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Hello Housing Boom
In the wake of Katrina, with need already mounting, thousands of homes are needed in the New Orleans region ASAP. Again, the dull mobile home comes to the rescue. Is there an architect or an urban designer involved? No way. | nytimes
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The men and women in charge are used to building things like trash incinerators, coal-fired electricity plants and oil fields in Saudi Arabia. They admit they will not be applying too much creativity to these new communities that will be created at a pace that would have made the master planner Robert Moses weep.
"We are a lot of right-brained guys, nothing too artistic," said Don Stokley, a structural engineer from Fluor, who is managing the company's strike teams.
Hey what about involving an architect, you right-brained nit wits!
just re-read that article again and got really depressed ...
depressing it is... depressing it is.
What is the big deal. This is temporary emergency housing. Make them to nice and people will never want to go back. If architects are so concerned about quick emergency housing, they should come up with prototypes. Cheap quick deployment, instead of McMansions.
Hopefully, many architects will be involved in the redevelopment of affected areas and hopefully the rebuild will be guided by economic forces NOT political ones like in NYC.
But given the fact that FEMA has already given no bid contracts to corporate suck ups, it doesnt look optimistic.
temporary emergency housing tends to turn into permanent housing very easily...
but what can we do? studying in south america, in an area prone to floods, at college i had a studio project concerning emergency housing for floods... it was too general and too early in my studies so nothing interesting came out of it, but this is a possibility....
i feel competitions and school studios are two possible avenues for exploring this, but of course at the same time we should raise an alert in some public way as to the great danger of what's being done.
i also feel we are partly to blame [partly!] because we have allowed the profession to be known for exaggerated utopian, unbuildable [but pretty] projects.
so,
1: can we find alternatives to the fema towns through competitions/studio projects? because if we're going to, we need to start now- even now it'll be late, but still bettter than sitting back.
2: how can we publicly raise a voice against rash developments while understanding that something needs to be done now or else people will suffer?
...and, rethinking my previous post after reading afh's page:
how can we support architects from the region so that they become involved in the process?
128,000 mobil homes needed.
http://www.builderonline.com/
"These temporary homes will come out," Mr. Gair of FEMA said. "We want to rebuild New Orleans. We do not want to create a state of travel trailers and mobile home parks."
"move people out when they are ready" ... we'll see what kind of state that creates.
for some reason this reminds me of Brit Hume after the London Bombings...
I mean, my first thought when I heard -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, "Hmmm, time to buy."
- Brit Hume July 7, 2005
wow that's depressing. hey prof white!
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