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While New Orleans haggles over a master redevelopment plan, people in some neighborhoods like Broadmoor have been rebuilding on their own. They are forming partnerships with companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to help gut homes, assemble volunteers and find pumping equipment.
One thing that Wall knew for certain when he took up the profession in the late 1970s is that he would not become a photojournalistic hunter. Educated as an art historian, he aspired instead to make photographs that could be constructed and experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often,” he told me. “They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.” He also disliked the way photographs were typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he said. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. They could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” he concluded.
In this hard-pressed city a proposal by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes has touched a raw nerve. The demolition, which would affect more than 4,500 housing units, represents for some the plight of a poor, black underclass displaced by Hurricane Katrina and struggling to return. It also represents the problems that faced the city even before the hurricane: poverty, crime and racial divisions.
The bluntness of HUD’s solution reflects a degree of historical amnesia that this wounded city cannot afford. In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes — and replace them with the kind of generic mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats — the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of this city.
Offering perhaps a last chance to bring some sanity to this process, a congressional subcommittee is scheduled to open hearings here on Feb. 22 about the future of the city’s affordable housing. It is an opportunity to rethink HUD’s questionable vision and reappraise the role that architecture plays in society.
The hearings should help open up a process that so far has seemed anything but democratic. HUD took control of the four complexes from the Housing Authority of New Orleans in 2002 because of accusations of financial mismanagement. In order to implement the demolition plan, both agencies must comply with a section of the National Historic Preservation Act that requires an appraisal of the historic significance of any building more than 50 years old. But they have largely ignored testimony from of a long list of preservationists, including the Louisiana Landmarks Society and a local representative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
In arguing to save the buildings, preservationists point to the human scale of the apartment complexes, whose pitched slate roofs, elegant brickwork and low-rise construction reflect a subtle understanding of the city’s historical context without slavishly mimicking it.
Tellingly, neither housing agency has closely examined alternatives to demolition, like renovating some buildings in the complexes and replacing others. Although the Housing Authority of New Orleans says that modernizing existing developments would cost more than building new housing, it has yet to release cost breakdowns or the source of the figures. John Fernandez, an architecture professor at M.I.T. who examined all four of the complexes, has suggested that the extent of the storm’s damage has been overstated.
The housing agencies’ tabula rasa planning mentality recalls the worst aspects of the postwar Modernist agenda, which substituted a suburban model of homogeneity for an urban one of diversity. The proposal for “traditional-style” pastel houses, set in neat little rows on uniform lots, is a model of conformity that attacks the idea of the city as a place where competing values coexist.
This is reinforced by the plan’s tendency to isolate the new housing from the rest of the city. Often arranged along dead-end cul-de-sacs, the proposed developments lack the mix of big and small buildings, residential apartments and retail shops that could weave them into the surrounding urban fabric.
The point is not to return people to the same housing conditions that existed before Hurricane Katrina, but to distinguish between failures of social policy and design policy. Architects can’t determine the economic mix of residents in public housing developments nor provide education and health services. Their job is to give physical form to social and cultural values.
In this city that should begin with a fair appraisal of existing housing. With its low scale, narrow footprint and high-quality construction, for example, the 1940s Lafitte development, one of the four complexes slated for demolition, cannot be compared to Desire, a generic, shoddily constructed housing block, built more than a decade later. Some have suggested carving new roads through existing developments to anchor them more firmly into the surrounding neighborhoods.
Solutions like this might preclude the violent bulldozing of neighborhoods in a city so short of housing. A willingness to make case by case historical distinctions would result in a more historically layered urban composition, one that could, eventually, include contemporary architectural ideas as well.
For that to happen, however, HUD needs to listen to the preservationists who have taken the time to examine the value of the city’s public housing stock. It might also consider tapping into a higher level of creative intelligence. Architects like Enrique Norten and Thom Mayne, for instance, are working on major projects for commercial developers in the city’s business district. Enlisting a similar level of imaginative talent to rethink the city’s public housing could help alleviate trenchant social divisions here.
If some feel nostalgia for places like Lafitte, it is partly because it embodies a time when America still seemed capable of a more hopeful vision, one in which architecture, planning and social policy collaborated to create a more decent society.