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11.28.05 SPECIAL ISSUE: Gulf Coast Report

ABOVE THE FOLD

AIA New York Chapter Members Continue to Support Katrina Relief
In addition to the Chapter's $5,000+ contribution to the Displaced Architects Fund, individual members and firms continue to support the AIA New York Chapter's Katrina Relief Fund which was set up through our affiliate foundation, the Center for Architecture Foundation, shortly following the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina and Rita.

Most recently, Mancini Duffy donated $20,000 in matching funds to the Center for Architecture Foundation Katrina Relief Fund. Anthony Schirripa, AIA, Vice President for Mancini Duffy and Chapter Treasurer said this of his firm's generous donation: "We [Mancini Duffy] felt compelled to give, and to focus the giving where it would do the most good. Our staff contributed a significant amount of money and we matched it. We're glad to do it."

If you would like to pledge your support for Katrina Relief, please send checks made out to the Center for Architecture Foundation Katrina Relief Fund, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(For those reading eOculus via email, please note that clicking on a link in the Table of Contents may open this issue in your Web browser).

Above the Fold

Reports from the Field

Classifieds

REPORTS FROM THE FIELD

Gulf States Recovery: Reports from the Front
by Ernest Hutton, AICP, Assoc. AIA

The AIA New York Chapter Disaster Preparedness Task Force, formed after the 2004 Asian tsunami, has evolved—post-Katrina—into a multi-disciplinary group of architecture, planning, landscape, and engineering organizations. Its primary focus will be what we can do as design professionals to assist disaster preparedness in the New York City region, but it will also act as an instigator for fundraising and a clearinghouse for voluntary efforts to assist disaster recovery for specific events.

A matrix of three stages of disaster response—initial relief, mid-term recovery, and longer-term rebuilding, plus a fourth—prevention/preparedness—summarizes lessons learned to help avoid or mitigate disaster related issues. These four stages are related to various geographic areas to demonstrate how design professionals can help—with direct action increasingly relevant and possible the closer to home the event, relying on donations for first or second tier responses in national or global events.

The Gulf Coast recovery and rebuilding effort is of particular interest as it is geographically close enough that assistance at various levels is possible. On November 15, the Disaster Preparedness Task Force and AIA New York Chapter sponsored Gulf States Recovery: Reports from the Front, a conference at the Center for Architecture to hear "reports from the field" from various organizations, conferences, and initiatives to better understand where there are common objectives and needs for assistance to begin to see how we, as design professionals, can help.

Participants included:
Architecture for Humanity
Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Conference, Baton Rouge
AIA/APA Conference, New Orleans
Congress for New Urbanism Biloxi Charrette
Urban Land Institute Katrina Task Force
Regional Plan Association, Washington DC Planning Session

Follow-up events will be held over the next months for progress reports examining specific planning and design issues, including a session for the various educational institutions that have involved students and faculty in real world assistance.

This special issue of eOculus is intended to expand the audience and to define points of contact for those who want to contribute time or resources.

Ernest Hutton, Assoc. AIA, AICP, Principal, Hutton Associates Inc., is a planner and urban designer who has prepared downtown and waterfront plans for a number of cities around the country. He is currently co-chair of the Disaster Preparedness Task Force and New York New Visions.

Mississippi Renewal Forum—Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal
by Daria Pizzetta, AIA


Daria Pizzetta

As part of the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal a week-long design charrette, headed by Duany Plater-Zyberk and the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), took place in Biloxi, Mississippi, October 12-17. The charrette brought together 110 CNU members along with local professionals and community leaders. The goal of the charrette was to produce planning and architectural tools that can guide local and state officials in rebuilding the 11 cities in the three counties along the entire length of the Gulf Coast.

The first day was dedicated to introducing the participants to the region, presentation of a project overview, and specialist reports. Prior to the design charrette, other committees of the Governor's Commission had prepared reports on the development desired to sustain infrastructure, economic and tourism goals, and other important topics. On the second day, participants toured their assigned cities and saw first-hand the vast devastation. After these introductory sessions, the urban designers and architects outlined their specific neighborhoods and building types for the focus of their work. The Biloxi team chose to redesign the downtown area, the Casino district, a local neighborhood, and the historic beachfront. A mid-way design presentation to local officials contributed to further development of the schemes. After three more intense days, the final results were revealed to the city officials.


Daria Pizzetta

The schemes have now been shared with the local communities and offer hope that the places they love and call home can be rebuilt.

The final reports of this forum can be found at Mississippi Renewal Forum. For continuing local coverage of the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, bookmark The SunHerald.

Daria Pizzetta, AIA, Senior Associate, H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, chairs the AIA New York State Chapter Interiors Committee. A Biloxi native, she is an Alumni Fellow of the Mississippi State University School of Architecture, where she received her Bachelor of Architecture degree.

ACORN Community Forum
by Lance Jay Brown, FAIA


Lance Jay Brown

Water damage is insidious. People board up their homes to protect against wind and rain, but then water overflows levees, punches through in places, surges up canals, and indiscriminately floods almost the entire building stock of a very special city. Sealed homes are abandoned or entomb the inhabitants. Some people trapped in attics by rising waters break out through the roofs. Some are not able to. The waters sit for days or weeks. It recedes or is pumped out. The homes remain sealed and the mold grows. When the plywood is finally removed the spores fly.

New Orleans, a city of over 450,000 people is left with only 10-15% of its population…and an election is on the horizon. How even to reach out and engage the people is a monumental challenge.

Traveling to New Orleans to participate in the ACORN Forum, November 7-8, was all about the city's repopulation and reconstruction. It was an extraordinary experience. The first day was spent touring the damaged/decimated urban landscape; the second, discussing ways to recover. While issues of regional planning and urban design were surfacing constantly, images of the local catastrophe kept recurring to eclipse them. A couch upholstered in a flower print rests comfortably in the arms of a tilted tree seven feet off the ground, left there after floating out of a house and grabbed by the tree as the waters receded. A man's brown felt hat, a bit natty, sits on the pavement next to a small valise, seams opened by the water, a tape collection spilling out; a large glass-fronted clock sits among stinking garbage, its hands arrested by the flood; and hundreds of pennies, turned verdigris by the toxic water, are scattered on the sidewalk nearby…perhaps a child's savings, perhaps a mother's.

New Orleans is a ghost town. Neighborhoods are without electricity and sewer connections, and the much of the Ninth Ward is still barricaded against reentry. Little work seems to be going on.

There is a vacuum of leadership that confounds the mind.


Lance Jay Brown

That said, the ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) conference, held at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, was a significant step in the right direction. It brought together more than 50 displaced community residents (with others participating by web link at 431 locations around the country, many with hundreds of listeners), several elected officials (Council members), technical experts (including civil engineers from LSU), architects, planners, activists, and educators from New Orleans and many other parts of the country. New York was represented by (in alphabetical order): Carmi Bee, FAIA (CCNY); Rick Bell, FAIA (AIA New York Chapter); Carlton Brown (Full Spectrum Developers); Lance Jay Brown, FAIA (CCNY); Majora Carter (Sustainable South Bronx); Bettina Damiani (Good Jobs New York); David Dyssegaard Kallick (Fiscal Policy Institute); Steven Kest (ACORN); Bill Menking (Pratt); Munsun Park (Jonathan Rose Co.); Ron Shiffman (Pratt); and Ayse Yonder (Pratt).

The results of the ACORN Forum are very encouraging. The organizers' message of thanks to participants included the following:

  • Already the staff from the ACORN Housing Corporation are talking with architects from LSU about developing specific rehab plans for targeted blocks in the lower Ninth Ward.
  • We have begun circulating some of the policy proposals that came from the conference to several of the elected officials who are talking about running for mayor of New Orleans.
  • We are reviewing the list of 53 potential action items developed by representatives from the institutions of higher education that attended the Forum, and are making plans to engage many of you to turn these proposals into real work.
  • In response to overwhelming interest from college students from around the country (many of whom watched the Forum via a web cast), we are hiring a student coordinator who will work with us to organize January term and summer work projects in New Orleans.
  • The ACORN Forum web cast is now archived on the Internet (www.acorn.org), and is offered distinct segments for easy use by college classes, evacuee groups, and policymakers.

Perhaps the most compelling presentation (of many) at the ACORN Forum was that of Peter Werwath of the Enterprise Foundation. He spelled out a "Marshall Plan" for New Orleans and the alternatives if such a plan is not realized. I encourage those interested in this, the most community based initiative to date, to go the ACORN website listed above to review his and other presentations, the Forum resources, and to learn more about this extraordinary initiative.

Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, FIUD, Principal, Lance Jay Brown, Architecture + Urban Design Consultants, has was a special advisor to the 1997 Mostar 2004 Urban Reconstruction Workshop, Bosnia Hercegovina, and co-directed (with Robert Geddes) Crosstown 116: Bringing Habitat II Home From Istanbul to Harlem. He is currently consulting on the Master Plan for the 35-acre City College Campus and Advisor to the Logan International Airport 9/11 Memorial Competition. He served two terms as Chair of the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College of the City University of New York.

AIA/APA Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference
by Margaret Helfand, FAIA

At least 600 participants were present at the Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference in New Orleans, December 10-12, presented by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in collaboration with the American Planning Association (APA), and co-sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The biggest problem for the Louisiana Gulf Coast region is that neither the state and city government efforts nor the public sector efforts are well coordinated and people are getting frustrated and angry.

The conference included full participation and support of elected officials at city and state levels, a Congressional delegation, the co-chairs of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and many high level community leaders from across the state. The conference was a huge success, and finally gave people some hope that Louisiana could come together to rebuild the region in a smarter, better way following principles developed during the three days of programs and workshops. Everyone pretty much agrees on the principles, but now it's a matter of turning them into programs for implementation.

[Click on link above for conference highlights.]

As we well know, this is where things get off track if there is not a STRONG public voice. This is why the people at the conference (and the members of the organizations they represented) need desperately to have a structure to continue to work together to achieve a good outcome, on a timely basis. Supporting this effort is the most important investment we can make to help with the recovery. The AIA/APA coalition of professional and civic organizations, modeled after a combination of New York New Visions and the Civic Alliance, is meant to provide a framework for coordinating public advocacy. The objective is to create a "single voice" to build more leverage on public policy and programs as they are formulated by the state and city governments. We can help them with advice based on our 9/11 experience (which we are doing), and we can help them with seed money for the coalition—as we were helped by others after 9/11.

Margaret Helfand, FAIA, principal of Helfand Architecture in New York, studied art history at Swarthmore College, then received a masters degree in architecture in 1973 following studies at the Architectural Association in London and the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to establishing her own New York-based firm in 1981, she was an associate with Marcel Breuer.

Architecture for Humanity: Repair, rebuilding and renewal in hurricane affected areas
While the recovery and rebuilding efforts are still in the early stages, Architecture for Humanity has teamed with a number of other organizations on two projects:

Neighborhood Cluster Initiative
Bay St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi

Sherry-Lea Bloodworth and other volunteers are partnering with World Shelters, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, City Team Ministries, Mississippi State University, Architects Without Borders, Architecture for Humanity, and others. Rather than siting temporary housing in a camp or on public lands, the group is working to site temporary housing on land owned by and leased from resident homeowners displaced by the Hurricane. Each of these "Neighborhood Clusters" will share temporary services and infrastructure while neighbors work together in a collaborative design/build program led by the residents themselves to repair and rebuild each other's homes.

The Shotgun Project: Preserving Hurricane Affected Neighborhoods and Creating a New Vernacular
New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Heritage Conservation Network in cooperation with the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, the Preservation Resource Council of New Orleans, Architectural Record, Tulane University, Louisiana State University, University of Minnesota, Architecture for Humanity/MN, Architecture for Humanity and others, has developed a 3-pronged program to assist in rebuilding. Segment One: Hands-on building conservation & training workshops Segment Two: Shotgun House Design Competition Segment Three: Financing of historic home preservation & new home construction

Click link above for details.

Cameron Sinclair is the co-founder and executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a 501c3 charitable organization that seeks architecture solutions to humanitarian crises and brings design services to communities in need.

Regional Plan Association: A National Collaborative for Rebuilding the Gulf Coast Region
by Petra Todorovich, Senior Planner, Regional Plan Association

After Katrina and Rita, the interconnectedness of the Gulf Coast Region was made abundantly clear. Regional Plan Association (RPA) has begun to investigate whether the Gulf Coast, which was regionally impacted, would benefit from a regional approach to rebuilding. Working with national partners, RPA has put together a prospectus on such an approach, which is steadily gaining momentum.

On November 3, RPA brought together a group of national organizations at the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington. DC, to discuss the prospectus. It proposes the creation of a voluntary collaboration of national organizations to create a region-wide framework for rebuilding that would recognize natural systems, make the region a more productive part of the national economy, and make it more resilient to future disasters. This project would involve three critical components, including:

  • A series of 21st Century Town Hall Meetings, modeled after New York New Visions' "Listening to the City," to engage a very large cross-section of the public and to gain consensus and build a constituency for critical decisions that will move the process forward.
  • The completion of an environmental sensitivity analysis for the entire Gulf Coast, which will provide an environmental framework for rebuilding in this ecologically imperiled region.
  • The convening of a national collaborative of the leadership of the major national organizations in urban planning, architecture, and design fields to work through their local chapters on the rebuilding efforts, which will serve as a client for initial efforts and a watchdog for federal efforts in the Gulf Coast.

Ideally, the national collaborative would work with a local client, possibly a home-grown "Civic Alliance" for the Gulf Coast to guide this work. The Collaborative can offer support and expertise to this alliance, drawing on our experience rebuilding Lower Manhattan.

Petra Todorovich, Senior Planner, Regional Plan Association, directs RPA's Lower Manhattan work, coordinates the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, and is project manager for America 2050.

Other related news, links, and events of interest:

Architectural Record/Tulane University School of Architecture Sponsor NOLA Housing Design Competition
On December 1, Architectural Record, in partnership with Tulane University School of Architecture, will launch Rebuilding "The Big Easy": An international competition for new housing in New Orleans. Professional architects are invited to submit proposals for multifamily housing for Chartres Street. Current architecture students are being challenged to design a single-family housing prototype for New Orleans. Competition rules and entry forms will be online at the above link on December 1; entry deadline is March 1, 2006.

Click "After the Hurricanes" to see Architectural Record's extensive hurricane coverage.

American Planning Association Report: New Orleans' Planning Operations Must Be Expanded
www.planning.org/katrina/pdf/rebuildingreport.pdf

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CLASSIFIEDS

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The Municipal Art Society Planning Center seeks a Senior Planner
The Senior Planner is generally responsible for advancing the mission of the Planning Center by providing technical assistance to communities; advocating with elected officials, city agencies, MAS committees, community groups and community boards; researching issues of relevance; writing testimony, articles, editorials and other persuasive materials; establishing partnerships with like-minded groups; providing advice and support to other Planning Center staff; monitoring progress of existing projects; conceptualizing new projects; and assisting the Director of the Planning Center as needed and requested.

Requirements: Advanced degree in Urban Planning or relevant field, at least two years work experience in planning or planning-related field, familiarity with New York City government, GIS training and capability, interest in community planning, excellent communication skills

Salary dependent on experience and qualifications. Standard benefits, then some.

Send cover letter and résumé to Eve Baron, Acting Director, MAS Planning Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022, or ebaron@mas.org.

AIA Contract Documents
The American Institute of Architects has Released Twelve New Contract Documents
New Documents Include a Design-Build Family, Six New Standard Forms of Architects' Services Documents, and a Request for Information (RFI) Form
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Paper Documents
The AIA New York Chapter is a full-service distributor of AIA Contract Documents, which are the most widely used standard form contracts in the building industry. These comprehensive contracts have been prepared by the AIA with the input of contractors, attorneys, architects, and engineers. Typically, industry professionals and home/property owners use these documents to support agreements relating to design and construction services. Anyone may purchase and use the AIA Contract Documents. AIA Members receive a 10% discount. For a full list and order form, see aiany.org/services/documentlist.pdf or call 212.358.6113 with your fax number.

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