The recovery and rebuilding of residential neighborhoods in New Orleans offers a unique learning experience for those who preserve, rehabilitate, and build traditional architecture. The extraordinary destruction from the Katrina event to the New Orleans housing stock was massive. Today thousands of homes continue to deteriorate and remain vacant as a result of economic conditions, lack of insurance, and other factors.
This AIA pre-convention Workshop will focus on the design, practice, leadership, technology, and collaboration that has occurred when and where infill residential structures have been built in New Orleans neighborhoods such as the Lower 9th Ward (L9). Workshop presenters shall examine how preservation and rehabilitation recovery projects and design solutions rooted in local building traditions and grounded in the history of New Orleans architecture have responded to the conditions of place. Projects demonstrating innovative and sustainable traditional residential designs based upon an established local vocabulary of forms that have been built since Katrina shall be discussed. Issues concerning the typology of infill residential architecture that has enhanced the sense of place in New Orleans neighborhoods shall be considered by both presenters and participants. Speakers and panelists will learn of ongoing project work in New Orleans neighborhoods and shall discuss work completed since the 2005 storm to discover lessons learned from design and project results in the recovering residential neighborhoods. A closing panel of diverse architectural critics, authors, and educators will lead a session designed to provoke and inform participants who will have an opportunity to discuss success and failure at the intersections of urban design, sustainability, storm durability, and sense of community in New Orleans neighborhoods.