W
wyliepoon
Guest
From Yahoo! News
Link to article
Mississippi rocks the boat with bold coastal designs
By Blair Kamin Tribune architecture critic
Tue Oct 18, 9:40 AM ET
Outside the gaudy, 12-story Isle of Capri casino and hotel, the signs linger of Hurricane Katrina's devastating wrath: mammoth casino barges shoved across a highway, the foundations of stately waterfront houses the storm rubbed out like an eraser from the sky.
Inside the casino, though, the scene was one of frenzied optimism: A room filled with architects from Illinois and elsewhere around the country, sketching a new future for the Mississippi Gulf Coast from morning till caffeine-wired midnight. Not the sophisticated planning effort you'd expect from the nation's poorest state.
"We can dream," said former Netscape CEO and Mississippi native Jim Barksdale, head of the governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, which is backed by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
On Monday, just one week after arriving here, the designers and their outspoken leader, Miami-based architect Andres Duany, unveiled the fruits of their brainstorming sessions as Barbour and Barksdale looked on: Detailed plans for 11 cities and towns along an 80-mile stretch of coastline. There, Katrina battered thousands of properties, creating in some places a virtual clean slate.
The plans take advantage of that opportunity, presenting a bold antidote to the suburban sprawl that laid waste to Mississippi's front-porch culture and once-bustling downtowns long before the hurricane hit. They represent the latest shot fired by Duany and the organization he helped found, the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism, at the strip malls, office parks and housing subdivisions the New Urbanists believe are despoiling the American landscape.
"This [region] was being eaten up by sprawl, not only the land but the cities," said Duany, 56, best known for co-designing the idyllic Florida Panhandle town of Seaside, which is the model for the compact, walkable neighborhoods the New Urbanists prefer to car-dominated suburbia.
No one but a cockeyed optimist expects the plans to be built just as the architects, planners, traffic engineers and other New Urbanist experts drew them. They have no statutory authority and likely will require extensive modifications to building codes, as well as millions of dollars in public and private investment.
Illuminating the choices
"Local people have to make the decision," Barbour said Monday. "The purpose of this commission is not to impose decisions on you. It's to illuminate the choices."
Nevertheless, the plans represent a clear signal that Mississippi intends not only to rebuild, but also to do things differently than before. Whether different will be better is a matter of debate.
Even before the end of the planning session, known as the Mississippi Renewal Forum, Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, infuriated participants by telling The Washington Post that the New Urbanists would deliver a "canned response" to rebuilding the Mississippi coastline and that their traditional designs would appeal "to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and pleasing and breezy, and each person knew his or her role."
"How does he know? What does he know?" Barksdale snapped in an interview Sunday. "I thought it was a mean-spirited thing for him to say that we all want to go back and own slaves."
Sitting in the Bimini Bay Ballroom of the Isle of Capri, about 100 New Urbanists from around the country joined the planning effort with 130 local architects and officials. Leading them was Duany, the movement's general.
After fanning out Thursday to the 11 cities and towns--Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, D'Iberville, Ocean Springs, Gautier, Moss Point and Pascagoulaand meeting the residents who remain, the designers started their day-and-night sketching sessions, which are known as "charrettes," a word derived from the French word for "little cart." At the Ecoles des Beaux Arts in 19th Century Paris, professors would collect final drawings from students with little carts.
By Saturday, the architects were lining the ballroom's walls with preliminary sketches and presenting them to local officials who asked pointed questions but seemed, by and large, to like what they saw.
A team of regional planners suggested turning an old CSX railroad track to the north of the coastline into a light-rail line and parklike boulevard. That would let people take mass transit to their jobs in cities such as Biloxi and Gulfport and would relieve traffic-choked U.S. Highway 90 along the coast.
For Biloxi, the designers advocated tearing down an elevated highway and replacing it with a ground-level boulevard that would feed traffic into the depressed downtown business district instead of bypassing it. They also would return two-way traffic to the downtown's forlorn pedestrian mall and encourage casinos, the engine of the city's economy, to have shops that face the street rather than turning inward, as suburban malls do.
Katrina isn't the only culprit
"We're not picking up after Katrina. We're picking up after urban planning disasters," said Pasadena, Calif., architect Elizabeth Moule, a member of the Biloxi planning team. "We're helping this town recover from the hurricane of the last 30 years."
As they designed, the planners were forced to improvise, reacting Saturday to the release of
Federal Emergency Management Agency flood advisory maps, which suggest that new buildings along the coast may have to be dramatically higher than those that were destroyed by the storm.
The planning team for tiny Waveland, where Katrina destroyed nearly all the main street business district south of the railroad tracks, quickly adjusted its plans, discarding a design that would have rebuilt the street where it used to be. Instead, the designers shifted the district 1,000 feet farther away from the gulf's threatening waters. At the tail end of their street, they inserted farmers market stalls and other open structures that could have water run through them without destroying them.
Along Biloxi's coastline of sandy white beaches, the architects ignored the vision of those who would keep the waterfront purely natural. Instead, across from the beach, they designed tiers of townhouses atop concrete parking garages that they expect to better weather future storms.
"There's a plot in charrettes," said Duany, who has conducted hundreds of them for New Urbanist towns, though never one of this size and scope. "There's the Thursday Night Massacre [when architects are forced to adjust to requirements they hadn't anticipated]. You pick yourself up. Eventually, you prevail."
Whether the New Urbanists will prevail will begin to become clear Tuesday when developers, who along with casino owners were excluded from the brainstorming sessions, get a first-hand look at the plans.
Even if the New Urbanists get their way, they--or, rather, some of the people who live here--may well face the problem of unintended consequences.
Seaside has proved so popular in the marketplace that it's become a victim of its own success. The poor and middle-class families have been priced out. Along the Mississippi coast, if a light-rail line were built and neighborhoods along the tracks gentrified, the poor black families that live there now could be displaced.
"That's what really plagues the New Urbanism--[the rap] that it's for wealthy folks," said Emily Talen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was at the sessions. "We have to make sure it doesn't happen here."
Link to article
Mississippi rocks the boat with bold coastal designs
By Blair Kamin Tribune architecture critic
Tue Oct 18, 9:40 AM ET
Outside the gaudy, 12-story Isle of Capri casino and hotel, the signs linger of Hurricane Katrina's devastating wrath: mammoth casino barges shoved across a highway, the foundations of stately waterfront houses the storm rubbed out like an eraser from the sky.
Inside the casino, though, the scene was one of frenzied optimism: A room filled with architects from Illinois and elsewhere around the country, sketching a new future for the Mississippi Gulf Coast from morning till caffeine-wired midnight. Not the sophisticated planning effort you'd expect from the nation's poorest state.
"We can dream," said former Netscape CEO and Mississippi native Jim Barksdale, head of the governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, which is backed by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
On Monday, just one week after arriving here, the designers and their outspoken leader, Miami-based architect Andres Duany, unveiled the fruits of their brainstorming sessions as Barbour and Barksdale looked on: Detailed plans for 11 cities and towns along an 80-mile stretch of coastline. There, Katrina battered thousands of properties, creating in some places a virtual clean slate.
The plans take advantage of that opportunity, presenting a bold antidote to the suburban sprawl that laid waste to Mississippi's front-porch culture and once-bustling downtowns long before the hurricane hit. They represent the latest shot fired by Duany and the organization he helped found, the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism, at the strip malls, office parks and housing subdivisions the New Urbanists believe are despoiling the American landscape.
"This [region] was being eaten up by sprawl, not only the land but the cities," said Duany, 56, best known for co-designing the idyllic Florida Panhandle town of Seaside, which is the model for the compact, walkable neighborhoods the New Urbanists prefer to car-dominated suburbia.
No one but a cockeyed optimist expects the plans to be built just as the architects, planners, traffic engineers and other New Urbanist experts drew them. They have no statutory authority and likely will require extensive modifications to building codes, as well as millions of dollars in public and private investment.
Illuminating the choices
"Local people have to make the decision," Barbour said Monday. "The purpose of this commission is not to impose decisions on you. It's to illuminate the choices."
Nevertheless, the plans represent a clear signal that Mississippi intends not only to rebuild, but also to do things differently than before. Whether different will be better is a matter of debate.
Even before the end of the planning session, known as the Mississippi Renewal Forum, Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, infuriated participants by telling The Washington Post that the New Urbanists would deliver a "canned response" to rebuilding the Mississippi coastline and that their traditional designs would appeal "to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and pleasing and breezy, and each person knew his or her role."
"How does he know? What does he know?" Barksdale snapped in an interview Sunday. "I thought it was a mean-spirited thing for him to say that we all want to go back and own slaves."
Sitting in the Bimini Bay Ballroom of the Isle of Capri, about 100 New Urbanists from around the country joined the planning effort with 130 local architects and officials. Leading them was Duany, the movement's general.
After fanning out Thursday to the 11 cities and towns--Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, D'Iberville, Ocean Springs, Gautier, Moss Point and Pascagoulaand meeting the residents who remain, the designers started their day-and-night sketching sessions, which are known as "charrettes," a word derived from the French word for "little cart." At the Ecoles des Beaux Arts in 19th Century Paris, professors would collect final drawings from students with little carts.
By Saturday, the architects were lining the ballroom's walls with preliminary sketches and presenting them to local officials who asked pointed questions but seemed, by and large, to like what they saw.
A team of regional planners suggested turning an old CSX railroad track to the north of the coastline into a light-rail line and parklike boulevard. That would let people take mass transit to their jobs in cities such as Biloxi and Gulfport and would relieve traffic-choked U.S. Highway 90 along the coast.
For Biloxi, the designers advocated tearing down an elevated highway and replacing it with a ground-level boulevard that would feed traffic into the depressed downtown business district instead of bypassing it. They also would return two-way traffic to the downtown's forlorn pedestrian mall and encourage casinos, the engine of the city's economy, to have shops that face the street rather than turning inward, as suburban malls do.
Katrina isn't the only culprit
"We're not picking up after Katrina. We're picking up after urban planning disasters," said Pasadena, Calif., architect Elizabeth Moule, a member of the Biloxi planning team. "We're helping this town recover from the hurricane of the last 30 years."
As they designed, the planners were forced to improvise, reacting Saturday to the release of
Federal Emergency Management Agency flood advisory maps, which suggest that new buildings along the coast may have to be dramatically higher than those that were destroyed by the storm.
The planning team for tiny Waveland, where Katrina destroyed nearly all the main street business district south of the railroad tracks, quickly adjusted its plans, discarding a design that would have rebuilt the street where it used to be. Instead, the designers shifted the district 1,000 feet farther away from the gulf's threatening waters. At the tail end of their street, they inserted farmers market stalls and other open structures that could have water run through them without destroying them.
Along Biloxi's coastline of sandy white beaches, the architects ignored the vision of those who would keep the waterfront purely natural. Instead, across from the beach, they designed tiers of townhouses atop concrete parking garages that they expect to better weather future storms.
"There's a plot in charrettes," said Duany, who has conducted hundreds of them for New Urbanist towns, though never one of this size and scope. "There's the Thursday Night Massacre [when architects are forced to adjust to requirements they hadn't anticipated]. You pick yourself up. Eventually, you prevail."
Whether the New Urbanists will prevail will begin to become clear Tuesday when developers, who along with casino owners were excluded from the brainstorming sessions, get a first-hand look at the plans.
Even if the New Urbanists get their way, they--or, rather, some of the people who live here--may well face the problem of unintended consequences.
Seaside has proved so popular in the marketplace that it's become a victim of its own success. The poor and middle-class families have been priced out. Along the Mississippi coast, if a light-rail line were built and neighborhoods along the tracks gentrified, the poor black families that live there now could be displaced.
"That's what really plagues the New Urbanism--[the rap] that it's for wealthy folks," said Emily Talen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was at the sessions. "We have to make sure it doesn't happen here."