New Orleans: Structure, Community, City

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN AND USGBC LOUISIANA FOREWORD BY MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

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EDITOR IN CHIEF + PUBLISHER Christopher Howe chris@gbdmagazine.com

PRESENTING SPONSORS

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Laura Heidenreich laura@gbdmagazine.com VP OF PRODUCTION + CREATIVE DIRECTOR Karin Bolliger MANAGING EDITOR Melanie Franke melanie@gbdmagazine.com ART DIRECTOR Aaron G. Lewis aaron@gbdmagazine.com MARKETING SPECIALIST Jen Illescas jen@gbdmagazine.com COPY EDITOR Steven Arroyo PHOTO EDITOR + STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Caleb Fox EDITORIAL CONSULTANT Timothy A. Schuler CONTRIBUTORS Brian Barth, Mary Kenney, Russ Klettke

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS A collaboration between Green Building & Design and USGBC Louisiana Edited by Melanie Franke Foreword by Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Presenting Sponsors FH Paschen, Green Building & Design, Holcim, and KONE 5

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

8

Foreword

By Mayor Mitch Landrieu

10

Introduction

By Shannon Stage of USGBC Louisiana

96

USGBC Louisiana: In Action

16

NEW STRUCTURE

18

Beyond Books: Libraries of New Orleans

By Mary Kenney

24

Structure Spotlight: 930 Poydras Tower

By Steven Arroyo

26

Building for Industry: New Orleans BioInnovation Center

By Brian Barth

34

Structure Spotlight: National World War II Museum

By Melanie Franke

36

Brand Recognition, Bottled: Baton Rouge Coca-Cola Bottling Plant

By Steven Arroyo

38

Structure Spotlight: Arabella Station Whole Foods

By Russ Klettke, Photography by Caleb Fox

40

NEW COMMUNITY

42

Tulane Awash in Green: Environmental Activism in Academics

By Mary Kenney, Photography by Caleb Fox

50

Community Spotlight: Parisite Skate Park

By Mary Kenney, Photography by Caleb Fox

52

Bringing Broadmoor Back: A Neighborhood’s Recovery

By Mary Kenney, Photography by Caleb Fox

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Community Spotlight: Abita Brewery

By Melanie Franke, Photography by Caleb Fox

62

Cultural Shifts: A Timeline of the Upper Ninth Ward

By Mary Kenney

64

Redefining the Lower Ninth: Green Homes for a New Era

By Mary Kenney, Photography by Caleb Fox

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Community Spotlight: Columbia Parc at the Bayou

By Mary Kenney

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NEW CITY

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A Center of Industry: The Port of New Orleans

By Russ Klettke

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Working with Water: New Orleans’ Urban Water Plan

By Russ Klettke, Photography by Caleb Fox

82

History on High Ground: Preserving the old New Orleans

By Russ Klettke, Photography by Caleb Fox

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Growth in the City: The Rise of Urban Farming

By Russ Klettke, Photography by Caleb Fox

90

Starting Fresh With Schools: After Disaster, an Education Revival

By Russ Klettke

94

Bike Easy in the Big Easy: A Better Environment for Cyclists

By Russ Klettke, Photography by Caleb Fox 7

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

FOREWORD MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU

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On August 29, 2005, the world watched in horror as the federal levees designed to protect New Orleans failed—and then over 80 percent of the city filled up with Hurricane Katrina’s stormwater. As a result of this catastrophic failure, hundreds were killed and the city was brought to its knees. When critical infrastructure fails, society simply stops.

In New Orleans, we know all too well the catastrophic consequences of neglecting our roads and bridges, coastlines, and pipelines. The impact of Katrina led the United States Army Corps of Engineers to analyze the soundness of our levees.

They found that 146 levees were compromised, but these levees weren’t in Louisiana. They were all over the country from California to Connecticut. We often take our important infrastructure— like roads and highways, bridges and tunnels, sewer and water management systems, canals and levees—for granted, but it’s aging right before our eyes. What starts as a small crack is often indicative of a worse problem beneath the surface.

Reinvesting in our nation’s infrastructure is vital to our long-term economic future. Without constant vigilance and upkeep, our cities’ physical backbones will break. New Orleans is the canary in the coal mine, and Katrina was our nation’s wake-up call.

Since then, the federal government has invested $14.5 billion in a new, 139-mile hurricane-protection system designed to protect New Orleans against a 100-year storm. In 2012, this system was put to test by Hurricane Isaac whose storm surge was nearly as powerful as Katrina’s. The new system performed as designed by keeping the water out and New Orleans dry. Without this significant infrastructure investment, New Orleans’ viability and our country’s economic strength would stand at risk.

An important thing to remember is that Katrina did not cause all of our problems—it merely exposed them. More importantly, it taught us that resilience precedes response and recovery. In New Orleans, we now know firsthand that hardening critical infrastructure is essential to our city’s ability not only to recover from serious weather events, but also to mitigate risk, ensure the safety of our residents, and maximize our economic productivity.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from natural or man-made events, and New Orleans has a history of resilience shaped by decades of experiences managing an array of emergencies and high-profile events. As a city, we have faced major weather events, sinking lands, rising seas, oil spills, and eroding coastlines—all while protecting our 350,000 residents and hosting nine million visitors a year for some of the largest business, sports, and entertainment events in the nation. Our goal is to make our city a national model for resilience by 2018, the 300th anniversary of New Orleans’ founding.

We are making the investments now that will protect and define us well into the future. Our

improved levee system is now among the strongest in the world. In addition, we have committed $3.3 billion to sewerage and water infrastructure improvements that will employ thousands of people and be coupled with the city’s ongoing $1 billion recovery program. We are building greener through major investments like our four new public libraries constructed with energy-efficient materials and technologies (p.18). We are also taking on the challenge to convert our aging streetlight system into energy-efficient LEDs. Because of our subtropical environment, we are designing and testing new strategies, like permeable concrete and rain gardens, to better integrate and retain water into physical structures through new water-management practices that encourage smart development and promote livable and sustainable communities.

This year, the city broke ground on the $9.1 million Lafitte Greenway, a 2.6-mile linear park with a combination bicycle and pedestrian path that will connect six historic neighborhoods from the French Quarter to Bayou St. John and MidCity (p.94). Before being converted to a railroad right-of-way decades ago, this corridor was the site of the Carondelet Canal, which brought ships from Lake Pontchartrain and Bayou St. John to the historic French Quarter. By reimagining this land’s use, we’ve created an important transformational project that will help spur community revitalization in the heart of New Orleans. More importantly, it will provide additional natural green with trees, native meadows, rain gardens, and stormwater retention features that further enhance our overall stormwater management efforts.

Looking to the future, we must prepare for the unpredictable impact climate change will have on coastal communities like New Orleans. The dangers are so clear and present, and we are uniquely poised to chart a new way forward. We must be the ones to set the standard for community renewal and sustainable development—we who live in the world’s deltas and on the edges of greater oceans are the most immediate laboratory for innovation and change, and our success or failure will be the symbol for the world’s ability to accomplish great things. But for all coastal cities, our future is not just about survival. It’s about sustainability and getting this right, for now and for the generations to come.

The Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan began as an infrastructure reconnaissance study and evolved into an infrastructure reinvestment plan built around water-based urban redevelopment (p.74). Thanks to a diverse and skillful team of architects, engineers, and urban planners, the Urban Water Plan outlines a brighter future for New Orleans through water management, leading to reduced flooding and subsidence. Through important infrastructure investments, we can make New Orleans a better place to live that is not only safer, but also economically stable by working with our natural environment instead of against it. This plan offers specific large water manage-

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

ment and green infrastructure projects, but it also offers a new mindset to how our city and regional community can rethink our approach to managing water. We are reminded that we can’t just build levees and floodwalls and pump water up and out of our communities. We must explore ways to put water back into our soils to create balance in our natural environment.

The Urban Water Plan provides a guide for addressing our region’s urban water challenges and works in concert with elements proposed in the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan. By working with our natural environment, multiple lines of defense can be utilized with this smart urban water-management strategy. The wetlands have traditionally served as a natural buffer to storm surge and supported critical habitats and recreational amenities. Building upon lessons learned firsthand from the Dutch, the Urban Water Plan employs the innovative slow, store and use, and then drain water-management strategy, which directs the Netherlands flood-control efforts. We have learned that we cannot just pump water out of our subtropical environment and not expect to have the negative consequences of subsidence. Instead, by increasing water retention and infiltration strategies, we can recharge the land beneath us and raise our region’s water table leading to more balanced subsurface.

Moving forward, New Orleans and its surrounding parishes face these unique challenges in water management. Water does not recognize political borders, and we must explore creative ways to implement projects across parish and jurisdictional lines. Under the Urban Water Plan, we speak in one clear voice that we accept the challenge of learning to live with water.

The City of New Orleans is committed to building new ecosystems, ones that function smarter and stronger than the ties of our past. With the support of public and private sectors, we have a plan that will lead us to being a global model of resiliency—a model leading to an enhanced quality of life, improved safety, and maintained economic stability. I want to thank the US Green Building Council for selecting New Orleans as the site of the 2014 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo and encourage all attendees to explore our amazing city. When we build green, we build for our future.

ABOUT THE MAYOR

After serving as a member of Louisiana’s House of Representatives and as lieutenant governor, Mitch Landrieu became mayor of New Orleans in 2010.

He comes from a long family of Louisiana politicians; his father was the mayor of New Orleans in the ‘70s, and his sister is a US senator from the state. In his term, he has spearheaded sustainability projects such as the Lafitte Greenway, a 2.6-mile pedestrian and bike path, and he has moved the Urban Water Plan into action.

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USGBC LOUISIANA WELCOME TO THE CRESCENT CITY

When you come to New Orleans, be ready to celebrate—because no one does it quite like we do. This city will engage all of your senses. You will see our blended heritage, proudly reflected in our architectural treasures. Taste cuisine seasoned with Creole ancestry and southern heat.

Smell the aroma of a simmering gumbo of cultural diversity. Hear the rhythm of Louisiana jazz that has a distinctive Caribbean undertone. And feel the vibe of a great American city pulsing with a French heartbeat.

New Orleans is rich with traditions that celebrate our differences and unite us as a culture that thrives on being unique.

Nearly a decade ago, disaster left an opportunity for rebirth. The harsh images seen around the world sparked a determination to reclaim and rebuild a better New Orleans. Now gleaming, high-performance buildings, with modern façades stand next to buildings with traditional style that have endured nearly 300 years. Resilient, energy-efficient homes stand on pilings shadowing shotgun houses that have cradled generation after generation of New Orleanians.

Before Hurricane Katrina, there was one LEED commercial building in Louisiana. Now, there are more than 70. In September 2005, there were zero LEED Homes, and today there are more than 570. New Orleans’ schools must be built to LEED standards, and greening our schools is not up for debate.

There’s a new way of thinking about how we live surrounded by water with a renewed determination to turn risks into assets and to prepare for an uncertain future. There is a commitment to restoring and preserving the natural habitats that the Mississippi River has created, integrating natural processes into the city’s infrastructure.

A new spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship supports the city, with nearly 2,000 new startup companies that have strong commitments to the local economy. “Quality of life” is more than a catchphrase with a thriving urban farming movement and a focus on a more energetic lifestyle. The number of bikeway miles has increased from 11 to 89 since 2004.

The stories in this book, and the experiences they celebrate, highlight a city and a region putting its priorities in order. We’re building a greener, healthier future.

New Orleans is a one-of-a-kind place. If you can think of a good reason to get together and celebrate, we will give it a name and call it a festival.

Welcome to the Green Building festival.

Laissez les vert temps rouler!

Shannon Stage, LEED Green Associate Executive Director USGBC Louisiana Chapter 10

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX (PORTRAIT), TIMOTHY HURSLEY (CRESCENT PARK)

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

WE’RE CELEBRATING A GREENER, HEALTHIER NEW ORLEANS WITH THE HELP OF NEARLY 100 PARTNERS

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS CHAPTER PARTNERS

Crescent Park See more on p.81

ANNUAL USGBC LOUISIANA CHAPTER SPONSORS Support a chapter in action.

VISIONARY

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Contributing Sponsor AllianceNRG Solutions CalStar Capital One Bank Center for Planning Excellence Citadel Builders Contects Entergy Landis Construction LDG Development Lochnivar LA Steam Equipment Co. MAPP Construction Tulane University VergesRome Architects United Rentals Woodward Design+Build

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For more information visit usgbclouisiana.org.

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PRESENTING SPONSOR

The Magazine for Today’s Leading Green Professional Sustainability has changed. As a concept, it remains clear: to build livable communities that will be as environmentally and economically viable tomorrow as they are today. But as an industry, sustainability is constantly evolving.

There are new technologies and new incentives to use them, new frameworks and new findings, new challenges and new possibilities.

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Making New Orleans Resilient Mother nature has been quite unkind to many parts of the United States over the last decade, but no city was hit harder than New Orleans.

For Holcim, this was especially painful because we live and play in the communities where we work, and New Orleans is an important part of our nationwide community.

When the levees failed, rebuilding this key component of New Orleans infrastructure was a daunting task. Supporting the Army Core of Engineers, Holcim provided much of the cement and technical expertise to make sure these new concrete mix designs for the levees and pumping

stations would serve generations to come and offer a sense of security to this wonderful city.

The new levee system design is extraordinarily impressive, but you have to look beneath the surface to grasp its full magnitude.

Innovative engineering matched with Holcim cement extends the levees’ foundation four stories underground, supporting the visible levee walls with invisible ingenuity. The New Orleans pumping station is the largest in the world, but it’s also a great example of teamwork and how Holcim helped make life a little easier in the Big Easy.

HOLCIM.US 13

PRESENTING SPONSOR

Building Education FHP Tectonics is one of the largest and most respected general contractors, providing specialists in every phase of construction from planning through completion. Over the years, we have built on our core skillset to become an industry leader in alternative delivery methods such as design/build, job-order contracting, and construction manager as contractor. FHP has been the contractor of choice for building, infrastructure, transportation, and highway projects as well as educational facilities—both new construction and renovations. We take great pride in our ability to perform any size contract to our customer’s complete satisfaction.

Our New Orleans team has performed

almost $300 million of work since opening in 2009. Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts have been a main focus with projects at Mildred Osborne School, Charles J. Colton School, Joe Brown Memorial Recreation Center, Behrman Park Stadium, and the Eastbank Treatment Plant, among others. We are also currently building two brand new schools, Fisk Howard Elementary and South Plaquemines Elementary, and working on extensive asbestos remediation to install new energy-efficient and hurricanerated windows and doors at Frederick Douglass Elementary. FHP is proud to be part of the local community, and we are excited to continue rebuilding New Orleans—the Paschen way.

FHPASCHEN.COM 14

PRESENTING SPONSOR

Eco-Efficiency with KONE KONE is a pioneer in developing eco-efficient solutions in the elevator and escalator industry.

We combat climate change by delivering elevator and escalator solutions and services that help our customers achieve their eco-efficiency goals in every phase of a building’s life cycle, from designing and constructing to maintaining and modernizing.

Among KONE’s focus areas are green building research projects related to people-flow technologies and pioneering low-carbon maintenance concepts that employ remote monitoring and an eco-efficient service vehicle fleet. In addition, we develop efficient installation methods for elevators and buildings, decreasing the installation time and resources needed.

Today we make our elevators energy efficient by using green hoisting systems, regenerative drives, LED lighting, and standby solutions. We also constantly strive to further reduce the energy consumption and increase the eco-efficiency of our solutions.

For example, in 2012, we launched a new volume elevator that is 40 percent more energy efficient than our previous industry-leading elevator platform in the US from 2008. More

recently, in 2013, we launched our latest highrise elevator technology, KONE UltraRope™, which can cut energy consumption in high-rise buildings by 15 percent for a 500-meter elevator ride. Our current escalator technology has also improved; it’s now 30 percent more energy efficient than it was in 2010.

By delivering eco-efficient solutions for sustainable and net-zero energy buildings, KONE contributes to the development of next-generation green buildings.

We work to further improve eco-efficiency in other areas as well, such as manufacturing, vehicle fleet, logistics, travel, installation, and maintenance. Furthermore, we focus on improving material efficiency while minimizing waste, water, and the use of hazardous materials.

KONE is the only elevator company to offer the best A-class energy-efficiency rating for its volume elevator range while fulfilling safety and accessibility codes. We also currently rank 12th among Newsweek’s World’s Greenest Companies.

At KONE, we strive to provide efficient, environmentally safe, and responsible high-performance solutions and services.

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NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

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NEW STRUCTURE

BEYOND BOOKS How New Orleans libraries became a blueprint for the city’s reconstruction

New Orleans was underwater. Up to 15 feet of it filled some neighborhoods, and 80 percent of the city was flooded. Damage from Hurricane Katrina was extensive, and when it came time to rebuild, it was hard to find a place to start. The problem of reconstruction became a catch-22: should residents wait for businesses and services to return before they did? But how could the city attract those things without people to use them? In the end, it was a public good, not a private one, that took first priority. The city rallied around its libraries as one of the first major reconstruction projects throughout the landscape.

Of the 14 libraries in the New Orleans public system, five were either destroyed or left uninhabitable after the floodwaters receded. Libraries became a priority through the “New Orleans Principles,” a set of guidelines developed by local and national experts convened by the USGBC that called for resilient and sustainable building and the reconstruction of “places of refuge” as a means for creating a better city post-Katrina.

New Orleans’ dedication to its public library system did not go unnoticed elsewhere. The American Library Association held its major convention there in 2011, a year before many of the new libraries opened, and reported signs of major rehabilitation efforts. “It’s been a long struggle, but evidence of recovery is everywhere,” an article titled “New Orleans on the Mend” reported in American Libraries magazine. The four libraries detailed here were built to meet LEED standards and serve as anchors in their communities. The new libraries have similar designs and materials, using white stucco and gray brick, but each library was modified to fit in neatly with its neighborhood.

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ROBERT E. SMITH LIBRARY

The two-story building located in New Orleans’ Lakeview neighborhood includes picture windows that filter in natural light throughout the building with some that look out to an interior courtyard. With children’s collections and technology centers, the building consists of two “U”-shaped blocks that cradle the internal courtyard on a raised plaza. The shape gives visitors the impression that they’re not far from the outdoors at any point in the library, and the blue and green walls of the interior continue to bring the colors of nature inside.

NEW ORLEANS

PHOTOS: TIM MUELLER

DETAILS: Area: Lakeview Size: 13,000 ft2 Opened: March 2012 Architect: Gould Evans Associate Architect: Lee Ledbetter & Associates Builder: Gibbs Construction

ABOVE: The reading room of the Robert E. Smith Library provides a warm environment with plenty of natural light for locals seeking a quiet space for reading or working.

RIGHT: The library also offers plenty of bike parking to accommodate the growing cycling community in New Orleans.

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

ROBERT E. SMITH COMMUNITY BRANCH LIBRARY

ROBERT E. SMITH COMMUNITY BRANCH LI

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

SECOND FL

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EAST NEW ORLEANS REGIONAL LIBRARY

ABOVE: Connected to a public park and featuring its own courtyard in front, the East New Orleans Regional Library building has an eco-friendly white roof, exterior sunscreens, and low-E tinted windows.

The East New Orleans Regional Library, with the word “READ” in bold blue letters plastered across high picture windows, was one of the first new libraries to open. The two-story facility has a meeting room that can accommodate 300 people, a technology center, a front courtyard, and a walking path connecting it to Joe W. Brown Park. The library has spaces for all ages with a children’s room, a teen area, and an adult learning center.

NEW ORLEANS EAST REGIONAL BRANCH LIBRARY

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

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PHOTOS: TIM MUELLER

DETAILS: Area: New Orleans East Size: 28,000 ft2 Opened: April 2012 Cost: $7.6 million Architect: Gould Evans Associate Architect: Lee Ledbetter & Associates Builder: Gibbs Construction

NEW ORLEANS EAST REGIONAL BRANCH LIBRARY

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

NORMAN MAYER LIBRARY

Housing a meeting room, approximately 25,000 circulating items, 19 public computers, free WiFi, and more than 2,000 DVDs, the Gentilly branch of New Orleans’ library system meets diverse needs. The room housing the teen collection overlooks Gentilly Boulevard, and the main entrance stair at the corner of Gentilly and Norman Mayer draws in pedestrians from the busy corridor. Slated as a music center, the library features an audio recording collection and several music-listening stations. To reduce building energy and water use, the library employs smart resource-reduction strategies and passive cooling.

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

DETAILS: Area: Gentilly Size: 19,000 ft2 Opened: March 2012 Cost: $5.7 million Architect: Gould Evans Associate Architect: Lee Ledbetter & Associates Builder: Gibbs Construction

NEW ORLEANS

TOP RIGHT: Norman Mayer caters to the public with bicycle storage and access to public transportation.

BOTTOM RIGHT: The library features the area’s first self-checkout stations and other technological advancements.

BELOW: Although solar panels weren’t in the budget, the electrical system and roof is prepped to handle energy generation in the future.

NORMAN MAYER BRANCH LIBRARY

NORMAN MAYER (GENTILLY) DISTRICT BRANCH LIBRARY

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

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PHOTOS: TIM MUELLER

NEW STRUCTURE

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NEW ORLEANS

ALGIERS REGIONAL BRANCH LIBRARY

Two wings replace the old one-story building that used to stand on Holiday Drive. Outdoor seating, commercial space, and a meeting room for 300 people with an adjoining kitchenette show that this library is about far more than books. The building features exposed ceilings defined by black ductwork, expansive windows keep the space naturally lit, and the adult and children’s collections are separated by glass that keeps the open floor plan intact.

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

ALGIERS REGIONAL BRANCH LIBRARY

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

ALGIERS REGIONAL BRANCH LIBRARY SECOND FLOOR PLAN

DETAILS: Area: Algiers Size: 28,000 ft2 Opened: July 2012 Cost: $9.25 million Architect: Gould Evans Associate Architect: Lee Ledbetter & Associates Builder: Gibbs Construction

THIS SPREAD: Algiers Regional is notable for its large cavity of open space just past the entrance.

A high ceiling and open floor plan allow easy wayfinding and provide visitors ample walking room.

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STRUCTURE SPOTLIGHT 930 POYDRAS TOWER

RIGHT: High-efficiency insulated metal panels compose the building envelope for 930 Poydras. Coupled with an innovative glazing system, the structure has high thermal performance with minimal thermal bridging.

BELOW: The courtyard’s landscaping doesn’t require irrigation, and the rooftop pool uses saltwater, which is healthier for residents because it doesn’t need typical pool chemicals.

PHOTOS: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

The 21-story, 462,000-square-foot, mixed-use downtown building at 930 Poydras Street takes traditional New Orleans housing design and quite literally turns it on its side. 930 Poydras mimics the horizontally expansive tendencies of New Orleans’ French Quarter blocks, only upwards instead of outwards, creating an eye-catching series of vertical lines on its cubic exterior.

Even the common courtyards of French Quarter homes are represented in the building’s ninth floor, which houses all public amenities to facilitate resident interaction and activity.

Amenities include a recycling center, a coffee bar, a movie screening lounge, and an outdoor pool deck with an oversized bleacher-style sunning area—as well as a fitness center that sits underneath it. Local firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple connected the 500-car parking garage to the 250-unit residential tower at this level as well, with access between the two provided by a bank of shuttle elevators.

Punctuating the ninth floor’s communal attractions is the building’s most obvious visual curiosity, the “sky lobby,” a protruding, double-height glass room that cantilevers over the street below, providing an unrivaled view of New Orleans’ many nearby sights as the building is within a mile of the Superdome, the Mississippi riverfront, and the French Quarter.

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NEW ORLEANS

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The metal louvers on the New Orleans BioInnovation Center act as sunshading devices while creating a unique look to the building’s façade.

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NEW ORLEANS

BUILDING FOR INDUSTRY The New Orleans BioInnovation Center brings biotech start-ups to the city in an innovative, LEED Gold structure

PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

I

n New Orleans’ central business district, there’s a building that speaks to the future as it references the past. The aluminum brisesoleil façade, with its uneven array of horizontal shades, projects an interplay of light and shadow against the glazing behind the panels. It creates a dappled effect on the cool terrazzo flooring of the lobby inside. Just beyond an interior glass wall is the inner courtyard; though slightly obscured by the dance of shadows, it has the timeless feel of a place of respite as the fountain at the center cascades water through sun-bathed foliage into an old alabaster basin.

Although it is reminiscent of a 19th-century French Quarter compound with louvered shutters and a breezy courtyard to water horses, the New Orleans BioInnovation Center (NOBIC) has a thoroughly 21st century purpose: to support biotech start-ups in Louisiana and solidify the industry as a mainstay of the region’s economy.

Twelve blocks from the Mississippi River up Canal Street—a broad right-of-way once intended for barges and now a bustling jamboree of the city’s cultural colors mixed with equal parts of its entrepreneurial ambitions—NOBIC has become a quiet incubator of southern Louisiana’s future.

It is an ordinary day at NOBIC. Inside, scientists scurry about mass spectrometers; sharply dressed businessmen are gathered around an enormous boardroom table listening to a presentation on cloud-based technology for tracking medication use, and in the hallway, a few casually dressed men and women are strategizing about 27

NEW STRUCTURE

funding opportunities with the director of the center’s commercialization department. The four-story, 66,000-square-foot space houses 35 emerging bioscience companies, which are outfitted with state-of-the-art wet labs, offices, and a suite of support services including legal firms, PR companies, accountants, and market analysts.

“Incubators turn out to be ecosystems—it’s not all about scientists,” says Z Smith, a principal at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple (EDR) and architect on the project, of NOBIC’s multifunctional structure.

NOBIC is about turning revolutionary, science-based ideas into sound business operations. However, when it comes to facilities, “the number-one need for a life-science company is office space and conference space,” says Aaron Miscenich, the organization’s executive director.

Since its doors opened in 2011, NOBIC has helped launch 75 companies, created over 200 jobs, and raised $6 million in start-up capital. “It’s designed as a gateway between the research and business communities,” he says of both the incubator program and the building itself, which is mostly convertible between office and lab space. Miscenich is quick to emphasize, however, that much of NOBIC’s magic comes through the informal interactions between tenants and organizational staff in break rooms, at event receptions, and under the spell of the massive fountain in the center’s breezy inner courtyard.

LEFT: The courtyard fountain reuses rainwater and water discharge.

RIGHT: Local artist Mitchell Gaudet created the partition wall out of recycled glass from French Quarter bars as a response to the absence of municipal glass recycling in the city.

Like other aspects of modern urban life often taken for granted, glass recycling has yet to be restored since Katrina.

OPPOSITE: Glass walls looking out to the courtyard allow the sun to naturally light a large portion of the building during the day.

PHOTOS: WILL CROCKER

Louisiana was facing an issue of having universities that produce biotech innovation, but it often left the state to be commercialized, says Smith, the director of sustainability and building performance for EDR, who is himself a scientist with a PhD in electrical engineering in addition to his

architect’s license, “so the legislature decided to fund three biotech centers.” It’s been nearly a decade since the State of Louisiana first chose to pursue policies friendly to the bioscience industry in the southeastern region of the state. Now, NOBIC’s location on Canal Street sits at one of the gateways to the New Orleans BioDistrict, a 1,500-acre redevelopment zone just west of the central business district that is already home to Tulane’s Medical School and the LSU Hospital, with a new VA Medical Center currently under construction. The redevelopment plan expects to stimulate 34,000 jobs and $3.3 billion in new investment over the next 15 to 20 years.

“It’s easy to forget how raw things were after Katrina,” says Mark Ripple, a partner at EDR. “There was a toxic soup six to eight feet deep for two weeks. . . buildings became infested with mold.

People said you couldn’t live in New Orleans because you couldn’t trust the air to breathe. There was incredible intellectual property coming out of Tulane, but it would disappear to Houston, Birmingham, and points beyond.”

As an idea, NOBIC began in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Facing numerous hurdles over funding and decisions over where to locate the center, the plans were still on the shelf when the hurricane hit. In the post-Katrina climate, however, the drive to make New Orleans a biotech hub found increasing traction. Rather than the code-minimum, value-engineered design originally conceived for the center, something more symbolic was in order.

“We wanted a facility that provided for our programming needs,” says Miscenich, who has been one of the center’s primary proponents during its long march from vision to fruition. “But I also wanted to enhance the brand with another angle.”

That angle ended up taking form as the first LEED Gold-certified lab building in Louisiana, dovetailing NOBIC’s future-thinking economic development mission with a citywide vision to rebuild a greener, more resilient New Orleans. “But we didn’t want to just throw up a green façade,” he

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says. “We looked at many of the green technologies for financial reasons. . . so frankly, it’s legitimate.”

“Hearing that NOBIC wanted to do more than just ‘fulfill program’ was music to an architect’s ears,” says Ripple, a lifelong resident of the Crescent City, who sees his work as “contemporary architecture that speaks to the spirit of New Orleans.” Although everyone involved seemed to agree that the building had to promote the next generation of leadership in New Orleans, the challenge came in molding the existing value-engineered design—which had already made it partway through the permitting process—into the tangible representation of the city’s new vision that became part of NOBIC’s mission in the years following Katrina.

“They were asking me, what can you do to reduce overall operating costs?” Smith says. Clearly, there was no budget for a complete redesign, but there was a fortuitous turn of events that greased the wheels for some major tweaking. The original 2006 design was priced based on what contractors were charging during the rebuilding frenzy after the storm. When the project came back on line in 2009, the inflated cost of construction had subsided.

“We ended up with a $600,000 surplus [in the budget] after the post-Katrina boom,” says Smith, who was charged with taking that budget and wringing as much resource-conserving design out of it as possible. “The conventional thinking is, ‘no, no, you have to design for sustainability from the beginning.’” That wasn’t in the cards, so the team set out on a six-week charette to see what $600,000 could do for the building’s environmental performance and operational bottom line. The project was already in the construction-management phase, so all ideas were immediately vetted by the engineers and contractors in terms of feasibility, cost, and energy savings. “We came up with 19 possibilities, which we reduced to 11 [final design changes],” Smith says.

On the $38 million project, the extra $600,000 was largely put toward efficiency features that have translated into $150,000 to $200,000 of savings on operating costs per year—an impressive three-year payback. Since this was not a showpiece LEED facility coming from a deep-pocketed philanthropist, design decisions had to transparently confront cost-benefit ratios. A photovoltaic array was considered, for example, but the numbers didn’t work, so it was nixed. “But we put in stub-outs on the roof, so it is solar ready,” Smith says, knowing the economics of photovoltaic panels will improve over the lifespan of the building.

“Some of the measures were free riding,” he says, “but most had a payback.”

Some of the efforts toward energy conservation came in a very low-cost package. For example, each lab is outfitted with its own ventilation 30

RIGHT: While respecting local architecture, NOBIC pushes the regional design culture forward, directly challenging certain conventions like impervious paving. Other design details are more subtle and driven as much by creative impulses as the practical considerations of sustainability.

PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

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ABOVE: The towering back wall of the lobby atrium is clad in local FSC-certified poplar.

The fast-growing native species is normally considered a cheap, paint-grade wood, but for EDR, it became a cost-effective palette to design a variegated indoor wall covering that echoes the lines of the exterior brise-soleil.

system controls. Instead of a normal lab ventilation configuration where all spaces receive a high air-change rate just in case one of them might need it, NOBIC allows each lab to select the ventilation rate appropriate for their current task. Of course, the old-fashioned brise-soleil also helps to rein in the energy budget. The front façade is 62-percent glazed but has the summertime solar gain of a building with 18-percent glazing as a result of the shading and light deflection. All combined, the simple design tweaks led to a building that uses less energy than 90 percent of typical laboratory structures.

Where the louvered façade takes a cue from traditional New Orleans architecture and turns it into a modern design for energy conservation, the courtyard fountain does the same for stormwater management. “We are a city surrounded and defined by water,“ Ripple says. “Unlike 75 percent of the country, we have too much of it.”

Thus, southern Louisiana is not a place for xeriscaping or cisterns that catch roof water and store it for irrigation purposes. Annual rainfall is about 62 inches, which, as any long-time New

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Orleans resident will tell you, is distributed in near-perfect, inch-per-week increments. But— and this is perhaps an understatement—it is a place to capture stormwater on-site and send it to the water table, rather than rushing down a municipal storm drain to the Mississippi.

The original design came with a courtyard fountain, but EDR reimagined it as part of the site’s stormwater infrastructure. Everything that falls onto the roof flows into the 12,000-gallon fountain basin, along with all of the air-handler condensate, which, in steamy New Orleans, is a 30,000-gallon-per-year stream. Water jets evaporate a bit of the total volume into the air, cooling the courtyard and drowning out traffic noise. But when it really pours, the system overflows into percolation beds beneath the parking lot, which are outfitted with bioswales that provide vegetative filtration along the way.

The parking lot foundation is another one of those low-cost, high-return features conceived in the redesign phase. “Some things don’t cost extra; you just have to think about them a little differently,” Ripple says. EDR specifies a coarse gravel subbase under any parking lot it designs, but the one at NOBIC was elevated an extra 18 inches to

PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

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Q&A MARK RIPPLE AND Z SMITH OF ESKEW+DUMEZ+RIPPLE Looking back on the years since Katrina, what stands out to you as the most significant characteristic of the efforts to rebuild?

SMITH: One of the great surprises post-Katrina is that New Orleans has become a magnet for start-ups.

Life is more than just going to Applebee’s. The city attracts young people, and we’re trying to make the most of this fact.

What are the roles of architects, builders, and designers to help refashion the urban environment in this regard?

RIPPLE: The attitude we’ve taken is that the conditions that affect architecture in New Orleans are timeless, but the best responses are of the times.

Three-hundred years later, we’re responding to the same conditions as the French when they first arrived: It’s hot, it’s muggy, and the land is always sinking from under you. The best architecture here uses innovative ways to deal with sun, rain, flooding, etcetera.

How does the New Orleans BioInnovation Center reflect what New Orleans is about today?

SMITH: Many of these labs and incubators end up in a suburban office park.

This is the only facility I know of where someone can step away from the mass spectrometer, go out on the balcony, catch some Mardi Gras beads, and get back to work.

function as a stormwater infiltration basin. With 40 percent of the gravel base consisting of empty space, the modest-sized lot became a 60,000-gallon reservoir that allows the flooding rains to seep slowly into the water table.

Step two for the parking lot redesign was a bit more complicated. EDR wanted to use pervious concrete, never before used in Louisiana, to surface the lot. “It looks like Rice Krispy Treats,” Ripple says. “The challenge was not in convincing the client, but our own engineers and city officials.

The construction industry in our region isn’t always known for being cutting edge.” The only example of pervious concrete they could find in the area was the driveway of a permeable pavement company’s owner. Thus, NOBIC became the guinea pig for proving the concept.

To say the least, it worked. Taken together, NOBIC’s stormwater features can absorb every drop of on-site precipitation for up to a 4-inch rain event—not an inconceivable feat in a suburban office park, but pretty impressive for a dense urban setting, making this the first example of a downtown New Orleans structure handling 100 percent of its stormwater on-site. Apparently, city officials were impressed, as were others working in the area. The local crew that was trained to install the pervious concrete at NOBIC has since trained others in the city, including Make It Right crews who have been using it to pave streets in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Under the broad banner of the biotech industry, NOBIC houses start-ups ranging from a supplier of stem cells to a company that builds modular, hydroponic grow systems in steel shipping crates intended to make urban farming a scalable form of agriculture. In its three-year history, Miscenich says the incubator program has already “graduated” two of its first participants. Another that is now poised to take flight is a nanotechnology company with a product that breaks down groundwater contaminants into nontoxic byproducts.

“Tulane patented the technology and contacted me about bringing it to market,” says David Culpepper, CEO of Nanofex, who has worked in the groundwater remediation business since the eighties. The product is essentially a fine powder of carbon-based microspheres covered in

Z Smith

Mark Ripple

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zerovalent iron molecules, which is all derived from local, sustainably farmed sugar cane and Louisiana crayfish shells. Nanofex injects the substance into groundwater wells at contaminated sites where the powder is dispersed through pores in soil and bedrock to clean up drinking water supplies, molecule by molecule. It is designed to target the chlorinated solvents used by dry cleaners as well as in the aerospace and computer-processor industries. “NOBIC opened just as we were getting started,” Culpepper says. “It’s been a great fit for a company like ours that prides itself on being sustainable.”

Culpepper says the camaraderie among his fellow tenants at NOBIC has been invaluable in terms of moral support, but the technical services and business advice have led to tangible outcomes that propel his business off the ground. “They have an emerging environmental economy fellow and commercialization director who we meet with regularly. . . [who] have come up with a number of ideas to help us, like applying to the New Orleans Idea Village competition,” he says in reference to the $50,000 business accelerator grants that Nanofex has twice received. Now, they’re helping him pursue a mega-contract with the Department of Energy to clean up groundwater at research facilities like the Savannah River site in South Carolina and Los Alamos in New Mexico.

There is plenty of work left in restoring wholeness to the city of New Orleans and its swampy, sea level hinterlands, but the post-Katrina efforts represent a paradigm shift in the ongoing patchwork of place. NOBIC, and the overall BioDistrict, are placing a big patch over the long-standing “braindrain” problem while also providing a forum to address other, ongoing city ills.

While Culpepper sits in his office, brainstorming ways to clean up contaminated water at the nation’s nuclear research facilities, inside NOBIC, yet another giant thunderstorm is brewing on the horizon outside. As the drops begin to collect and trickle down his office’s glass walls toward the sleek courtyard landscape below, the building’s mission feels palpable inside. It’s a new type of melting pot for New Orleans, one that considers the future as much as the present and elevates responsibility—social, environmental, and fiscal— to the top priority in how things are done. Local and global, theory and practice, business and ethics—they all meet in harmonious design.

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STRUCTURE SPOTLIGHT NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM

PHOTO: THOMAS DAMGAARD

New Orleans may seem like an odd city for the National World War II Museum, but its location is actually rooted in history. Originally opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, the programming focused on the invasion of Normandy, France, by exploring the amphibious operations of WWII. A key part of those attacks was the Higgins boat, designed, constructed, and tested in New Orleans by Higgins Industries. The city is also home to Stephen Ambrose, a historian who spearheaded the project.

The museum recently completed its Freedom Pavilion—the second of four construction phases. The first phase, completed in 2012, included the Theater Pavilion, which is made up of precast concrete panels along its Magazine Street façade, making the building look like a fortress. The lighter, more open Freedom Pavilion houses historical macro-objects from the war, including B-29 bombers and fighter planes suspended from the ceiling and tanks, war machines, and an interactive submarine exhibit on ground level. Commemorating America’s soldiers, the Freedom Pavilion has a wall honoring recipients of the prestigious Medal of Honor.

Phases three and four are in the works, and once completed in 2017, they’ll all be connected through a central lawn with a floating canopy to protect the space from the elements and sunshade a large portion of the museum.

LEFT: The 36,000-squarefoot Freedom Pavilion stands five stories tall and showcases some of the largest artifacts from World War II. RIGHT: The first phase, the Solomon Victory Theater, has a stark, protective façade made of precast concrete.

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BRAND RECOGNITION, BOTTLED A vital employer in southern Louisiana for more than a century, Coca-Cola continues to lead with sustainability

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE from TOP: The plant catches attention off of Plank Road with an oversized, glass-encased replica of a Coca-Cola bottle near its main entrance.

GraceHebert’s interior designer used color and shape schemes based on the logo and fizzy texture of Coke.

Various items of the brand’s nostalgia provide a sense of familiarity that permeates throughout the plant.

The building’s training room simulates a real grocery store to properly teach employees to stock shelves and perform machine maintenance.

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The Baton Rouge Coca-Cola bottling plant has plenty of elaborate features, including a training room laid out like a mini grocery store dedicated to teaching new employees how to stock shelves and service fountain machines—but it’s a decoration, a 12-foot-tall rotating replica of a Coke bottle encased in glass with a neon backdrop out in front that best sums up the mission of the team that built it: widespread recognition and committed environmentalism.

“It was really to create a visual presence from the road as you drove by,” says Jerry Hebert, president of GraceHebert Architects, of the giant bottle, which was a gift from Coke’s National Headquarters. “Staying sustainable, we were able to create this glass tower and display a Coke bottle in it.”

It isn’t just drivers out on Plank Road that are noticing the plant. The 56,322-square-foot facility, among the largest of its kind in the country, became the first LEED-certified manufacturing plant that Coca-Cola and Louisiana have ever had upon its completion in 2009. It’s not only huge, but it also has award-winning design with the Design Excellence Award from the American Society of Interior Designers, for which Hebert credits the ideas of Kriste C. Rigby, an interior designer and partner at GraceHebert.

“She basically took the concept of the Coca-Cola logo and design and put that throughout the floors in the buildings, and she made it feel like a really cool, contemporary space,” he says. “[We were given] a lot of older Coca-Cola nostalgia that she was able to spread throughout the building and reuse to make it feel comfortable and see the brand of Coke. No matter where you walk throughout the building, you feel it. That’s a good thing if you can be sustainable and have a cool building all at the same time.”

The plant features reflective roofing, materials from within a 500-mile radius, and two wells to conserve water—which Hebert notes that a soda-bottling plant is sure to use a lot of, making water conservation a huge priority. But, according to him, its broad impact stretches beyond the environment. The new plant has also helped boost local employment and business for the New Orleans region, a home to the company where Coke products have been made for more than 100 years.

“The great thing about Coca-Cola as a corporate citizen is they’re so involved in the community in Baton Rouge in so many different ways, and they help out so many nonprofits,” Hebert says.

Even in the wake of disaster—and the untimely passing of the plant’s president, Joseph “Darian” Chustz, in January of 2012—Coca-Cola is extending its century-long stay in Baton Rouge, the same city where in 1906 the first-ever bottle of Coke was produced.

“They’ve had a huge impact, and their presence here would have been greatly missed had they not stayed,” Hebert says. “The mayor’s office and everybody else was working with them to keep them here in a sustainable environment so that they’ll be here for the long haul.”

PHOTOS: BRIAN BAIAMONTE

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STRUCTURE SPOTLIGHT ARABELLA STATION WHOLE FOODS New Orleans’ Arabella Station bus barn, constructed in 1893, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places because it met a key qualification: it contributed to a major pattern of American history. That was the era of electric streetcars, in which trolleys plied the streets of cities across the country over approximately three decades starting in 1890.

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While New Orleans’ most famous streetcar, named Desire, was serviced at a Canal Station, the Arabella-based lines had a lot to do with development of the Crescent City in the early 20th century. That’s because where the streetcars went outward, homes and businesses were sure to follow.

Streetcars gave way to buses, but Arabella Station eventually fell into disuse. With preservation status, the city was saddled with the problem of what to do with this hulking structure, a largely metal-clad shed. Mixed-use developments involving retail and residential units were discussed, but Whole Foods Market showed interest and was eventually able to

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX (PRESENT), COURTESY OF MANNING ARCHITECTS (HISTORICAL)

repurpose the building as its then-newest location in New Orleans.

That was in 2002. It would weather Katrina fairly well three years later, perhaps due to the low-pitched, metal roof of the 63,000-squarefoot structure. The store occupies 38,000 square feet with 25,000 square feet dedicated to parking. The original skin, corrugated metal, was replaced in the renovation, and brick walls, all internal structural elements, some windows, and louvers were preserved. Downtown-facing glass walls allow shoppers an airier interior atmosphere.

Architects at Billes Partners needed to wend their way through regulatory agencies as well as

neighborhood groups to complete the renovation for the new owner to eventually receive the federal tax credit for repurposing.

Now that it’s been more than a century after it was first constructed, people are still travelling in and out of the station, but for a different purpose than their earlier counterparts.

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LEFT: Before being converted into a Whole Foods in 2002, the structure was a 19th century streetcar bus barn.

Whole Foods replaced much of the metal that Arabella Station was originally made of, but kept its metal roof, which helped the structure hold up through Katrina.

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TULANE AWASH IN GREEN

Although New Orleans isn’t thought of as a college town, Tulane University is widely considered one of the city’s top economic drivers, employers, and trendsetters. As a hub of rebuilding, revitalizing, and entrepreneurship, Tulane has a story that mirrors its hometown’s.

The university has committed to achieving LEED Silver standards in all new buildings and will be carbon neutral by 2030—goals that are being driven by a panel of university employees known as the Green Machine. Liz Davey, director of the university’s Office of Sustainability and Green Machine member, discusses her department’s beginnings and why sustainable building has a leg up in academia.

How did the Office of Sustainability come to be?

It actually started with a course in environmental sociology. The students created an environmental report card for the university in the mid-‘90s where they had to develop the criteria and collect the data. Aaron Allen, the student who went on to write the honors thesis that launched our office, got his start in that course.

An undergraduate thesis launched the office?

It was a wonderful honors thesis. I keep it posted, and it’s available in our library. Before Aaron left, he lobbied deans, the president, and other senior administrators to contribute money to establish the Office of Sustainability.

Where is Aaron now?

He went on to do his PhD in music at Harvard, and he is now an associate professor of musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

He is the university’s academic sustainability coordinator, and he has played a role in creating a new field called ecomusicology, which looks at the relationship between the environment and music.

You’re a member of the Green Machine, can you tell me more about the initiative and who works on it?

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How was the Green Machine founded?

This started when I invited key staff people over for lunch, and we read (continued on page 49)

PHOTO: CALEB FOX

RIGHT: Tulane’s Office of Sustainability director, Liz Davey, is part of a team of faculty members now known as the Green Machine, which works on environmental initiatives at the university and has nine LEED APs on its staff.

I would call it a nickname for all of the Tulane people who work on the green aspects of our building projects. It’s not confined to one office or department. We’ve got LEED APs and Green Associates, design and construction services, and the school of architecture on board.

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TULANE CASE STUDY WEATHERHEAD HALL Construction of Weatherhead Hall, the 80,700-square-foot home to more than 260 undergraduate students, was scheduled to begin the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf region. Following the disaster, the teams at Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas Architects and John C. Williams Architects updated the design with new building codes, improved flood-mitigation techniques, and set a goal to achieve LEED certification upon completion in 2011.

Occupancy sensors, the most noticeable green feature, were employed to shut off lights in hallways, stairwells, and unused rooms. The sensors also control temperature and select electrical outlets throughout the building. The university’s first dual-flush toilets were installed in Weatherhead, which is predicted to reduce water use by 32 percent.

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TULANE CASE STUDY J. BENNETT JOHNSTON HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH BUILDING Greening a research facility is never easy, but the three-floor laboratory renovation of the seven-story J. Bennett Johnston Health and Environmental Research Building achieved LEED-CI Gold certification after its completion in August 2013. The old model consisted of small individual rooms, which were converted into ballroom-style laboratory spaces, which are open and collaborative instead of closed off. The building’s low-flow plumbing fixtures are estimated to reduce water consumption by more than 30 percent, and 54 percent of the existing materials remained in the renovated space. Laboratories consume much more energy than other university buildings, especially because of the need for fume hoods to clean the air. Variable airflow fume hoods were installed to reduce the necessary amount of conditioned air, and the laboratory’s lighting fixtures are tailored to each workspace and turn off automatically when the room is empty or can be lit by sunlight.

PHOTO: THE LEMOINE CO. (JOHNSTON EXTERIOR)

© 2011 ROBERT BENSON PHOTOGRAPHY

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TULANE CASE STUDY THE HERTZ CENTER

PHOTOS: WILL CROCKER

The $13 million LEED-certified Hertz Center has 43,000 square feet of practice space for Tulane’s men’s and women’s basketball and women’s volleyball teams. The Hertz Center has two courts made of FSC-certified wood; several offices and locker rooms; a conditioning, training, and hydrotherapy center; a film room; and conference rooms for breakout meetings. The design teams at Gould Evans and Lee Ledbetter & Associates envisioned the center as a “home away from home” for student athletes and included areas for them to relax outside when off the courts, complete with iPod and iPhone docking stations.

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TULANE CASE STUDY DINWIDDIE HALL Renovated in 2010, the 91-year-old Dinwiddie Hall achieved LEED Gold status after the Green Machine chose it to be the first LEED project on campus. Dinwiddie was renovated for $9 million and currently houses the Department of Anthropology and the Middle American Research Institute. The project focused on recycling and preserving materials and maintained 51 percent of the original interior.

More than 76 percent of the demolition and construction waste from the project was recycled. Dinwiddie uses 17.9 percent less energy than a baseline building, and lowflow fixtures have reduced water use by 35 percent. The contractor who worked on Dinwiddie ensured that all paints, primers, sealants, adhesives, and coatings met low-VOC standards, and the building is equipped with carbon dioxide monitors.

the LEED standard through, credit by credit. It took us two lunches to get through. We discussed what it was and how it compared to Tulane’s existing design and construction processes. The university architect selected Dinwiddie Hall as our first LEED project.

What challenges are unique to driving sustainability in an academic setting?

The variety of buildings that we have on a campus, which you can see in our LEED projects. These are just a small portion of our building stock and include laboratories, residence halls, athletic facilities, old buildings, and new buildings. Campuses are busy, noisy, active places with lots of little micro-communities. Engaging so many different groups is another challenge.

What opportunities are unique to this environment?

Working with college students gives you the great privilege of focusing on university sustainability.

They have high standards for us and make great contributions. When you involve students in a project, the potential impact is so great because they can carry that experience into the future.

How are students involved at the Office of Sustainability?

Students do all of the communications, many of the outreach projects, documentation for site credits, and the creation of many educational materials for occupants of LEED projects.

How does their influence affect the office’s goals and operations?

It’s very important to have students involved.

They raise great questions and know what will interest their peers. It’s always going to be a better project if there’s strong student involvement.

PHOTO: ALAN KARCHMER

Do you think Tulane, a private university, has any advantages over public universities working on sustainability?

Universities are value-driven institutions. Within a university, concerns about environmental impact, sustainability, and the future are taken very seriously. Private universities have even more freedom to act on those values than our public counterparts.

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COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT PARISITE SKATE PARK For many, especially those outside the skateboarding community, the term “skate park” evokes the image of a concrete landscape without a scrap of green in sight. Once generally accurate, that image is now outdated.

The planning and design of skate parks nationwide has transformed their look and role within communities, embodied by Parisite Skate Park, the only skate park in New Orleans. With the help of Tulane City Center, the Tony Hawk Foundation, the Drew Brees Foundation, and Red Bull, Parisite will become more than just a skate park. In addition to its half-pipe and snake run, the park will feature a stormwater diversion system, rain gardens, and bioswales. The plans for the park emphasize that it isn’t just a gathering place for skaters; designers have included plans for an outdoor classroom, public seating, and picnic areas, too.

This community focus is nothing new for the park. After New Orleans’ first skate park, the Peach Orchard, was demolished in 2012, skaters from across the city gathered under Interstate 610 and began pouring concrete. The area’s popularity gained traction, and the city started questioning the safety and legality of the skating area. Skaters banded to form a nonprofit, Transitional Spaces, to negotiate with City Hall and keep the park open. In 2013, New Orleans recognized Parisite as an official recreation area, and in June 2014, the master plan for a formal park was approved by the City Planning Commission.

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ABOVE: At the corner of Paris and Pleasure Streets in the Seventh Ward, Parisite Skate Park lies below Interstate 610. Because of this location, the nonprofit formed by the skaters, Transitional Spaces, had to work through multiple levels of red tape with city, state, and national governing entities.

OPPOSITE: The new park will be a gathering place for the community with greenways and bioswales as opposed to the all-concrete landscapes typical of skate parks.

PHOTO: CALEB FOX; RENDERINGS: HARMON-DECOTIIS STUDIO TEAM / TULANE CITY CENTER

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BRINGING BROADMOOR BACK

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Four months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes, Broadmoor residents were told that if 50 percent of them didn’t return, their dying neighborhood would be converted into parkland.

PHOTO: CALEB FOX

They insisted the neighborhood wasn’t dead.

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Ellarose Gray never left for a hurricane.

The storms would come, usually between late summer and early fall, hurl themselves against New Orleans, and retreat again, but she remained.

Gray had lived in Broadmoor, a neighborhood in the 12th and 13th Wards on the west side of the city, since 1978, when she moved into her home in time to see the New Year fireworks from her front yard. She and her neighbors always stayed, and when the storm was over, they descended onto the streets to clean it all up and set things right again.

When officials spent the last full week of August 2005 urging the city to evacuate, not everyone listened. The storm they were calling Katrina had swelled into a hurricane and shrank back to a tropical storm several times, all in the course of a few days. By Sunday morning, it was classified as a category-four hurricane. Gray heard the news and worried. What she’d endured in all her years in Broadmoor suddenly didn’t matter. She decided to leave that afternoon, after she went to church.

An hour before New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin would hold a press conference and order a mandatory evacuation, Gray and others from her church decided to cancel the service and leave the city.

“We started hearing about how bad it was going to be,” she remembers. “We decided we weren’t going to have no service because nobody’s coming.”

They piled into several vans, leaving behind homes, possessions, and cars safely locked up in the church parking lot. Gray left her two-bedroom duplex on Louisiana Avenue Parkway, where a large tree in the front yard had endured even more storms than she had. The small fleet of borrowed vans headed for Robert, Louisiana, 55 miles away across Lake Pontchartrain to the north—the drive took them a little over an hour. The day was perfect: blue skies, a bright and hot August sun, and lower humidity than usual for the marshy city. A few hours later, after the mayor called Katrina “the storm most of us have feared” and the Superdome opened as a last-ditch shelter, that same trip took up to six hours.

“We were not here when it happened, and I thank God—it’s the first time,” she says, trailing off to take a moment to collect her thoughts. “I’ve never left because of a hurricane.”

By 9 a.m. the next day, the lowest parts of the city were under eight feet of water. Five hours later, officials confirmed breaches in three canal levees.

Those who had stayed in their houses or the Superdome were suddenly stranded, and reports of looting swelled as quickly as the floodwaters.

On Tuesday, National Guard troops, helicop54

ters, and state buses poured into New Orleans to evacuate civilians, but 85 percent of the city was already underwater. For the next several days, legislators would argue, pass relief packages, and demand to know how the levees failed. But finger-pointing wasn’t on the minds of those who had left the city.

Eight to ten feet of water surged through homes in Broadmoor, including Gray’s duplex. It swirled around the massive tree in her front yard and poured in through the doorways. Her house was more elevated than some of the ranch-style homes on her block. Those houses didn’t flood— they were knocked off of their foundations and wiped away with only concrete slabs left behind to mark their passing. Meanwhile, Gray was busy arranging for another shelter for herself and neighbors, this time in Baton Rouge, where they would remain for the next three months. As media descended on the drowning city, she heard the news filtering in. People were dying, not just in their homes, but also in the Superdome.

“God, a lot of people were killed,” she says softly, as if nearly 10 years later, she still can’t believe it. “A lot of people drowned. My Lord. That was bad. That was the worst.”

•••

David Winkler-Schmit was a journalist on the ground when the hurricane surged into the city.

For the next five years, every paragraph of every story he would write would include the word “Katrina.”

About four months after the storm hurled against the Big Easy, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission began releasing plans to rebuild the city. The map the commission created had six green dots scattered across it; these dots were areas that, if 50 percent of the residents didn’t return, would be turned into parks. Broadmoor was covered in green ink.

“I know how to repopulate a neighborhood,” a Broadmoor resident told Winkler-Schmit.

“How?” “Tell them they can’t.”

BROADMOOR

OPPOSITE: Ellarose Gray has been a resident of Broadmoor for forty years.

BELOW: In response to Hurricane Katrina flooding (shown in shades of blue), the Bring New Orleans Back Commission announced plans for strategic parks in the city in low-lying areas. Broadmoor was one of six spots in the city designated to become park space.

THE GREEN DOTS 2006 BRING NEW ORLEANS BACK COMMISSION PLAN AREAS PROPOSED TO BECOME PARKS/GREEN SPACE PHOTO: CALEB FOX

NEW COMMUNITY

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Within three days of the map’s release, Broadmoor began to rally. A few hundred people wielding handwritten signs gathered on public ground.

One unified slogan emerged: “Broadmoor Lives.”

The protests didn’t stop there, and it echoed throughout the parish. On February 8, 2006, hundreds of Katrina survivors marched in front of the White House. They wielded white ruffled parasols, small umbrellas meant to remind legislators of New Orleans and its culture, and demanded funds to rebuild the city and the Gulf Coast. LaToya Cantrell, president of Broadmoor’s neighborhood association before the storm, was among them. Although she was a politically active community member, she found out about the commission’s plan to bulldoze Broadmoor by reading the front page of The Times-Picayune.

“There was no involvement from the community in regard to the planning process that made this recommendation,” Cantrell says. “That’s what got us started.”

Gray had moved back into Broadmoor, though her home was uninhabitable, when the plans to demolish it were released. She worked in the radiology department of a local hospital, and the hospital offered to house employees in apartments built for patients undergoing care at the facility. She was in a second-floor apartment she describes as beautiful, with two bedrooms and a large glass door, and while in that apartment, she thought about how to save Broadmoor from the green dot.

It would take more than an informal effort to bring the neighborhood back this time, especially on a time limit before bulldozers rolled in. Many residents who wanted to return had no place to go and couldn’t afford to come back, and 50 percent of the original residents suddenly seemed hardly any more obtainable than 80 or 100 or 120. The hurricane was bad enough, but the levee failures seemed to doom Broadmoor, whose streets were now filled with muck and debris and a noticeable

David Winkler-Schmit, School Board President

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LaToya Cantrell, City Council Member

lack of traffic or any signs of life. The neighborhood sits in a bowl, geographically speaking, and had no way to protect itself from filling up after solid concrete failed.

“You say ‘Katrina and the levee failures,’ and it sounds like a band name,” Winkler-Schmit says, “but both pieces contributed to what happened.”

The neighborhood residents were not deterred. Gray partnered with Cantrell and many other long-time Broadmoor residents to form the Broadmoor Improvement Association (BIA).

They worked with local and state governments and private organizations to bring funding, planning, and construction back to the neighborhood.

They wrote grants, called former residents to ask what it would take to come home, staged protests, and outlined what they wanted to emphasize in Broadmoor’s new structure. They formed several committees to work on what needed to be done, such as the Repopulation and Revitalization committees.

“We drew this flower that symbolized our plan,” Cantrell says. “The center was the community, the citizens, and each petal of the flower had a different meaning. One was government, another was faith-based communities, another was private organizations. All of them played a role in how we were going to find resources and rebuild.”

It was a journey that would be measured in years, not months. Their first priority was the construction of an educational corridor, anchored by a public library and school. Once the corridor was completed, organizers would look to places that provide access to technology, health care, social services, and art in a centralized location.

Broadmoor worked with the Harvard Kennedy School, Carnegie Corporation, the City of San Francisco, the Clinton Global Initiative, and many other organizations to rebuild the neighborhood.

They had to start somewhere, and that place was the library.

“It’s not just about books,” Cantrell says. “It was a neutral place to galvanize people. Everyone in the community could see themselves in that library.”

It took several years for the community to receive FEMA funding, especially because

ROSA F. KELLER LIBRARY Another anchor of the neighborhood’s educational corridor, the Keller Library is a staple of the rebuilt Broadmoor. The library began its life as two buildings, a one-story bungalow constructed as a home in 1917 and an additional wing for books in 1993.

After Katrina, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple worked to renovate the house, and the second building was demolished and rebuilt with an emphasis on natural lighting.

DETAILS: Completion Date: March 2012 Size: 9,000 ft2 Cost: $4.6 million Certifications: LEED certified Architect: Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Contractor: Ryan Gootee General Contractors MEP Engineer: Lucien T. Vivien & Associates Structural and Civil Engineer: Kulkarni Consultants Commissioning: Thompson Building Energy Solutions

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX (PORTRAITS), TIMOTHY HURSLEY (ROSA F. KELLER)

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ANDREW H. WILSON CHARTER SCHOOL The pre-K-8 Wilson Charter School houses approximately 540 students and includes 26 classrooms, administration rooms, a cafeteria, gymnasium, art studio, music room, computer lab, and library. Plans for the school were released in 2008, and the school serves as one of the anchors of Broadmoor’s education corridor.

•••

Many problems that existed in Broadmoor and other parts of the city before the hurricane haven’t been solved yet, such as crime rates and income disparity. Winkler-Schmit remembers a conversation with a young man when he worked at the New Orleans Public Library. He was interviewing him, asking a series of general questions.

“What’s your most significant achievement up until now?” he asked.

The man didn’t blink. “Being alive.”

If Katrina taught Broadmoor anything, says Winkler-Schmit, who is now president of the Broadmoor Charter School Board, it’s that the power of a community can overcome these problems, just as it did to a map that blotted it out.

Leadership like Cantrell’s made that happen. She now serves on the New Orleans City Council after Gray encouraged her to run in 2012. The library and school define the educational corridor and are built to LEED standards. A fine arts and wellness center, just across the street from the library and

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school, is under construction, and a health clinic is in the works. Many houses are still being rebuilt or refitted, but numerous LEED-certified homes, some Platinum, have been added in the process.

“We still have over 250 homes that are being rebuilt, with families that need to come back,” Cantrell says. “We still have a ways to go to make sure Broadmoor is better than it was before.”

The Broadmoor of today looks much different than the Broadmoor of 2005, but some things remain the same. Gray is back in her duplex. She’s proud of an archway she designed between her dining room and living room. She couldn’t describe what she wanted perfectly, so she sketched it out on a sheet of paper to show to the FEMA contractor. The tree that stood with 10 feet of water swirled around it is still standing in her front yard, and she likes to sit near it on her new porch.

“I was so satisfied being home,” she says.

“Nothing else really mattered. Everything is perfectly completed.”

After cleanup crews swept through her duplex and the block, Gray was amazed at the change. She walked through her yard, devoid of weeds or even a speck of debris, and spotted a little twig that had fallen off of her tree. She took it between her fingers, and it sparked an idea. For nearly a year, Gray picked up twigs she found scattered around Broadmoor and glued them to the twig from her front yard. They were little pieces, cast aside, symbols of death that had been snapped off and tossed away, but once she glued them all together, she called her creation “the tree of life.”

“It’s us,” she says. “It’s what we were going through. We came from death to life.”

Now, when Gray sits on her front porch, she doesn’t just see slabs of concrete up and down Louisiana Avenue Parkway, signifying what used to be. She doesn’t see streets full of muck and debris. There are cars going down Broad Street, like veins pumping blood once more. It’s finally busy again, because Broadmoor lives.

PHOTOS: MICHAEL ROBINSON

DETAILS: Completion Date: January 2010 Size: 96,122 ft2 Cost: $25.8 million Certifications: LEED for Schools 2007, LEED for Schools Gold Architect: HMS Architects Associate Architect: Innovative Designs General Contractor: Walton Construction Green Building Technical Assistance: Global Green USA Structural Engineer: Morphy Makofsky, Inc. Mechanical/Electrical Engineer: Moses Engineers

numerous government property-value assessments were dismally low. The library, for example, was initially valued at $350,000. Cantrell helped organize disputes, and three assessments later, the library was valued at $4 million.

The Repopulation Committee continued to call former Broadmoor residents after the library’s construction began, and a pattern emerged. A major obstacle to many homeowners’ returns was the lack of public education within the neighborhood. The BIA’s next priority was to build the Andrew H. Wilson Charter School to address that issue. But residents didn’t want to just rebuild what had stood before Katrina and been wiped away. They wanted to build a better Broadmoor. They sought advice on green and sustainable building and designed a library and school that could survive the next disaster, ultimately constructing a LEED Gold facility.

“As the years passed, resources started to dwindle,” Cantrell says. “But we weren’t done.

We had to figure out how to invest in ourselves, not off the backs of other people.”

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NEW COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT ABITA BREWERY

PHOTO: CALEB FOX

For hundreds of years, people have congregated at their local brewpub to hear the latest news, chat with friends, and just be amongst their neighbors. Abita Brewing Company, located across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, is where residents of Abita Springs come to relax after a long day and enjoy a local, and now sustainably manufactured, craft brew. In 2013, the brewing facility installed 340 solar panels on its roof, which now power 10 percent of the building’s manufacturing operations, offsetting 2.7 million kilowatt-hours at the energy-intensive facility. This is in addition to their on-site wastewater treatment, their harvesting and housing of natural gas, and a Steinecker Merlin kettle that cuts boiling time in half and further reduces natural gas use. Abita scores yet another major win in sustainability with its bottle packaging; with an unorthodox but still fully functional design, their six-pack cases use 50 percent less cardboard than a typical packaging method. Some of these upgrades have an up-front cost but will pay dividends in the future, which all comes back to the community philosophy Abita engages in every day.

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1803

NEW COMMUNITY

The United States purchases the territory of Louisiana from France. As New Orleans expands and its culture as an American city grows, its population increases [Fig.1]. The Mississippi River is a key part of the city, and with a larger population dumping waste into it, homes upriver become the settling areas for wealthier individuals, leaving the downriver neighborhoods with higher Creole and working-class populations.

CULTURAL SHIFTS How politics and disaster have shaped the Upper Ninth Ward for more than 200 years

1914

The Louisiana State Government authorizes the building of the Industrial Canal to connect the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. The canal bisects the Ninth Ward, creating the Upper Ninth and Lower Ninth.

NOVEMBER 1960 Fig.1: New Orleans built area in 1841 and streets of 1880.

Fig.2: Ruby Bridges escorted to William J. Frantz Elementary School by US Marshals.

Fig.3: Flooding of the Ninth Ward following Hurricane Betsy.

The Orleans Parish School Board announces plans to integrate schools.

Schools open November 14, and only the police chief knows which have been chosen to integrate. Two schools in the city, one being William J. Frantz Elementary in the Upper Ninth, open with integrated classes; one of the new students was Ruby Bridges [Fig.2].

White flight, in which whites move out of urban areas in large numbers, snowballs.

SEPTEMBER 1965

Hurricane Betsy hits New Orleans, and the Industrial Canal floods much of the Lower Ninth Ward [Fig.3]. The flooding exacerbates white flight, and the area becomes predominately African-American over the next few decades.

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1

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3

PHOTOS: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (FIG. 2 & 3), JOCELYN AUGUSTINO / FEMA (FIG. 4), RICHARD MARTIN / FLICKR CC (FIG. 6)

A quick Internet search of the term “gentrification” paints a complex picture. Many believe that the concept, a demographic shift toward wealthier residents that’s often associated with block busting, rent hikes, and even violence and racism, destroys communities. In contrast to the well-publicized struggles of the Lower Ninth Ward, the Upper Ninth is experiencing a resurgence with an influx of millennials settling in the area after coming to New Orleans to volunteer in the wake of Katrina. Ask residents in the Upper Ninth Ward how they feel about gentrification—though the word alone can’t come close to encompassing what’s really happening there—and the answers are mixed. Some argue that without wealthier individuals moving into the neighborhood, many buildings would have remained vacant or even been demolished by now. Others say an increase in neighborhood transplants cuts into long-held culture.

A glance back at the history of New Orleans and the Upper Ninth sheds light on past demographic shifts and how they’re changing in the present.

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1973

The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) opens, offering intensive instruction in writing, music, dance, theater, and more. This move makes the Upper Ninth area a focal point of art and culture in the city.

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AUGUST 2011

The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music opens to the public, anchoring the Upper Ninth’s Musicians’ Village, one of the major development projects in the area and a draw for younger residents to move to the Upper Ninth [Fig.6].

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AUGUST 2005

Hurricane Katrina makes landfall east of New Orleans. Breaches in canal levees throughout the city result in catastrophic flooding [Fig.4]. Within a few weeks, Common Ground Collective sends 500 volunteers to work in the Ninth Ward while living in St. Mary of the Angels school in the Upper Ninth. Common Ground Health Clinic, the only health facility in the area, opens. Many young professionals begin moving to the area to help in the cleanup efforts.

JANUARY 2006

Eight acres in the Upper Ninth are sold to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, which plans to create a Musicians’ Village. This area would consist of Habitat homes and include the future Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

SPRING 2008

Build Now, a local nonprofit, begins constructing site-built stilt houses in the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward areas, Lakeview, and Gentilly [Fig.5].

2008-2009

Recovery funds dwindle, but the overall New Orleans economy is relatively stable compared to the rest of the nation, which is feeling the effects of the financial crisis. Media entrepreneurs, volunteers with organizations such as Teach for America, and film industry professionals make up a sizable percentage of the new population.

APRIL 2013

Redevelopment of the Florida public housing complex in the Upper Ninth begins [Fig.7]. The complex promises to bring back individuals displaced

by Katrina and draw new individuals supported by the Housing Authority of New Orleans, a balance to the area’s gentrification.

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AUGUST 2013

A portion of St. Claude Avenue in the Upper Ninth is officially zoned as an arts and culture overlay by the New Orleans City Council. The City Council says the movement will protect small- and medium-sized businesses in the area, and critics use the term “gentrification” to describe the decision both positively and negatively.

JUNE 2014

Growing Green, which offers to rent vacant lots for just $250 per year to people who promise to create urban agricultural space, has two lots in the Upper Ninth slated to become a 7,200-square-foot produce garden.

The commitment of Growing Green and similar organizations to building a more sustainable neighborhood continues to draw new, young residents to the area. [Fig.8]

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Fig.4: Post-Katrina flooding in the Ninth Ward.

Fig.5: A Build Now home.

Fig.6: The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in the Upper Ninth.

Fig.7: The Florida Projects, a public housing complex.

Fig.8: Children showing off produce from Growing Green’s garden.

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NEW COMMUNITY

REDEFINING THE LOWER NINTH Almost 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward is primed for community development with a foundation of sustainable homebuilding

THIS PAGE: Vacant patches of land are still scattered throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, but modern, solar array-adorned green homes from Make It Right are gradually filling those spaces.

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX

OPPOSITE: Although designed by world-renowned architects, the Make It Right homes still reference classic New Orleans architecture, such as front porches, but with green upgrades. Morphosis Architects designed this house to literally float up to 12 feet in the event of a flood, which is higher than projected flooding for the area.

The Lower Ninth Ward has a special energy— underneath the easygoing charm of its residents, there is a sense of momentum that has been coursing through the neighborhood since Hurricane Katrina poured into it from three sides, flooding homes and smashing some of them off of their foundations.

To say that the neighborhood has fully recovered in the nine years since it suffered the worst devastation in its history is a stretch. Slabs of concrete still dominate many yards where there were once ranch-style homes. Of the houses that have been built, some stand alone with no neighbors for several lots. A cover article in New York Magazine written just two years ago described the Lower Ninth as “Jungleland,” alongside depictions of vacant homes, abandoned construction materials, overgrown lawns, and stray cats and dogs.

Although it was just one of many areas devastated by the post-Katrina flooding, the Lower Ninth was one of the hardest hit. But the homes built by organizations like Make It Right and Global Green are quashing that feeling of abandonment and cutting through the jungle that’s grown in New Orleans.

Tom Darden, executive director of Make It Right, and Michelle Pyne, green building program associate at Global Green, describe the neighborhood as a community of working-class homeowners before Katrina struck—which challenges the two-dimensional view of poverty that many outside New Orleans associate with the pre-Katrina Lower Ninth.

“It has such a passionate base of residents, and is an incredible place to be,” Pyne says. “It was a unique neighborhood with a high number of African-American homeownership.”

Darden says many pre-Katrina residents of the Lower Ninth belonged to working class families that planned and saved to purchase their own homes, sometimes passing them down through generations. After Katrina, they wanted the ability to do so again.

In 2007, two years after Katrina made landfall, the Lower Ninth still lagged behind other communities in rebuilding and bringing its residents back to the neighborhood. Brad Pitt had visited the neighborhood many times since Katrina and was shocked to see the lack of progress. He

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NEW COMMUNITY

BAYOU BIENVENUE

The view from the lookout at the edge of the old Mississippi River delta swamp reveals acres of brackish water broken up only by stumps that barely break the surface.

Trees act as horizontal levees against large storms; Bayou Bienvenue was once a freshwater cypress swamp, but it turned into an open-water marsh, devoid of trees because shipping channels opened it to saltwater, which eventually killed the Cyprus trees. Had it remained intact, the swamp could have minimized damage and protected the Lower Ninth Ward and other areas from Hurricane Katrina.

Wetland loss is a widespread problem in Louisiana, which loses one football field of wetlands each hour. Here are some quick facts about the swamp and efforts to reclaim it: 1. A 65-YEAR DEATH The cypress swamp at Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle was still robust and functional in 1933. Levee and canal construction contaminated the swamp with saltwater, and by 1998, it had become a plain of open water dotted with “cypress ghosts.”

3. SILVER LINING A surge barrier and rock dam were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but that loss may have helped the cypress swamp. When the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (the channel connecting the bayou to the Mississippi) closed, saltwater contamination was reduced.

2. NATURAL LEVEES When the man-made levees failed, the cypress forest could have served as a natural levee and second line of defense. Wetlands reduce the height and speed of storm surges.

4. NEXT STEP Since Hurricane Katrina, legislators realized the necessity of natural protections against weather disasters. In 2012, the Louisiana legislature passed a master plan for restoration and protection of coastal areas such as the marsh.

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committed to help rebuild the Lower Ninth and partnered with Global Green to host an architecture competition, which led to the formation of Make It Right. Darden was the nonprofit’s first volunteer and helped make Pitt’s idea of rebuilding a sustainable, safe neighborhood possible.

The Make It Right houses are unlike anything else in the Lower Ninth, both in style and design. The first Make It Right homes were neon pink spots across an otherwise muddy, bleak landscape. Today, they come in similarly bright colors—yellows, blues, and greens figure prominently—with asymmetrical metal roofs and wide decks typical of many homes in the city. All designed by world-class architects, the styles take a slightly exaggerated view of traditional New Orleans architecture, which has drawn both praise and criticism. Homeowners choose the home designs, and Darden says they’ve been happy with their look and feel. Others have critiqued them as too modern, too odd, and not New Orleanian.

Architectural reviews aside, if you walk through the neighborhood, the residents will tell you their home is just what they wanted.

The goals in sustainability outlined by Make It Right and Global Green, which operates in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth, have proven attainable. The first Global Green house in Holy Cross was completed in May 2008, is LEED Platinum-certified, and saves residents approximately $1,200 to $2,400 in annual energy costs. Global Green is currently constructing a Community Development and Climate Action Center along with an affordable rental apartment on the same site. Make It Right has completed 100 LEED Platinum-certified, Cradle-to-Cradle-inspired homes as of August 2014. Both groups use solar panels, energy- and water-efficient appliances, and designs that emphasize smart energy use and protection from flooding.

Builders had to consider factors unique to New Orleans. Pyne explains that most of the research in sustainable building is done in the northwest and northeast: two regions with very different climates from that of New Orleans. Techniques had to be modified for the hot, humid environment of a city encircled by Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The high cooling load for these green homes also required particular attention to insulation and air sealing, and builders had to

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PHOTOS: CALEB FOX (BAYOU BIENVENUE, PYNE)

address problems with mold and outdated city utilities, such as old water pipes and grids.

“This is the way that housing should be built everywhere, and it serves as an example,” Darden says. “Now we can say, ‘If we can do it here, why not anywhere?’”

Global Green and Make It Right are far from finished in the Lower Ninth. There are still undeveloped areas, and many residents who relocated after Katrina haven’t returned. But former residents still call Darden at Make It Right saying they plan on coming back. “It’s amazing to me that, this far out, they’re still wanting to come back,” he says. “Sometimes it takes a long time to get organized enough to do so.”

A major issue that both organizations are working to address is the lack of amenities. Although the Upper Ninth Ward is experiencing a resurgence of businesses and amenities, the Lower Ninth has no grocery store, few gas stations,

Tom Darden, Make It Right

Michelle Pyne, Global Green

ABOVE: Global Green’s development is located in the Holy Cross neighborhood, which is above sea level unlike much of the Lower Ninth Ward.

no pharmacies, and the nearest hospital is across the canal and five miles away. However, there are businesses investing in the community—one of the few area restaurants, Café Dauphine in Holy Cross, opened its doors in 2012, and CVS just announced a new location for the area. Dr. King Charter School is so far the only school in the Lower Ninth, but a 2009 article in The Times-Picayune called it “a symbol of rebirth.”

Darden described the amenities question as a “chicken and the egg” problem: will the people come back first, or the services? Since the Lower Ninth is still behind the rest of the city in recovering population, the draw for businesses is slim.

Still, building hasn’t stalled in the area; a new fire station, community center, and high school are in the works, creating that feeling of momentum that’s permeating the city. Pyne says the neighborhood becomes more appealing to returning and new homeowners every year.

“The neighborhood definitely has assets that the real estate and development market is starting to notice,” she says, “which is scary to some. Some people want to keep it a secret.” Open park space, urban levees, beautiful views of the Mississippi, and walking and biking lanes are among the conveniences unique to the neighborhood.

Darden says in his eight years working in the area, he’s learned that defining core values and not deviating from them is key to this type of work, especially in the face of heated criticism.

In the Lower Ninth, those goals are climate adaptation, sustainability, affordability, and durability.

“The one constant is change,” he says, and, in a neighborhood still rebuilding itself, that’s true on every street corner.

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COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT COLUMBIA PARC AT THE BAYOU New Orleans’ relationship with public housing is long, checkered, and often uneasy. The Housing Authority of New Orleans was no stranger to adversity when Hurricane Katrina wiped out many of the authority’s properties, which were plagued with funding issues and, in one case, a property owner accused of attracting violence, drugs, and other crime.

Floodwaters reached up to 10 feet in the St. Bernard Projects, a Seventh Ward neighborhood that had mold-infested public buildings, and in 2007, the authority completely demolished the development.

What stands in its place is now Columbia Parc at the Bayou, a 52-acre national model for the possibilities of public housing. All of its housing units meet LEED for Home standards, and its apartments were constructed with nontoxic and low-VOC materials, Energy Star-certified light fixtures, and other energy-efficient methods. The residential community boasts a fitness center, an outdoor pool, a 46-seat movie theater, and a $9 million early education center. Columbia Parc’s senior housing complex earned LEED Platinum status with a rooftop solar array and organic gardens.

Many residents enjoy the changes to the homes, but like any public housing project, the reconstruction of Columbia Parc is not without controversy. Rents have climbed since Katrina, and many areas suffer from a shortage of livable, affordable units. Some former residents have opted to take vouchers that allow them to settle elsewhere.

Columbia Parc’s entry requirements are rigorous; in addition to the housing authority’s criminal background check and approval, potential tenants must pass a credit check and work at least 20 hours per week, unless they are elderly, disabled, or enrolled in an educational or vocational program.

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ABOVE: Heritage Senior Residences, the LEED Platinum-certified senior housing component overlooking the central green of the 52-acre development, has a solar array on its roof in addition to energy-efficient appliances.

OPPOSITE: All of Columbia Parc’s townhomes have low-VOC materials, Energy Star appliances, efficient insulation, and low-flow fixtures, which all help the residences meet LEED for Homes standards.

PHOTOS: RION RIZZO (ABOVE), CALEB FOX (RIGHT)

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NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

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1718

NEW CITY

French colonist Jean-Baptist Le Moyne founds the city of New Orleans, making it the capital of the huge French colony. The city shows great potential for shipping from settlements along the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico and Europe. Its precise location is selected on higher ground due to the flood-prone nature of the waterway.

A CENTER OF INDUSTRY At more than 300 years old, the Port of New Orleans shifts its focus to sustainable practices

The Port of New Orleans once made its city America’s richest and among its most populous. How it has evolved over time reflects advances in shipping technologies that enabled prosperity for farms and industries upriver and to companies and countries overseas. This evolution continues today, as sustainability practices move to the forefront.

PRE-EUROPEAN

The Mississippi River delta that provides much of New Orleans’ land mass is formed around 2200 BC and is inhabited by Native Americans 1,300 years prior to the arrival of French explorers [Fig.1]. The predominant native culture encountered by the earliest Spanish explorers in the mid16th century is the Choctaw, a name that is traced to the phrase for “river people.”

1690s

French explorers and fur trappers first arrive and settle among Native Americans. Archaeological digs reveal that prehistoric (100 BC–400 AD) trade occurred along rivers, tributaries, and bayous of this region—and at the very location of the first European settlement. Traces of the French language still exist in the region today, where the 2000 census revealed 15 percent of those who identify as Creole and Cajun continue to speak the Cajun-French dialect at home.

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1776

The Port of New Orleans, owned by Spain since 1763, plays an important role in the Revolutionary War. The Spaniards allow the American revolutionaries to smuggle military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River to the colonists. During the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans would draw that conflict to a close, when American forces prevented the British from seizing the city, its port, and control of the Mississippi River.

Fig.1: The Mississippi River delta is the geological backbone for the the Port of New Orleans.

Fig.2: Steamships, slightly larger and more advanced than steamboats, docked at the Port of New Orleans.

Fig.3: The Port of New Orleans is the country’s sixth largest port based on volume.

1803

France, having only recently acquired the port from Spain (Napoleon needed it for his European wars), sells it to the US for $15 million as part of the Louisiana Purchase. America consequently increases in size by 828,000 square miles. Spain had granted the Americans shipping rights through the port for three years in 1795, from which President Thomas Jefferson realized its critical value.

1812

The first steamboat enters the port after plying its way from Pittsburgh along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. For the first time, there is a practical way to travel upstream, which significantly reduces the cost of shipping cotton, lead, timber, grain, and other goods northward, and gives rise to the manufacture of larger steamships [Fig.2]. By 1840, New Orleans becomes the wealthiest and thirdmost populous city in the United States.

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1861-1865, CIVIL WAR

As a capital for the South and its largest city, New Orleans’ role in the Civil War is critical for both sides. The Northern Union army targets the city early in the war because of its strategic military position and to control cotton, tobacco, sugar, and other exports. The city and its port are captured early in 1862 with little Confederate resistance; some historians believe the cosmopolitan nature of the city’s polyglot population was Union-friendly. The French Quarter and other parts of the city are consequently spared destruction.

PHOTO: ED METZ / SHUTTERSTOCK (AERIAL)

1865-1877, RECONSTRUCTION

Ice manufacturing and refrigerated shipping expands the types of food commodities shipped through the port.

New dredging technologies deepen channels to permit entry to oceangoing vessels, coinciding with the development of more efficient river barges.

By 1879, federal authorities would take control of both river navigation and flood control.

1884

The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (the 1884 World’s Fair) commemorates the first shipment of cotton to England in 1784.

The fair draws more than one million visitors and is illuminated with 5,000 electric lights, a novelty at the time.

Trains, steamboats, and oceangoing ships all provide access to the 249 acres of fairgrounds situated along the river.

1970s

Containerization, the introduction of intermodal freight containers, revolutionizes the shipping industry, creating efficiencies for international trade and transport [Fig.3]. Considered a chief contributor to globalization of commerce, the reusable steel boxes reduce costs and prompt the opening of the port’s France Road Container Terminal on the Industrial Canal, which would cut the route traveled by oceangoing vessels from 100 to 68 miles.

1900-1960s

Bananas, cotton, grain, and coffee activity grow at the port, leading to the construction of grain elevators that would enable the port to become the largest-volume grain exporter in the US by 1950. The largest green coffee storage and processing facility in the world, known as Silocaf, continues operations today.

2000s

The port’s critical Napoleon Avenue wharves, sheds, and warehouses are adapted to modern container shipping with newer technologies that maximize speed and efficiency.

2014

The Port of New Orleans enters into an agreement to fund research at the University of New Orleans (UNO) to find ways to improve the port’s sustainability through projects focusing on cleaner materials, production processes, and water and energy consumption. UNO is recognized for its work in shipbuilding, ship repair, and ship recycling industries.

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WORKING

New Orleans’ past overuse of drainage systems is the source of many present-day troubles.

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PHOTO: CALEB FOX

WITH WATER

Acknowledging its mistakes, the city plans to capture more water—and put it to work.

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ew Orleans is a complex place. It’s a city of people and history, celebrations and sorrows, gorgeous architecture and urban decay—and more recently, devastation and a determined resurgence.

At the center of this is water, which acts as both friend—indeed, water is the reason this city exists—and as foe. Probe the hydrology of New Orleans and you’ll discover that water comes by river, by rain, by storm surge, and through the ground. At least, that is how nature intended. Current events show that nature, when thwarted, can wreak disaster.

History also tells us that cities hit by disaster often rise again. Chicago had its 1871 fire and came back with a revered urban plan fit for the 20th century. San Francisco was brought to its knees by the earthquake of 1906 and today is the center of the digital universe. In each case, measures were taken to either prevent or mitigate the same disasters from recurring; but of course, that requires an understanding of the root causes and threats those cities inevitably face.

One mistaken perception of New Orleans has been that the floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina were the city’s sole catastrophe. They weren’t. While water in all the wrong places at all the wrong times was indeed a huge problem and caused the deaths of more than 1,800 people, it was not the Crescent City’s only problem with water—not by a long shot.

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Ironically, one of the biggest problems in New Orleans is dry soil. And what led to this curious fact were well-intentioned, but under-informed, efforts to get water out of the city at all times as a fundamental strategy over the better part of the 20th century. This was based on the notion that the city’s frequent hurricanes and its 60 inches of rain per annum were forces to resist.

The enacted solution was to pump the water out, all of the time, because water was the enemy—because it often was, even more so when development began in low-lying areas after implementing the pumping system. Such trust the city fathers had in those pumps.

This idea of controlling water was not unique to New Orleans; in the 20th century, Chicago reversed the flow of its urban river, the Colorado River was tamed by the Hoover Dam, and the Central Valley Project in California rerouted three rivers to transform a desert into farmland. The Netherlands has pushed back the sea with windmills since the 1200s. Most of these water projects have performed as intended; the Hoover Dam provides electricity to cities in Nevada, Arizona, and California, enabling growth. Every grocery store in America today carries produce originating in the vast agricultural regions of central California, and in Holland, great swaths of farmland exist solely because the Dutch were able to wrest land from the shallows of the North Sea. But each of these altered the course of nature, and all are worthy of reexamination in an era of environmental awareness and climate change.

We now have evidence of how tampering with

BELOW: The Urban Water Plan was based on the concept that water is an asset for the city and should be used as an infrastructure network for stormwater as well as space for recreation.

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ABOVE: The plan references the use of parks as stormwater retention spaces after heavy rainfall.

natural systems can lead to significant problems and inconveniences, including deadly disasters.

Call it the law of unintended consequences.

Fortunately, post-Katrina, New Orleans has responded. With the input of engineers and planners from the Royal Netherlands Embassy, the American Planning Association, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, city leaders, regional economic development organization Greater New Orleans, Inc., New Orleans architecture and planning firm Waggonner & Ball Architects, and Senator Mary Landrieu, the Urban Water Plan (UWP or Plan) has been devised.

The UWP is hugely ambitious, disruptive, and transformative. Waggonner & Ball’s David Waggonner, a chief architect of the UWP, quotes Daniel Burnham, the architect who in 1909 coauthored the influential Chicago overhaul project series known as the Burnham Plan, in describing it: “Make no little plans.”

The Plan will revolutionize how water is treated in the city. Instead of walling off the canals to keep water out, which is the present scenario, the Plan will turn the canals into “blueways,” centers of recreation with appropriate space for overflow in heavy rains. Parks will have ample space for play when the city is dry and then double as detention ponds when it rains, protecting surrounding homes from flooding. The many facets all come down to treating water as an asset to embrace— one that will ultimately transform the city physically and financially.

It may cost $6.2 billion to implement, with no funding secured as yet; coastal wetland rebuild-

ing already has a $50 billion price tag in a project called Coast 2050, funded by oil and gas royalties.

The UWP will transform the city’s landscape, opening up and adding waterways and greenways where streets and homes, walled-off canals, and city rights-of-way now stand. It is subject to review, scrutiny, debate, and inevitable funding battles. But the Plan can transform the city in ways the rest of the world will one day imitate.

Unfortunately for New Orleans, the law of unintended consequences came into force almost imperceptibly. Geologists called it subsidence, which means the earth is settling or sinking. According to Alex Kolker, an assistant professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and adjunct professor at Tulane’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences with a PhD in marine and atmospheric sciences, this is due to the drying out of the organic matter, which was built up over centuries as river silt deposited to form the delta on which New Orleans sits.

Why are the soils drying up? It’s because New Orleans became very good at getting rid of its water—and a few other things as well. “Land can sink for many reasons,” Kolker says. “Peat layers oxidize, which is what happens in old marshes, where plant matter is decaying, but more rapidly when dry. It also happens when sediments are compressed. Where New York City is built largely on bedrock, New Orleans is built on mud. When you pull out fluids, including the extensive drilling of oil and gas in Southern Louisiana, that’s a 77

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factor. In other places, there is groundwater mining, and there’s something we call the ‘cone of compression,’ a low spot on the water table such as at the east end of Orleans parish.”

Kolker says this subsidence problem has some severe effects, such as where the earth has dropped as much as eight feet. Heavy objects— buildings, streets, and, most critically, levees— sink. There were levees that had dropped three feet below design, which was a contributing factor to their failure in Katrina. The journal Nature reported as early as 2002 that the rate of sinking was faster than previously assumed, about an inch per year in parts of the city where previous models only estimated one fifth of an inch.

Other cities have had similar subsidence issues. North Jakarta, Indonesia, has sunk 13 feet in the past 35 years. Bangkok, Thailand, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, each deal with subsidence issues. This is a phenomenon given deep investigation by researchers at Deltares Research Institute in Utrecht, Netherlands. The Dutch, after all, live below sea level themselves—and played a pivotal role in the development of New Orleans’ UWP. Kolker is quick to point out that the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which affected Mississippi River communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, drove much of the strategy to keep the city dry in the decades that followed. He also emphasizes that the UWP, devised to rehydrate the soils by allowing water to naturally filter into the ground, is not a panacea for all water problems in the city.

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Storms can still bring surges of water from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ponchartrain. Those will be mitigated by restoration of coastal wetlands and strengthening levees, and the existing pumping systems will continue to push rainfall out of the city. Rains will continue to fall, of course, and when they do, more pervious surfaces in the city will allow them to recharge the soils. Water in the Mississippi may rise from runoff hundreds of miles upstream, presenting another threat. A state-sponsored 2012 Coastal Master Plan—with which the UWP is closely aligned—addresses these strategies outside of the city itself.

All pieces are a part of the whole, of course.

A levee system built to keep out surging waters performs poorly if it has sunk several feet from where engineers determined it should be.

Similarly, the whole of what makes New Orleans function is the volume of commerce that flows through its ports. In the days and weeks that followed Hurricane Katrina, oil and gas suppliers; grain producers; and steel, chemical, and rubber industries all experienced crippling slow-downs and stoppages because of the storm. About one sixth of the coffee imported to the US was left to sit in warehouses, subject to wet conditions that sent coffee-futures contract prices skyward following the storm. What the residents of New Orleans suffered in Katrina was great, but the pain was distributed throughout the state and national economies as well.

The devastation of Katrina had a truly global impact. The eyes of the world, from economic interests in particular, were on how New Orleans would recover—if it could.

When the people leading the efforts to restore New Orleans talk about their plans, there is no hint of defeatism; there simply was too much

BELOW: The city’s current water infrastructure walls off most of the canals, making them less accessible and visible to the public.

there to give up. Culturally, aesthetically, and historically—not to mention gastronomically—the place is like no other. And its role in global commerce is nothing less than critical.

This is why the industry is on board with the UWP, says Robin Barnes, executive vice president and chief operations officer at Greater New Orleans, Inc., a chief funder of the Plan. “Companies realize we are completely dependent on our environment,” she says. “The Coastal and Urban Water plans incorporate the economy into the equation.”

Barnes points out how by reducing subsidence and flood risks, there could be clear economic impacts. Between 44,000 and 100,000 jobs would be created over 50 years. Flood insurance premiums would go down, actual flood damage costs would decrease by $8 billion over 50 years, and real estate values would go up by $183 million.

Add to that how tourists might venture beyond the French Quarter. “We need to exploit water,” Barnes says. “It can increase the quality of life.

Instead of using walls to block the river and lake, we hope to now see it and love it.”

Which sums up much of the problem and much of its solution. For decades, New Orleans had regarded water—psychologically, and in its infrastructure—as something to fear. The canal walls told the world to stay away.

“There is psychological territory to be dealt with,” Waggonner says. “Someone once said ‘water is the element of dreams,’ and yet there is a large part of the population that has a fear of water. Not everyone naturally embraces water as a plus.”

Cedric Grant, the former deputy mayor of facilities, infrastructure, and community development offers a personal perspective on this problem. “My father told us that he used to swim in the river when he was a kid, but my mom didn’t

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URBAN WATER PLAN DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS

LAFITTE BLUEWAY

The Lafitte Corridor is based on a 3.1-mile stretch of former canal and railway right-ofway that is already being rebuilt as the Lafitte Greenway to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists traveling between the French Quarter and Lake Pontchartrain (p.94). The Blueway would add a flowing water feature that would help recharge the groundwater, provide stormwater storage, and add value to surrounding neighborhoods.

By connecting to Bayou St. John, the waterway can both receive rainwater and access bayou water during periods of drought. Six major streets intersect with the corridor, but additional pedestrian connections can provide access and flow between surrounding neighborhoods at the streetblock level.

LAKEVIEW FLOATING STREETS

Subsidence of soils under impervious pavement wreaks havoc on New Orleans streets, and stormwater runoff causes frequent neighborhood flooding.

But the “floating street” concept allows water to infiltrate the soil, largely through pervious pavement, bioswales, subsurface storage, and infiltration lines. Tree plantings alongside streets mitigate rainfall and reduce solar heat gain.

This plan also encourages a “complete streets” approach. Instead of accommodating motorized transport only, lanes for pedestrians and bicyclists will be added. Under-street utility lines, both public and private, would be bundled to provide an organized subsurface utility system and for storm protection, as above-ground utility poles often fall in severe weather.

TOP: Projected 10-year storm flooding with current water infrastructure. BOTTOM: Projected 10-year storm flooding with Urban Water Plan.

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like that,” he says, laughing. “Today, I can’t swim.”

Grant qualifies that some areas of the city embrace and benefit from water frontage—such as along Bayou St. John, which borders higher- and lower-income areas alike—but most waterways in the city run underground. The newest exception is Crescent Park, a 1.4-mile riverside strip that opened in 2013, surrounded largely by industrial features and working-class neighborhoods. “It’s a great place to bike, breezes off the river are cooler, and it’s one spot where you get views of both the river and the city,” he says.

Grant, who recently assumed a new position as executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, mentions that water historically has also been regarded as mosquito-breeding territory. He feels part of the education program with the creation of waterways in the UWP is to show residents how plants can provide means for natural control of nuisance insects—and that such methods can be used on both a large (municipal and commercial) and small (residential) scale.

The Plan was devised in a series of meetings and workshops conducted with engineers, urban designers, landscape architects, city planners, and soils and hydrology experts in both the Nether-

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lands and New Orleans. Called the “Dutch Dialogues,” Barnes and Waggonner joined Senator Landrieu at workshops and meetings in New Orleans and the Netherlands. Based on centuries of work and study by the Dutch (and their own history of disastrous floods), the dialogues squarely confronted the realities of subsiding land in delta regions, which the Netherlands and New Orleans share in common.

The Plan includes some deeply intriguing features. The city will remove floodwalls along existing canals to replace them with parks, trails, docks, and waterfront development. Some streets will be retrofitted with the insertion of bioswales and permeable pavement, catching rain where it falls. Publicly owned rights of way (such as along highways), vacant lots, and blighted properties can be converted to larger-scale water storage, and retrofitted pumps circulate surface water to promote beneficial riparian ecologies. The result is a city that creates space for overflow in heavy rains and storms—allowing roads, parks, and waterways to swell, as they naturally should, but incorporating those swells into the city’s infrastructure.

“This is a work-with-nature approach,” Barnes says. “We can’t take a ‘pure nature’ approach with a 300-year-old city in place.”

Nobody is promising that the Urban Water Plan will be accomplished quickly. Waggonner, whose late father was a US congressman from northwest

TOP LEFT: The Urban Water Plan proposes to turn much of the land surrounding the Industrial Canal in the Ninth Ward into vegetated space to slow and mitigate stormwater damage, as the area is prone to flooding.

BOTTOM LEFT: A cross-section of the proposed changes to the London Avenue Canal show how water can spill over from the main canal into safe areas meant to handle excess stormwater—as opposed to causing flooding in neighborhoods.

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PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY (CRESCENT)

ABOVE: Planned by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, Crescent Park reconnects residents of New Orleans with the Mississippi River by providing park space.

Louisiana, acknowledges that public works projects such as this are subject to who is in office at the time—a “tyranny of the term,” he calls it. He advises that scientists working in public capacities are the most effective sustainability advocates when they have the ear of the politician. Part of that sales job, as Waggonner explains, is about delivering attractive projects early on. “They have to want it to pay for it,” he says, referring to both taxpayers and elected officials.

Grant thinks education can also help. He reasons that over the decades it may take to build so many things in so many places, if communities are educated and supportive of the Plan, they will push their elected officials to see it through.

“We have to show how sustainable infrastructure works, how it helps deliver basic services, how it creates jobs, and that with more jobs comes lower crime,” Grant says, adding that a program called the Green Infrastructure Initiative already funds water education in schools as of 2014.

Grant sees momentum already pushing in the right directions. The city has added 4,000 jobs in four years, and real estate prices are rising quickly. Reflecting on his own and his four siblings’ lack of swim training, he notes the city is participating in a national American Red Cross swim instruction program.

“I’m hopeful,” Grant says. “When people feel safe, when they see a place that is a good environment, then they know it’s a good place to live.”

That might be the simplest outcome anyone can expect from a very complicated set of problems.

RECONNECTING WITH WATER: CRESCENT PARK

In the Upper Ninth Ward, train tracks kept New Orleanians from seeing and interacting with the Missippi River.

Now, the rustic Piety Bridge transports people from what feels like a transit wasteland on one side to an urban paradise overlooking the river on the other. Designed by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple—and a special project of the late Allen Eskew—Crescent Park is a 1.4-milelong, 20-acre riverfront oasis, replete with bioswales and native flora. From the remnants of the old Piety wharf building, park visitors look out to the city’s skyline—a physical reminder of New Orleans history and future.

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HISTORY ON HIGH GROUND

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PHOTOS: CALEB FOX (PORTRAIT); KAREN APRICOT (ST. FRANCIS CABRINI); LAURA DOWNEY (LIGHTHOUSE)

Local architect and preservation advocate Peter Trapolin shares how the city’s oldest structures offer a lesson in better building

Because of its long history, New Orleans buildings are known for their unique styles, most notably in the French Quarter, but also the Garden District and pre-20th century working-class neighborhoods. These areas lend character and insight to the city’s diverse history, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many wondered if these architectural relics were lost.

In terms of human life and structures, storm losses were immense; at least 1,833 people died, and property damage was estimated at $108 billion. But outcomes for historic buildings weren’t as bad as originally feared, due largely to the fact that before the 20th century, most New Orleans building was done on higher ground, where seasonal and storm flooding did not occur. “If you superimpose an 1895 map over the flood zones, you would see why these historical buildings were spared,” says Peter Trapolin, a board member of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans and principal-in-charge at Trapolin–Peer Architects, a firm based in the city.

Affected homes in the flood zones were elevated only three feet above grade, at best, because of a prevailing belief that the pump system would prevent flooding. Those structures were largely slab-on-grade and built after the 1920s when the population was expanding. Katrina, plus the second onslaught a few weeks later from Hurricane Rita, proved that assumption wrong. “My staff and I agree that the mid-century modern homes and buildings are what we were most sorry to lose,” Trapolin says, adding that restoration efforts with those were muted due to a lack of appreciation of the period.

With that, many pieces of history couldn’t be saved. Trapolin cites the St. Francis Cabrini Church, a Roman Catholic edifice completed in 1963 by the firm Curtis and Davis that featured sweeping arcs, modern stained glass, a soaring white steeple and steel cross, and curved roofs.

Parishioners and preservationists alike protested its demolition in 2007; the floodwater line had

OPPOSITE: As part of the rehab of this historic French Quarter building, Peter Trapolin designed the threeunit apartment complex to have a geothermal system.

LEFT: Community members watch as the mid-centruy St. Francis Xavier Cabrini Church is demolished.

RIGHT: The rebuilt New Canal Lighthouse once again stands on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

reached six feet, but some argued that the building could have been saved. The Naval Brigade Music Hall was another loss, storm-damaged and then demolished by an unauthorized group of visiting firemen that did not understand its role in the history of jazz music.

One notable “save” was the New Canal Lighthouse, originally built in 1839 on the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline and all but destroyed by Katrina and Rita. Trapolin says that FEMA funding in general favors historic preservation. “A Section 106 review ensures that no irreparable harm comes to the historic character of a building,” he says.

What also helps is New Orleans’ long appreciation for historical buildings and their places in culture, which Trapolin says goes back to the 1930s. The American townhouses, Gothic and Greek revival mansions, French Second Empire mansions, Creole cottages and townhouses, raised center-hall cottages, shotgun houses, and double-gallery houses inspired writers including Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, Anne Rice, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote.

As Trapolin sees it, historic preservation is synonymous with sustainability, and neither of those things hinders development. “Nothing stops us from incorporating green technology in historic structures,” he says, noting that geothermal energy—used in many projects because the city is on soil, not bedrock—has an added benefit of reducing noise and visual clutter. “There’s plenty of vacant land for new buildings,” he notes.

Trapolin adds that old cypress and pine timbers used for floors often stayed intact when they dried out, and plaster walls did not develop mold the way Sheetrock often does. Preservation in New Orleans has proven possible, and it provides important lessons for resilient building in the 21st century.

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Located in New Orleans’ historic Tremé neighborhood, Good Food Farm looks out to neighboring homes and Highway 10.

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PHOTO: CALEB FOX

GROWTH IN THE CITY Although the Port of New Orleans is responsible for massive shiploads of agricultural products on their way from the American heartland to the rest of the world, the locavore movement—toward fresher, unprocessed food cultivated on local farms—is bursting to life in New Orleans. With an abundance of empty lots post-Katrina, many community gardeners became urban-farm entrepreneurs. Here are two successful, but very different, growing enterprises that educate and inspire their communities.

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GOOD FOOD FARM Established in the Tremé neighborhood, Good Food Farm is currently the only urban farm in the city that funds itself entirely through sales.

The farm’s clients are some of New Orleans’ top restaurants and hotels, including Sylvain, Root and Square Root, Emeril Lagasse’s NOLA Restaurant, and several restaurants run by James Beard Foundation Awardee John Besh. At least 25 of the farm’s restaurant clients receive weekly farm shares, which keeps a steady stream of income for the small, community-focused farm.

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Good Food specializes in microgreens such as shizo, mustard greens, amaranth, and basil and provides jobs to two full-time and three part-time staff members. Over the long term, the farm wants to provide jobs and job training—to do so will mean expanding, but in the meantime, volunteers and members of the local community learn how to garden on their own. One of the part-time employees is a 30-year resident of the neighborhood who has been working at the farm for two years now—two years that have been “the most purposeful of her life.”

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ABOVE: With two full-time and three part-time staffers as well as volunteers, Good Food teaches the community about sustainable gardening practices.

RIGHT: Microgreens are Good Food’s specialty and its biggest cash-crop for high-end restaurants in the area.

LOWER RIGHT: Thanks to more than 25 regular high-profile clients, Good Food is the only financially self-sustaining urban farm in New Orleans.

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX

OPPOSITE: Good Food Farm part-time employee Miss Pat (center) tends her own section of the farm where she grows eggplant, cotton, okra, and many other plants.

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GROW DAT YOUTH FARM

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Located on seven acres of land in City Park, Grow Dat Youth Farm sells 60 percent of what it grows to markets, restaurants, and corner stores, with the remaining 40 percent designated as “shared harvest” and donated to food distribution charities. Teenagers and young adults are the primary employees, engaged in garden chores as well as educational programs and marketing tasks.

Johanna Gilligan, Grow Dat’s founder and executive director, describes the program as a way to actively engage with people in a different paradigm, one that’s able to address economics, nutrition, and job skills through one enterprise rather than dealing with each need in one-off programs. Gilligan is a former teacher and found that many of her students were working in the fast-food industry, so she conceptualized Grow Dat to build healthier relationships between people and food by making them a part of the entire food-production process.

Grow Dat has a strong partnership with Tulane City Center and the Tulane School of Architecture, which designed and helped build the farm’s new open-air, netzero facility made of repurposed shipping containers.

The building includes an outdoor classroom, a teaching kitchen, administrative offices, locker rooms, bathrooms with composting toilets, and a large post-harvest area.

TOP LEFT: Johanna Gilligan is the founder and executive director of Grow Dat. TOP RIGHT: The net-zero structure for Grow Dat was constructed out of reused shipping containers.

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX

LEFT: Grow Dat occupies seven of the 1,300 acres of City Park.

OPPOSITE: The farm recruits students from New Orleans-area high schools to teach them about farming practices and food preparation in its demonstration kitchen.

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CASE STUDY LB LANDRY–OP WALKER COLLEGE AND CAREER PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL Eskew+Dumez+Ripple designed Landry-Walker (formerly LB Landry High School prior to merging with O. Perry Walker High School in 2013) to replace the Lord Beaconsfield Landry School, a 67-year-old elementary school rendered uninhabitable in 2005 from mold and water damages after Katrina. Located in Algiers, the 214,000-square-foot replacement building has solar panels and can withstand winds of up to 130 miles per hour.

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STARTING FRESH WITH SCHOOLS In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ school system was almost nonexistant, but serious academic and building problems predated the catastrophe. The city found its reset button, and disastertested students are its biggest beneficiaries.

PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

C

onsider the experience of the typical 10thgrade student in New Orleans today, someone educated in the city’s public school system since at least 2004.

In first grade, you would have experienced Hurricane Katrina, an extended evacuation, and no schools near home for the better part of the year. You would have continued your primary education elsewhere—Baton Rouge? Houston?

Atlanta?—for at least six months, or quite possibly several years. Within a year, you might have had a school and a home to return to, both pieces limping along with repairs done by volunteers, parents, teachers, and with help from the private industry. Every day, as you walked or took a bus to school from your repaired home—or more likely, a temporary home, motel room, cruise ship, RV, shelter, or FEMA trailer—you would pass block after block of debris piles, boarded-up houses, and shuttered schools destined for demolition.

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Now, New Orleans has 81 local schools that serve a decidedly smaller population than a decade ago. The journey of today’s high school-age student reflects much of what has happened in public education in New Orleans since Katrina— and it has everything to do with the future of the city for decades to come.

New Orleans schools have undergone a revolutionary transformation since 2005; a necessary upgrade as the system and its students received dismal scores in the old school programs and spaces. The Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD) was established two years before Katrina to do whatever it could—all while tolerating termite infestations, leaky pipes, rotted floors, and poorly performing building mechanicals. Four years into that program, post-Katrina, the state took control of it in partnership with the Orleans Parish School Board. Today, almost all schools are organized as charters, students can choose which school they will attend, and dozens of old

CASE STUDY LAKE AREA NEW TECH EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL Constructed in 2009, Lake Area High School is designed to hold classes on the second and third floors only. The first floor, where the cafeteria, media center, and covered parking are located, can be repaired in a future flooding event while classes continue above—Katrina flooding reached eight feet on this site. Built where a junior high school formerly stood, Lake Area High School kept that school’s swimming pools as rain cisterns to reduce potable water use. Siting, tall windows, and sloped ceilings optimize natural light, which teachers say has been beneficial in this LEED Silver school.

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buildings are closed and demolished. Fifty-eight school buildings are either refurbished or newbuilds to serve the district’s students.

There were many naysayers in the soggy and depopulated fall of 2005 who questioned whether the city, schools included, could ever come back. But the school system of New Orleans has since made a major resurgence, indeed—one of resourcefulness, tenacity, evolution, discovery, and achievement.

As many large cities face choices about charter schools, there is no lack of controversy and debate among them, particularly from teachers’ unions.

New Orleans had its share—even as it had to fire thousands of educators due to a steep drop in student population.

James Garvey, a private-practice attorney who also sits on the state board of education, was involved in the tumultuous period that ensued after Katrina. He was around when the state took over the district, which opened the door for the charter system, and is a true believer in charters.

“If parents have a choice instead of being told where their children will go, the students do better overall,” he says. “We [the state school board] were not previously in the business of running schools. What we did was set standards. Lacking that experience, we allowed charter organizations to run the operations.”

Garvey readily cites improving scores as proof of this regime’s effectiveness. High school graduation rates have climbed from 54 percent in 2004 to 77.8 percent in spring 2014. The portion of students attending a school with an “F” rating by state standards was 75 percent between 2004 and 2005, but by 2013, that number dropped to 17 percent. Twelve percent of children were lucky enough to attend an “A” or “B” school before Katrina, and today, 34 percent do.

It helped that the federal government kicked in $1.8 billion for school repairs, retrofits, and rebuilding. “Federal money was dedicated to structures, which is not always the case,” Garvey says. “FEMA and the insurance companies had ironclad rules.” Fortunately, the powers that be decided to use this money to build high-performing, environmentally conscious schools.

The push to build green came from a belief in how it would best serve the needs of students.

“The old buildings were inefficient,” he says.

“They didn’t cool well in the hot months. In our winters, 45 degrees feels much worse in our humidity. We didn’t build this just to be green. We did it because we felt these buildings were better for educating students, and that it would save money in energy costs.”

One example is the new Crocker Arts + Technology elementary school, which replaced a storm-damaged 1968 building that had almost no windows. The new building employs energy-efficient windows, which create a much lighter, airier space and ultimately lead to

PHOTOS: SHANNON SHERIDAN (LAKE AREA); CALEB FOX (BENJAMIN FRANKLIN); ALISE O’BRIEN (COLTON)

RIGHT: Benjamin Franklin High School, one of the top-performing schools in Louisiana year in and out, has updated and greened most of its outdated facilities with help from corporate donations—from companies such as Sloan, Bradley, SageGlass, and CertainTeed— through the Green Schools Showcase.

better student performance. In every New Orleans school, double-paned windows and other envelope-tightening measures were implemented to achieve a minimum 25 percent energy savings, and several schools achieved LEED Silver or Gold certifications.

Of course, these successful green schools didn’t pop up overnight. For several years, students, parents, and educators had to make do with what they had. Many spent their entire elementary, middle, or high school years in trailers—and as recently as 2013, activists criticized the district for the fact that some students still didn’t have real classrooms eight years after Katrina.

But the story at Benjamin Franklin High School was quite different. Long revered as the public school of choice by college-bound students, it receives top rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and Businessweek magazines and occupies a number-one ranking statewide almost every year. The first floor of its building, situated on the University of New Orleans campus, suffered flood damage in 2005, but the school was reopened within six months.

The school’s chief financial officer, Allison Bowler, explains how. “Parents and teachers jumped in to clean it up and get it reopened,” she says, “which we did with the help of donations.”

In fact, Bowler has been working overtime to marshal contributions from companies, which go largely toward promoting a healthier, pro-environment experience for students. Even with federal funds, the school was $2.5 million short of its needs; Bowler says a full retrofit can only come through corporate donations at this point.

Bowler advises the Student Green Society, which has instituted a recycling system on campus, recruits other students for recycling

NEW ORLEANS

activities, identifies behavioral means to reduce electricity use, and even managed to cut purchased water consumption by 15,000 bottles annually through a reusable container campaign.

She credits her science-teacher colleagues for inspiring and tapping into this interest of these Katrina-tested students.

Each building is also a teaching tool for students. Ben Franklin took it a step further by building a diversity garden on campus and creating a five-year sustainability plan for their school.

USGBC Louisiana recognized these efforts, and Ben Franklin won the 2014 Green Schools Challenge high school division, a statewide competition to green schools.

Many New Orleans tenth-graders are getting an education today that began with a deadly environmental catastrophe a decade ago. Given what they have been through—and how that experience turned into a learning opportunity—they might be on their way to finding solutions that will benefit us all one day.

CASE STUDY CHARLES J. COLTON SCHOOL Built in 1929, the Colton School underwent a historic renovation after Katrina as part of Recovery School District program for $28 million. With the revamp, Waggonner & Ball Architects designed a 25,000-squarefoot addition for its south side. The renovation and addition are constructed to LEED Silver standards with the help of FH Paschen, the LEED consultant and contractor on the project. One of the building’s most prominent green features is its seven massive skylights that let natural light flow into the entire building.

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BIKE EASY IN THE BIG EASY Bike lanes have increased from 11 to 89 miles in the past 10 years in New Orleans, and there’s no sign of slowing down

Greenway Master Plan

LEFT: New Orleans’ biking infrastructure is represented in green, with its bikeable connection streets in purple.

New Orleans is a very old city that owes its history, and much of its present-day economy, to waterborne transportation. But as it reinvents itself, the Big Easy is working to be a 21st century city in all kinds of ways, transportation included. That’s why Bike Easy, an organization that has managed to expand bike-friendly streets and trails from 11 miles pre-Katrina to 89 miles today, is playing an important role.

“The city wants to be healthier and safer,” says Naomi Doerner, executive director of the 2,000-member nonprofit advocacy group. Bike Easy lobbied for those extra miles, achieving what cities around the world are coming to understand: bike-friendly urban environments are economic stimulators.

A comprehensive 2013 report from PeopleForBikes and the Alliance for Biking & Walking found that cities with bicycling infrastructure attract generation X and millennial workers who prefer

living car-free in revitalized downtowns over time- and money-consuming auto commutes.

That report, “Protected Bike Lanes Mean Business,” details how bike infrastructure boosts real estate values, attracts companies to city centers, and fosters worker productivity and health.

Bike Easy partners with several research and advocacy organizations—the University of New Orleans Transportation Center and the Tulane University Prevention Research Center among them—in building a case for cycling infrastructure in the Crescent City. For example, a 2001 joint study identified the need for bike parking facilities in the French Quarter, leading to the installation of multibike corrals; elsewhere, an additional 200 bike racks now dot the city.

Doerner says each of these factors fuel New Orleans’ embrace of biking as a welcome part of the transportation system. She also claims the city offers unique advantages to bikers. “We are a flat city, which is very positive for commuters,” she says. “We also have spectacular weather nine months out of the year. New Orleans culture loves the outdoors with vibrant street life, parades, and waterfronts.”

This information has paved the way for projects like the Lafitte Greenway Bicycle and Pedestrian Path, a 2.6-mile park that connects the French Quarter to Bayou St. John, Tremé, Tulane Gravier, Mid-City, and Faubourg St. John. The project is currently under development and will feature off-road, six-foot-wide bike lanes, which Doerner says will be “transformative” by creating a crucial access route for many neighborhoods.

A successful test of a bike-share program during the 2013 Super Bowl informed city planners as they work to establish a permanent city bike enterprise, which will likely draw casual cyclists to the joys of two-wheeled transportation.

Greenway Along Orleans Relief Canal

TOP RIGHT: The Lafitte Greenway plan may implement a surface canal called the “Orleans Relief Canal” complemented by artful benches at each pedestrian bridge and bike paths alongside.

BOTTOM RIGHT: With the city’s recent addition of almost 80 miles of bike lanes, New Orleanians are using two-wheeled transportation more frequently.

OPPOSITE: Sustainable practices like biking are essential to the continued rise and preservation of New Orleans.

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A shallow-depth surface canal, similarly described in the Waggonner + Ball plan, could be implemented and accented with custom art benches to mark entrances to pedestrian bridges.

5-Greenway Park Design | 77

PHOTOS: CALEB FOX; RENDERING & MAP: CITY OF NEW ORLEANS

NEW CITY

NEW ORLEANS

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NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

USGBC LOUISIANA IN ACTION With numerous programs and events, USGBC Louisiana is a teacher, an advocate, and a partner for statewide sustainability

EDUCATE

COLLABORATE

ADVOCATE

“Our relationship with USGBC Louisiana has afforded us the opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals who support, promote, and advance building performance. The chapter is working to grow the green economy in the state and that will grow the demand for our FSC-certified product line.

That’s good for business and that’s good for all of us in Louisiana.” Blake Cooper, Roy O Martin

With over 50 educational events each year, our chapter provides continuing education to more than 850 LEED credentialed professionals in Louisiana.

PHOTO: TIMOTHY HURSLEY

BELOW: LB Landry High School was certified LEED Silver in 2011.

We work with lawmakers and key decisionmakers in the state to enact better building codes, support LEED in legislation, and develop green financing initiatives—we drive the state’s green economy.

We have more than 20 partnerships with community organizations to increase public awareness of green building benefits and create opportunities for service.

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CHAPTER IMPACT

NEWSTRUCTURE COMMUNITY CITYORLEANS

Statewide programs have a lasting influence with our focus on education and real-world implementation

GREEN TOOLS LEED In Louisiana Online Building profiles and case studies highlighting measurable energy savings.

LEED Mentors Free expertise from a volunteer network of green professionals.

University Design Studio A forum for the exchange of ideas for university architecture students.

Greening the MLS A partnership with the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors to educate agents and appraisers about the new green features added to their Multiple Listing Service.

Annual Green Report A check up on Louisiana’s green building health.

“It is illogical not to take advantage of technology and green building standards to create healthier communities with more efficient use of our scarce resources.”

Rita Benson LeBlanc, Owner, New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans

GREEN SCHOOLS The Louisiana Green Schools Challenge Green professionals serve as volunteer mentors to green teams at schools, developing low cost or no cost hands-on sustainable projects to improve school learning environments.

7,000 STUDENTS + 40 SCHOOLS + 37 MENTORS = LIFELONG IMPACT The Louisiana Green School Showcase We connect schools with businesses that care about improving learning environments for K-12 students.

CLOCKWISE from TOP LEFT: The Green Schools Challenge team from North Live Oak Elementary in Watson.

Chapter work day with Habitat for Humanity in Lafayette.

Senior architecture students at poster session in Baton Rouge.

The Hynes Charter School Recycling Rangers in New Orleans.

1 SCHOOL + 25 PRODUCT VENDORS + $100,000 WORTH OF GREEN RENOVATIONS = LIFELONG IMPACT 97

Rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina was a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps the biggest New Orleans has faced in its nearly 300-year history. But residents have responded by creating deeper connections with their ecosystems that underscore their commitment to the environment—from individual structures, to larger communities, and to the whole city. The New Orleans BioInnovation Center treats all of its stormwater on-site; the Broadmoor neighborhood rebuilt itself sustainably to defeat the city’s proposal to repurpose it as a park; and the Urban Water Plan revolutionizes the city’s water infrastructure to handle future storm surges. It’s a new New Orleans today—one that accounts for place above all else because there is no place like it.

INCLUDES INTERVIEWS WITH:

David Waggonner, Principal at Waggonner & Ball Architects Liz Davey, Director of the Office of Sustainability at Tulane University Mark Ripple, Partner at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Peter Trapolin, Partner at Trapolin–Peer Architects Tom Darden, Executive Director of Make It Right

A collaboration between:

And a foreword by Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Presenting Sponsors FH Paschen, Green Building & Design, Holcim, and KONE

Green Building & Design Custom Media © 2014 MSRP $10 USD