Tulane UrbanBuild Projects

(Spoiler alert: working to resolve deinterlace and frame rate issues on video post; more info to come in post.)

"Tulane Prototype":
One of the communities forced to leave New Orleans before the storm (and, of course, kept away by the flood) was the Architecture program at Tulane, which decided on returning to design and build a series of housing prototypes intown. The idea of sponsoring specific, urban infill projects existed pre-Katrina, but the aftermath made the project even more urgent.
As a first experiment in block-quoting:

Tulane URBANbuild is a comprehensive program which provides community design services to actively support the rehabilitation of neighborhoods subject to damage in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Faculty and students engaged in URBANbuild studios are deployed to neighborhoods throughout the city to develop creative and sustainable urban design strategies, innovative designs for new housing, and proposals for site-specific urban interventions and large-scale mixed use urban environments. As an integral component of the URBANbuild program, faculty and students are also designing four housing prototypes for each of the study neighborhoods, and constructing one prototype house in partnership with community non-profit agencies that specialize in affordable housing and neighborhood redevelopment. Prototype 1 on 1930 Dumaine Street, the first of four house prototypes to be built over the next two years, was completed in the summer of 2006, in partnership with Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, UJAMAA and Project Home Again.

I spent a few days with the faculty and students: as the video indicates, Alan Lewis led an urban planning studio contemporaneous with Byron Mouton's design studio. Both of them were working with a nice balance between strong a theoretical base and a flexible design strategy. The former looked at briding some of the formal, logistical and cultural divides that pre-dated Katrina; the latter group analyzed what made the typical shotgun house work so effectively and how it could be updated in terms of both style and technology.
Not only was the design well-articulated, but the students were able to articulate the whole strategy, which indicated a lot of passion for the project from everyone involved. The final execution, however, offers a facade to the street that is rather imposing, versus the renderings you see in the package, as well as the way in which the students talk about it. The package itself was originally even shorter (I had kept everything under 3:00 for my pitch); I went back in and reinserted comments from the Dean. And: the piece is just too fast-paced in general; it either needs to cover less stuff, have less narration, or just be a 4:00-:30 piece. Anyway.

[Apropos of nothing, but...] "Separated at Birth"

Developing Story:

I have this uncanny ability at my present job (copywriter, CNN Intl.) to see someone on our air and say, "Jeez, so-and-so could play them." Or, "doesn't he sound like..."
Case in point (or, First Case-in-Point): Lynndie England, whose fifteen minutes of fame came from those legendary poses at Abu Ghraib prison. When the Marine glamour shot kept cropping up on our air and everywhere else, I kept getting this irrepressible déjà vu, until it dawned on me: Chip Douglas from "My Three Sons." Their facial structure and expressions are eerily similar.









Skip ahead, in order of importance and topicality, to Alberto Gonzales, whose voice sounded oddly familiar. What was it about his voice, other than the fact that it's annoying high-pitch whine tried vainly to conceal a web of treasonous infamy. But whatever.
As I've gotten older, I can stilll make these kind of limbic connections, though I've lost the Rainman ability, say, to instantly spot my car keys in a complex web of crap on my desk, instead having to scan, rescan and scan again, usually applying my tactile skills to the task, too. He sort of looks like Wayne Newton, too; wait for the popup poster when the website loads. [The connection here should be: contemporary Gonzo looks like contemporary KemoSabe, but --more importantly-- sounds like Wayne as kid. Couldn't find audio of young Wayne; use your imagination.]

And get this one out the way quickly:











Margaret Beckett and Helen Gurley Brown.

Prefab Overview from DWELL Conference

(Spoiler alert: working to resolve deinterlace and frame rate issues on video post.]

"Prefab's Promise":
While putting together an initial package of videos about new architectural trends in New Orleans, one of the more promising topics of interest was prefab: standardized construction on a large scale, job creation, modernist infill, etc. Just a few months after the storm, DWELL Magazine hosted a conference in conjunction with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The panel featured designers of DWELL homes and designers hooked into prefab's history and/or its resurgence. I stole DWELL's "Prefab's Promise" title, partly because "promise" was the best way to describe the vibe that was in the air. [And, you have to ration your outlay of originality, lest you wear it out.] Everyone was, and continues to be, very excited about the field.
The centerpiece of the conference was a reassembly of Jean Prouvé's 1949 Maison Tropicale. An excellent write-up can be found here about Robert Rubin, the architectural historian who rescued the dilapidated artifact from Brazzaville. I interviewed him and Allison Arieff, although they don't appear in this scaled-down pitch version of the prefab piece. My original intention was to pitch the prefab topic an an entire episode of "Design 360," a somewhat short-lived weekend features program on CNN International. Robert could have anchored a piece with additional b-roll and interviews from the atelier in Paris that originally fabricated the maisons, as Allison's interview could have likewise done for an overview of prefab's resurgence. But like many shows there, once they lost the sponsor, they let the show die, replacing it with "The Art of Life." [In keeping with general cultural trends in the media and beyond, the replacement replaces the theory/design/creation bent of the former program with an emphasis on desire and mere consumption.]
The piece I arrived at for my initial purposes would have been expanded into two pieces: one that focused on the DWELL architects and how they each brought unique personal experiences and perspectives to their respective designs (always need that "people angle" in TV!); the other breaking out Bruce LeBel into a piece about sustainability and the larger, social project of prefab housing. I also didn't get to use my talk with Joel Turkel, nor did I get to talk with MIT's Lawrence Sass about the rapid prototype project he presented.