22 Feature
The Architect’s Newspaper
TIGER ISLAND RESPITE Rome Office completes breezy, affordable apartments for seniors in Morgan City, Louisiana.
Morgan City, a town of 11,000 residents in southern Louisiana, doesn’t fade into exurban sprawl like most cities in the Sun Belt. Surrounded on all sides by lakes, rivers, and bayous, Morgan City has a tight footprint and ends abruptly at the water’s edge. On the eastern end of downtown, Tiger Island Senior Apartments, a new below-market-rate housing complex, opened in December. The development is configured in an unconventional sawtooth layout that creates a courtyard of native grasses and trees, all overlooking a deep green marshland that terminates at a levee on Lake Palourde. The project is unusually ambitious by any standard: for Morgan City, for 55-plus low-income housing, and for its developer, Renaissance Property Group. In earlier efforts, Renaissance, which specializes in affordable housing, opted
LEONID FURMANSK Y
for an off-the-shelf mix of gables, shutters, and porches, attempting to dress multifamily residences in the clothes of a single-family home. By contrast, Tiger Island Senior Apartments, with their contemporary geometric architecture and focus on shared communal space, offer a different, more progressive vision for affordable senior housing. The design is the work of Rome Office, a New Orleans– based firm founded by two alums of the Bjarke Ingels Group’s New York studio. The young firm was started in 2016 when founders Brian Rousseau Rome and Melissa Bauld Rome married and returned to the South to be closer to family. When I visited the principals at their open-plan studio in New Orleans’s French Quarter, I met a duo who finished each other’s sentences and wore black despite the triple-digit heat index. When I noted Bjarke Ingels’s tagline, “Yes Is More,” both broke out into knowing chuckles tinged with irony. Designing Tiger Island entailed hearing a lot more nos than yeses. A poor town in a poor state, Morgan City’s per capita annual income is less than $25,000; its modest economy is centered on fish and fossil fuels. (It hosts an annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival to crown a Miss Shrimp and Petroleum beauty queen.) Constructing a below-market-rate development with low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs) in this context meant sticking to a bare-bones budget of just $156 per square foot—less than $150,000 per unit. Time and again, the Romes had to make hard decisions about what to prioritize as they bounced up against “value engineering,” a bloodless term for nickel-and-diming. Initially, the firm presented multiple schemes to Renaissance with the overarching goal, as Melissa Rome put it, of “avoiding [the] motel typology” endemic to lowcost schemes: two slabs set at right angles framing a parking lot. The layout the architects most hoped to construct was a finite loop—a circle with a gap at one end—that would form a round courtyard opening onto the green bayou vista. Their backup plan—the one that got built— had two wings laid out in sawtooth formation to frame a