects, a young African-American firm based in Charleston, South Carolina, and New York (Ray Huff and Mario Gooden are the principals) to look at this project from their perspective. Huff + Gooden is only nine years old and does not have a great deal of built work to its name. However, the firm's imaginative schemes for a History and Science Museum in Charleston (design completed 1998) and the Degaussing Office Building (design completed 2001) show the versatility of the firm's work, which responds to a given setting with strong and memorable form. In a design for a house commissioned to replace one destroyed by Hurricane Hugo, Huff + Gooden combined traditional craft with abstract shapes to create a simple yet forceful object. The sleek and angular school buildings they put forward here would stand as a symbol of hope in a devastated neighborhood.

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On a citywide scale--where the question becomes "How one can turn the metropolis's cultural legacy into a physical attractor?"--we proposed erecting a new "mediatheque," or multimedia library, for downtown New Orleans. Long before Katrina, Mayor C. Ray Nagin had been advocating for a new public library downtown, and we thought the disaster might be the impetus for this dream finally to come to fruition in a project that would integrate new technologies with the storehouse of knowledge the city shelters. Such a public building at the core of New Orleans's downtown would argue for the importance of a shared identity--in a way that the anonymous office buildings and hotels currently there do not. The mediatheque would fulfill the role courthouses and city halls once did, while plugging the city's residents into larger networks of knowledge.

We turned first to Dutch architect Ben van Berkel. His firm, UN (United Network) Studio, has long been a proponent of "deep planning," and the firm's manner of working has been to begin by gathering large amounts of data and then to mold them, with the help of the computer, into iconic form. UN Studio is currently designing a new train station at Arnhem, the Netherlands, and the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart (2006). Van Berkel has become increasingly interested in the cultural implications of form, investigating how masses and volumes seemingly the product of mathematical formulas can have a deeper human resonance. For the mediatheque, UN Studios chose to reference age-old memorials and monuments, revitalizing them by deploying current technologies to create both a symbolic and an actual place for New Orleanians to access their culture. We also called on Thom Mayne and his Los Angeles-based studio, Morphosis. Winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize, Mayne has long been known for expressive forms that seem to rise with a machinic force from the ground to create jagged and jarring spatial enclosures. Yet his structures have always been shaped by an attempt to understand and open up existing urban conditions. The Diamond Ranch High School (1999) in Pomona, California, for instance, is an extrusion of its hillside into angled buildings that also stand as larger versions of the small tract homes huddled below the school. Mayne is trained as an urban designer as well as an architect, and his interests have lately returned to the question of how we can unfold the city itself into new forms. He had already been asked by a private developer to make a proposal for New Orleans and thus could use our mediatheque project as a way of testing his ideas for the city.

Finally, at the scale of the delta landscape, we asked two designers trained as landscape architects to reconsider New Orleans's largest public open space, City Park. This popular spot for gathering, recreation, and culture was completely destroyed by Katrina, with most of its vegetation drowned or killed by salt water. We thought this might be a place where New Orleanians could not only come together but also come to a renewed knowledge of and relationship with the delta's landscape. The park is located adjacent to one of the city's major canals and connected to a larger system of green spaces that are or could be in turn connected with the infrastructure that allows human beings to inhabit a region that is, essentially, an enormous swamp.

Adriaan Geuze, of the Dutch landscape firm West 8, is a trained horticulturist but works as a landscape architect, urban designer, and artist. He has been at the forefront of the argument that design must be enlisted to address global warming. Living and working in the Netherlands--70 percent of which would be inundated were a major flood to occur--he has proposed making a place for water and integrating it into planning, rather than trying to resist it with dams and dikes in a Sisyphean struggle against nature. His inventive landscape architecture and planning has combined disparate elements and forms to make us aware of the artificiality even of what we think of as nature, while reinvigorating the city with a sense of play. In rethinking City Park, Geuze drew on his experience with water in the landscape to create a park that is a miniature of the whole delta and includes a new river as well as a water memorial. Similarly, American landscape architect George Hargreaves has been a pioneer in bringing back a sense of the natural setting so often "buried" underneath urban patterns. In San Jose, California, for example, he revealed the long-neglected Guadalupe River--the waterway that had once been the city's raison d'etre but had become little more than a sewer and a flood risk--turning it into a linear park that reconnected this sprawling city's various neighborhoods and natural biotopes (1998). He employed a similar strategy for Crissy Field (2001), the park he designed at the base of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and for the site of the Sydney Olympics (2000). Making us aware of where we are and building with nature to reconnect us to that site has been at the core of Hargreaves's work, and this is precisely his firm's approach to City Park. Hargreaves Associates proposes using the rebuilding and improvement of New Orleans's water infrastructure as an organizational element for new public spaces.

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We gave our six design teams one month to produce their ideas for a Newer Orleans. The results appearing in the pages that follow are offered not as polished proposals or completed plans but as images and forms meant to trigger discussion and widen the scope of possibilities for New Orleans's resurrection. All six projects seek to reconnect the city's residents to one another, to their city, and to their landscape. They seek to house a sense of community, attract attention and activity, and make the landscape visible. They propose a shared space, both physical and mental, around which the city could organize itself in a meaningful manner. And in so doing, they not only suggest an architecture for a Newer Orleans but also point out potential ways for making all of us at home in an increasingly alien world.

AARON BETSKY IS DIRECTOR OF THE NETHERLANDS ARCHITECTURE INSTITUTE IN ROTTERDAM. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

COMMUNITY

MVRDV

MVRDV HAS TAKEN a drawing made by a girl in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as the psychological blueprint for a new school to be located in a blighted downtown neighborhood wiped out in the deluge. "She drew this hill with people walking up to the top, escaping from the flood," the architects write. "It had something religious as well as sentimental to it, but its simplicity was highly appealing. Perhaps we should build and realize her dream." To this end, they perform a kind of reverse archaeology, embedding an irregular pile of long, rectangular spaces in an artificial landscape. The shapes of the spaces recall the shoebox configuration of the traditional shotgun houses that once filled the quarter, suggesting a metaphorical reuse of detritus. At the same time, they form a reinhabited heap of debris that rises, quite literally in the accompanying images, above the section line drawn by the waters across the city. All of the crucial program elements--classrooms, library, and community center--are situated above sea level: The high ground created by the hill provides refuge from future floods.

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These spaces fan out from a wedge-shaped core that opens toward the sky and is roofed by, of all things, a skateboard ramp studded with skylights. The landscape itself is broken by the brightly colored interior volumes, which nose out of the ground like flotsam buried in a dune to form wide verandas overlooking the neighborhood. A sheltered basketball court is cut into the eastern slope, adjacent to a small playground that runs gently down toward the existing grade below. A funicular (so much more fun than an elevator), a lower-level parking garage, and steep paths provide access to the mound and the structures inside, weaving their geometries into the surrounding street grid.

The building is permeated with a sense of whimsy underpinned by an acknowledgment of the terrible events that took place here. MVRDV realizes that "it can look as if we are vultures, going around the world circling above possible disasters to find new commissions," and has tempered its architecture with a restraint that is somewhat uncharacteristic of the group. The firm's project, they say, "is landscape, maybe not architecture"--a modest reformulation of a vital piece of local infrastructure, meant both to revitalize a community and serve as a safe haven should the levees ever fail again.*

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COMMUNITY

Huff + Gooden

New Orleans is a city where style has always been intimately linked to the substance of culture. In a place where funerals are a public spectacle, why should the act of reconstruction be wholly determined by a sense of pragmatic functionalism? Huff + Gooden suggests that a reconstructed Big Easy without the flash may as well be postwar Berlin. In the firm's design for a new school, community center, and adjacent housing the architects bring some life back to a ruined environment.

The proposed structure is a sprawling, crystalline object. Glassy fragments cantilever across roads and public spaces, attempting, in the architects' words, "to catalyze an infrastructure that seeks to spatialize the cultural landscape within the urban fabric." What this means, quite literally, is that the form of the building reaches out of the traditional spatial envelopes that tend to define urban development--setback lines, zoning envelopes, street corridors, and pedestrian walkways--and interpenetrates them, reorganizing the localized flow of people and energy.

The inclusion of housing alongside the school and center extends the scheme's public vision into the private realm, involving all aspects of the community in the act of regeneration. The aim is to "support relationships in the cultural landscape as well as to be a place of education." Implied is a challenge to established authorities and practices, a rejection of the normative urban planning that, in an earlier era, helped create the conditions that would leave thousands of people without food, shelter, or hope. Given that, as Huff + Gooden points out, the previously existing infrastructure in New Orleans served largely to wall the neighborhood in and cut it off from downtown, what would be the point of rebuilding it?

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The new building also functions as an aspirational object in a down-at-the-heels part of town: It is intended to represent the possibility of a richer (intellectually or otherwise) life to the adults and children who will use it every day. By proposing such a building, Huff + Gooden calls into question the unarticulated hierarchy of architectural production in the United States, which usually dictates that Santa Monica gets Frank Gehry while South Central LA has to make do with the local school construction authority.

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URBAN ICON

UN Studio

UN STUDIO PROPOSES a twenty-first-century library for a Newer Orleans. "Our vision is to understand the building as a tool for reestablishing a balanced ecology between culture and commerce, neighborhoods and larger units," the designers say, putting forward a complex structure that attempts to reconcile the many dichotomies of the pre-Katrina city.

For inspiration they look to the archetypal ziggurat, a stepped pyramid form that recurs in cultures across the globe (thus belonging to none exclusively)--transforming it into an irregular zigzag of linear volumes wrapped in a crystalline glass skin. As the form twists upward, it creates both interior spaces and exterior greenswards, alternately becoming of, in, and outside the natural landscape in a way that rebuts any contention that the rebuilders of a city must choose sides in a struggle between humans and their environment.

Functionally, the building aspires to facilitate the capture and exchange of all types of data, incorporating media stacks, city offices, assembly spaces, classrooms, exhibition halls, even cafes and gardens. Areas with different needs are segregated according to their access to daylight, storage being housed on the undersides of the canted volumes and occupied zones falling at upper edges where sun is abundant. UN Studio imagines it as an urban "attractor" in a new local network of such attractors that create and manage a reenergized flow of people and information through the urban fabric. This idea that architecture forms nodes in a kind of psychographic network, and that these nodes can, if properly designed, function as amplifiers of a cultural signal implies (for good or ill) that good planning is never enough to spur successful redevelopment. The Newer Orleans may be shaped by urban planners and civil engineers but ultimately depends on architects to bring it to life.

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Like much recent Dutch architecture, UN Studio's building does not shoehorn a diverse program into a rigidly defined platonic container. Taking a cue instead from developmental biology, the proposed design allows the program elements to develop into three-dimensional space organically, supported by an exterior structural membrane, expressing the complexity of its contents without reservation. This is a communal space for a modern city, a mediatheque, or, in UN Studio's words, "a type of 'playground,' not a territory one holds or possesses but rather a setting that people transiently share." At the most basic level, UN Studio's approach denies the slide toward privatization and compartmentalization that marks the recent history of many American cities, and suggests that when a city's most prominent public space--the Superdome--has been transformed into a symbol of neglect and despair, people need more than a metaphorical roof over their heads.

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URBAN ICON

Morphosis

GROWTH, IN ALL ITS GUISES, is the one unquestioned imperative in almost every formulation of American civil ideology. To propose a scheme of meaningful retrenchment as the blueprint for the rebuilding of New Orleans, as Thom Mayne and Morphosis do in these pages, is a daring, even defiant approach. They point out that "the city, even three years out, will have lost 50 percent of its population, and given the general assumption of uncertainty, the city realistically can neither rebuild infrastructure nor resume services at pre-Katrina levels." They accept these facts at face value, stating that "contraction can provide an opportunity to radically transform and improve an urban system," and see in them an opportunity to refashion a sustainable metropolitan fabric better able to nurture its remaining citizens and withstand the hurricanes that will find their way across the Gulf of Mexico in the decades to come.

The scheme is based on four simple propositions. The first is to abandon the low-lying areas of the city to nature, either by using them as parks or letting them revert to wetlands. The second is to restore and revitalize existing housing on high ground to provide homes for those most in need (and, of course, willing to return). The third is to designate specific areas of new, high-density development adjacent to existing waterways and highways, in the regions shown in deep orange on the plan to the right.

The fourth and perhaps most crucial proposal is to create a new City Hall district as a kind of cultural precinct linked to the rest of the city by light-rail and dominated by a "Great Park" that will form a series of public forums adjacent to the existing Superdome. This reinvigorated urban core would incorporate a jazz museum and performance venues, educational buildings, as well as city offices, high-rise residential towers, commercial space, and underground parking. Akin in spirit to the Potsdamer Platz section of Berlin, the vision reflects the belief that open public spaces, anchored by cultural and civic institutions, are the bedrock of civic life. The idea may hardly be new--as anyone who has walked on the National Mall in Washington, DC, may observe--yet it has gotten short shrift in late-twentieth-century urban landscapes dominated by private development.

History teaches us that even the greatest of cities live cyclical lives, expanding and contracting as wars, plague, and natural forces ebb and flow. A visitor to Rome in the Middle Ages would have found goats grazing in the Forum and the Colosseum used as a quarry. Whether visitors to New Orleans a hundred years hence will find picturesque ruins, Houston-like urban sprawl, or Morphosis's vision of a smaller, vibrant twenty-first-century metropolis remains an unanswerable question.

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LANDSCAPE

West 8

NEW ORLEANS'S FAMOUS fifteen-hundred-acre City Park was ravaged by Katrina, its plants and trees killed by saline ocean waters and soil poisoned by the toxic brew that festered for months after the floods. In response, West 8 proposes not an image of this public space reconstructed in a far and uncertain future, but rather a holistic, three-phase restoration of the devastated landscape today.

In recognition of the fact that conditions in New Orleans remain dire, the plan first calls for the City Park's use as a staging area for continuing recovery, placing temporary housing at the east and west ends of the park while reserving critical space for community functions and the deployment of military personnel. The second phase depends on thousands of volunteers, who are to plant two million trees and dig a network of streams and drainage ditches. These new watercourses link to a renewed and expanded, meandering body of water--called the Jordan, with all the name's associations with rebirth--that empties into Lake Pontchartrain. "The trees," West 8 explains, "together with a sustainable water system will clean the soil of the park within a period of one to two years. The citizens of New Orleans are asked to work together with people from all over the world, offering a symbol of hope and renewal." If this plan seems far-fetched, recall that during the Great Depression the federal government employed more than twenty thousand men and women through the WPA to build bridges, a garden, and a stadium, as well as to dig more than ten miles of lagoons by hand in this very same park.

The third phase will finally see the regenerated landscape's transformation into "the best expression of the pride and dignity of New Orleans's population." Complementing the Jordan will be a Promenade of Music with an architecturally designed zigzagging channel; the Path of Freedom, a large sports track leading to the lakeshore; and the Track of Katrina, a contemplative series of large lily ponds commemorating those lives taken by the disaster.

All these features intertwine to create a miniature river delta that is both a piece of and a metaphoric recapitulation of the greater Mississippi Delta. The "thematic streams," and the narratives they imply, will combine with the story of the park's own reconstruction to shape a memorial landscape where ecologically functional pieces of the environment take the place of triumphal arches and ceremonial allees. The end result, West 8 hopes, will create a geography that both acknowledges the disaster and points the way to a sustainable equilibrium among the river, gulf, city, and citizens.

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LANDSCAPE

Hargreaves Associates

"CULTURE RESPONDS TO INFRASTRUCTURE," states Hargreaves Associates, which asks for nothing less than the complete rebuilding of New Orleans. Seeing little hope for rebirth in a diminished city, the firm ambitiously proposes to completely secure the city against category five hurricanes through an improved system of levees, canals, and pumps. At the same time, Hargreaves seeks to reknit, quite literally, the discontinuous social fabric that separated poor from rich and black from white in the pre-Katrina landscape. Implied in the firm's analysis is the obvious fact that while the levees let the water in, deep and long-standing social divisions prevented people from getting out once disaster struck.

The physical reality of infrastructure often creates divided communities. Just as impassible highways segregate Los Angeles, the canals and levees of New Orleans created enclaves in the lower portions of the city, preventing meaningful communication between neighborhoods. Hargreaves Associates performs a neat act of urban jujitsu by transforming these barriers into public spaces--placing a series of linear parks along levees and canals--and then dissolving them with scores of bridges, envisioned as weblike lattices of concrete, that flow seamlessly into the surrounding landscape. Hargreaves Associates also proposes a pattern of "greenways" composed of narrow contiguous spaces, assembled by stringing together (to the extent possible) lots left unoccupied in the city's ruined districts; running against the north-south warp of the canals and parks, these function as a kind of street-scale connective tissue between neighborhoods.

Central to this plan is the understanding that cities depend on a deliberate layering of interconnected cultural and technological artifacts. The conflict between the aspirations of people and the gulf tides has always been mediated by imagination made tangible in rock, sand, pilings, and concrete. A fragile control over the forces of nature is at the heart of the idea of New Orleans, and Hargreaves Associates sees no reason to abandon the ambition that created a city in a swamp below sea level.

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AARON BETSKY

*All project descriptions were written by Kevin Pratt, an architect based in Philadelphia and a regular contributor to Anforum.