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Wieder bewohnbar

Allgemein
Wieder bewohnbar

Hurra, ein neuer Anlass für international bekannte Architekten, die Welt ein bisschen besser zu machen! Brad Pitt, der vor einiger Zeit öffentlichkeitswirksam mit Gattin und Kindern nach New Orleans gezogen ist, tat sich mit dem Öko-Guru William McDonough zusammen und rief zu einem Ideenwettbewerb für bezahlbare, vorgefertigte und stabile Häuser auf, die im 2005 übel von Katrina getroffenen Stadtteil Lower Ninth Ward aufgebaut werden sollen. Und sie kamen alle: von Graft und MVRDV über David Adjaye und Thom Mayne bis zu Shigeru Ban. Und legten alle mehr oder weniger ungewöhnliche Varianten des traditionellen »shotgun«-Hauses vor, von denen großenteils zweifelhaft ist, ob die künftigen Bewohner sie akzeptieren. Wobei sich die europäischen von den amerikanischen Beiträgen darin unterschieden, dass die Europäer etwas modernere und weniger langweilige Entwürfe vorlegten. Die Frage ist im Fall von New Orleans, dessen Bevölkerung schon vor Katrina schrumpfte und die seit der Flut um ein weiteres Drittel zurückgegangen ist, ob die Bewohner nicht einfach funktionstüchtige Architektur benötigen, die sie in Gebrauch nehmen können, ohne avantgardistische Sperenzchen wie eine den Nachbarn zugewandte Untersei- te (!) oder eine völlig untraditionelle Form mitbezahlen zu müssen. Um moderne, individuelle, innovative und dabei bezahlbare Häuser bemüht sich hingegen die Gruppe »Urbanbuild« von der Tulane University in New Orleans, die gegenwärtig bereits den dritten Prototyp ihrer Bauten in New Orleans, wenn auch in einem anderen Stadtteil, aufstellen. Damit zeigen sie, dass sich auch bei Alltagsarchitektur die Lösung nicht auf die Form allein beschränken darf, sondern dass die Landschaft sowie wirtschaftliche und soziale Aspekte unbedingt mit bedacht werden müssen. ~dr

~Aaron Betsky

Making It Not Quite Right in New Orleans
What is to be done? It is a question architects love to hear. And there are rare occasions when architecture in itself can, as the title of a new effort in New Orleans would put it, »make things right.« This particular project seems particularly interesting not only because of the dire and still perilous state of this swamp-bound city, but also because of its chief sponsor, Brad Pitt. The actor, who moved with his wife, Angelina Jolie, and their gaggle of children from around the world to New Orleans last year, brings a great deal of public recognition and resources to a city that is still missing more than a third of its population since the devastation of August, 2005’s Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Thirteen architects have answered Pitt’s call to design houses that are affordable, replicable and safe for the worst hit neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward.
The problem is that there is both an existing type that seems most appropriate to any kind of affordable and sociable residential construction in New Orleans, while one still has to question the viability of the city as a whole. To start with the latter: New Orleans began as a small trading post on one of the few sites in the Mississippi’s vast delta that stood above sea level. Since then, it has sprawled all over what was once swampland. It was, and is, a disaster waiting to happen. Massive flood control measures, such as those employed for centuries by the Dutch, could vouchsafe the area, but these are extremely expensive, while the truth is that the city has long since lost most of its economic viability. With almost no local industry, oil companies gone or left and its port losing to more modern rivals, there is very little other than tourism to keep it going. New Orleans was a »shrinking city« long before Katrina blew in. No wonder that Thom Mayne of Morphosis, called in by a developer to survey the situation in the fall of 2005, came to the simple and inevitable conclusion: let most of the city go back to nature, preserving only the traditional core and that part of the city that is built on high ground. Unfortunately, that means the rich areas of the Garden District, as well as the old tourist enclave of the French Quarter. Such a logical response is politically and socially unviable.
But with the government at every level unwilling to invest sufficiently in adequate flood control measures and with very little economic incentive to live in the city, what is the use? Pitt’s response is that areas such as the Ninth Ward were lively, if very poor, communities, and it is not our place to question whether or not to rebuild it. Instead, architects must rebuild it better. This Pitt means literally: advised by eco-guru William McDonough in his »Make It Right« project, he mandated accepting standard building practices, lot sizes and every other aspect of the way people lived before Katrina. This was not to be utopian architecture, but ameliorative design. The basic building block is the »shotgun« house: a narrow string of rooms fronted by a large porch and lifted slightly off the ground. Slotted into New Orleans standard lot of 10 by 30 meters, the house is an adaptation of the traditional bungalow, stretched, simplified and opened up to encourage breezes to flow through. It gained its name from the fact that one could shoot a bullet straight from the front all the way to the back yard.
The thirteen architects Pitt and his team invited all accepted this basic form, as well as the prevalent building materials of wood frame, clapboard siding and plywood panels. Several of them were European (or, as in the case of Graft, have European/American practices), but their approaches did not seem to fall apart along continental lines. What differentiated their approaches was an attempt to make the houses more open, safer and, frankly, more modern. In this European architects had a tendency to favor the modern more than the Americans. That last effort underscores the importance of attention and optimism, so that the Ninth Ward will not be forgotten and can believe in its future.
The most radical design came from the Dutch firm MVRDV (above left). They took the shotgun form and kinked it in the middle, sending the gabled front shooting up to the sky while allowing a car to pull underneath this upturned emblem of domesticity. The house also rises up to the rear, so that all but the central dining area is raised off the flood plane. It also allows MVRDV to create a sense of interior spatial differentiation by shifting floor levels. Unfortunately, the design seems too radical in its form to be recognized by potential inhabitants as an acceptable way of living, while the upturned house also turns its back (or rather its underside) to the neighborhood.
Equally radical is David Adjaye (below left). Alone among all the designers he eschewed traditional form, choosing instead to propose one of his trademark minimalist boxes. Here it is a dark-stained plywood rectangle surmounted by a deck shaded by a pergola of solar collectors. The front porch seems stuck on as an afterthought, and the house does not appear to be lifted off the ground. Its interior is a light and airy loft, which again makes one wonder about how potential inhabitants would respond to such a wonderfully open, but untraditional environment.
Shigeru Ban, who has a great deal of experience applying architecture to disaster areas, proposes a similarly simple box containing a loft-like space, but he topped it with a gabled roof that appears to have no function other than to recall a traditional form. He also lifted the house up off the ground, making sure to mask the resulting dark underside with a green trellis. The lighter and more open materials suggested by local firm Eskew + Dumez + Ripple (above right) mirror its form in what seems to be a more vernacular mode.
The most interesting designs are those that push and pull more or less gently at the existing typology of the shotgun house. Graft (below right), the Berlin- and Los Angeles-based firm with which Pitt has collaborated for a number of years, took the gable roof and brought it all the way down to one side of the house, and then wrapped it around so that it could become generous, asymmetrical steps that are large enough to be a porch. Philadelphia-based Kieran Timberlake envisioned a trellis along one long side of the house, as well as on the roof, while the house itself became a tight and efficient box skinned with various wood panels and slats.
Morphosis contributed a proposal for a house that looks like a standard shotgun house whose roof has been angled, canted and cut, but whose lone pillar placed in the center of the front porch hints at the design’s true innovation: the whole building can float from a truss that runs from this front support all the way to the rear. In what is the most aesthetically pleasing design, fellow Angelinos Pugh + Scarpa wrapped the whole building in a fine mesh of wood frames, lifting up the front and pushing the porch back to the building’s middle, thus implying a stronger mix of public and private while creating a sense of spatial excitement at the house’s core.
Yet none of these designs truly answered Pitt’s call for safe, affordable, replicable houses that could serve as building blocks for a revitalized Ninth Ward. They are all either too radical and abstract to become recognizable and adoptable parts of the neighborhood, or too boring (the other designs) to provide any sense of difference. Mr. Pitt would do well to look at what a dozen students at Tulane University, New Orleans, working under the guidance of architect Byron Mouton in the school’s »Urbanbuild« program, have designed and built in other wards. They have shown that standard building technology and typology can be manipulated to create new and recognizable, innovative and affordable homes. But more than that, Mr. Pitt and his baker’s dozen of designers should ask themselves whether salvation is to be found in isolated form, or whether architecture need not be part of a larger and more complex discussion on the relationship of landscape to economic and social realities. Perhaps it takes, as one of America’s presidential candidates famously said, a village, and not a house, to make it right.
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