|
|
|
New Orleans Architecture: Building Renewal
Karen Kingsley
Architecture ... is a subject that is fraught with genuine conflict, and it seems to have acquired an extraordinary capacity to make all kinds of people extremely angry about issues that range from the most intensely personal to the most diffusely political.
|
| —Deyan Sudjic, New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006 |
|
|
| This essay on the architecture of New Orleans looks at certain features of the city—architectural icons, vernacular structures, and nature—and some conflicts they have provoked in the city's renewal of its built fabric. I have structured the essay as a sequence of vignettes, a composition that reflects the fragmentary nature of the city as it reshapes itself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. |
1
|
|
Fifty years ago, Architectural Forum, a leading architectural journal of its day, featured a lengthy article titled "The new New Orleans." The text begins: "New Orleans is midway in the greatest industrial transformation, change and civic growth in its history.... There would be nothing unique about all this in the booming southland, except that New Orleans is unique, possessing regional native flavor matched in few U.S. cities." The author continues, "But brooding behind all this [industrial change] is the distinctive native architectural flavor of the city, and whether it will live or die."1 |
2
|
|
Today, the change is not industrial—and in hindsight, the notion that New Orleans itself would experience industrial change is piquant. Nevertheless, now that the city suffers the effects of Hurricane Katrina, questions about architectural quality and change have resurfaced. As for the "native architectural flavor"—the author was referring to the city's nineteenth-century buildings—how does that characterization apply to the city as a whole? After all, except in the Vieux Carré, Faubourg Marigny, the Garden District, and Uptown, which lie on the strip of higher land that borders the Mississippi River, and in a few other areas, such as Tremé, most of the city's architectural fabric dates from the twentieth century. So although the city contains some of the oldest buildings in the nation, it is a modern city, a fact often lost on its inhabitants and certainly ignored by visitors seeking (or residents enamored of) a genuine historical ambience, who flock to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sections. |
3
|
|
Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, selected the site for New Orleans in 1718 for its relatively high elevation and the easy access to it from the Gulf of Mexico via Lake Pontchartrain. The city was laid out in 1721 on a typical French grid plan by the engineer Louis-Pierre Le Blond de la Tour and his assistant Adrien de Pauger. The centerpiece of their scheme was St. Louis Cathedral, fronted by a large square. Facing the Mississippi River, the building and square served as a gateway or reception hall to the city. In the early nineteenth century, the square was further monumentalized by the construction of the handsome Cabildo and Presbytère buildings that flank the cathedral. The Pontalba apartments constructed along two sides of the square in the mid-nineteenth century and the landscaping of the square, previously used as a parade ground, into a parklike space completed the transformation of this ensemble. A marvelous urban space was created. Views of the cathedral seen from across the square have been the most popular image of the city. Printed on postcards and in advertising, depicted in paintings and photographs, the cathedral achieved an iconic status.2 |
. . . |
There are about 4001 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
