ARTICLE TACTICIAN
KATRINA 10 YEARS/10 STORIES
AN AIA NEW ORLEANS CURATED EXHIBIT
T
he Emerging Professionals at the AIA New Orleans Chapter curated an exhibit titled, 10 years/10 Stories, which captures and highlights the combined efforts of Architects in New Orleans’ recovery. The committee consisted of AIA Associates and YAF members from five different architectural firms, Letterman’s Blue Print & Supply and USGBC Louisiana. We worked together over a concentrated 5 month period, collecting stories, stitching together themes and designing and constructing the exhibit components. The exhibit frequently circles back to August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina blew through our City as a Category 5 storm. This was a horrific event for our city, but one that galvanized the practice and identity of Architects in New Orleans in unimaginable and unprecedented ways. On a city-wide scale, it was difficult to find one street that was not affected by flood waters or wind damage, and revisiting these images from that time was like opening an old wound. We had a focused purpose to rebuild our Community, to regain some semblance of our pre-storm lives. In addition to rebuilding our personal lives, we were left to address large scale rebuilding effort in neighborhoods that had been destroyed, and a downtown that was utterly crippled. In a larger way, the exhibit has served as a mechanism to educate the general public on the role of architects, and raise awareness of the impact that the profession has had in the last decade. With themes of Community, Finance, Policy, Resiliency, Culture, Design Awareness, Environment, Equality, Growth and, naturally, the future as What’s Next, we have collected some pretty amazing stories. By recalling the state of affairs that we started with in 2005, we realize that we have come a very long way. Our journey was far from perfect, but these situations rarely come with a playbook. The Community chapter of the exhibit describes the immediate days following the storm. While at the national level, there were discussions arguing for the complete abandonment of the city, the residents of New Orleans were gathering in just about any public space that could host them; the first of which was Ms. Mae’s 24-hour dive bar on Napoleon Avenue. The personal fortitude of the New Orleans community and their determination to not just rebuild, but to reinvent, was obvious and clear. The desperate efforts of individual communities and design professionals and funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Greater New Orleans Area Foundation enabled the Louisiana Recovery Authority to launch a city-wide neighborhood recovery and rebuilding planning effort. By the end of 2006, the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP) was developed with unprecedented participation and representation from every part of the city. This included the displaced citizens in Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and the entire diaspora community nationwide via satellite mega-feed, using
[After Hurricane Katrina, AIA New Orleans] had a focused purpose to rebuild our Community, to regain some semblance of our pre-storm lives.
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CONNECTION
THE ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN JOURNAL OF THE YOUNG ARCHITECTS FORUM