In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric.

Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront.

"If you don't fix the murder problem, none of the other systems are going to click in," Scharf predicts. "Because you're not going to get the investment, you're not going to get the tourism, the great restaurants in the city, in the [French] Quarter and elsewhere, are not going to be able to stay in business."
- jimlouis 8-31-2007 6:37 pm [add a comment]