Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

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In August 2005, 80 per cent of New Orleans was devastated by flood damage precipitated by Hurricane Katrina. Christiana Spens was on a college exchange in Memphis when the hurricane hit. Here she gives her impressions of the city in the wake of the storm. One night in a sorority house at the University of Mississippi, where I was visiting a friend of a friend during my year in Memphis as an exchange student, I heard plans about a trip to New Orleans to help clean up the wreckage caused by Hurricane Katrina. I signed up and in March we set off on a road trip down to the Gulf Coast, into a place torn up by natural storms and left to rot by a disengaged government. The hurricane had blown by six months ago, and yet the place was still a sprawling mass of devastation, a chunk of a metropolis no more than broken asphalt and bent foundations. Probably the greatest shock was the sense of time halted, as if progression had died late last summer. When we arrived at the camp there was a lot of talk about the Book of Revelation, much preaching and blues of a fundamentalist kind, a whole lack of jazz. But a rhythm took hold subtly, with each beat of a brick laid down, each scrape of a dig, and the music began to play softly in the near-motionless air of New Orleans. There is a Dead End sign that may as well be a street sign for the strip of devastation it represents. Even the palms are dead. Never before has ‘cul-de-sac’ seemed such a profoundly literal and depressing term. It is early morning and we drive by this particular Dead End and a string of others. I sip 50 cent coffee as I see with the new clarity of daylight the wasteland in my midst. There are structures, but no walls – broken bones but no flesh. Billboards and signs are gone, though iron frames remain, twisted, entangled in wires. I see a broken piano in a wild dry garden, its wood shattered. A boat balances in a dead tree. There are driveways but no houses; there are roads but no towns. Slabs of concrete are hanging, dangling from electrical wires. We drive past absent facades, amber lights in lines from the street lights that are at last up again, but which illuminate not houses but their remains, or their altogether absence. We pass school buses wrecked and lying trashed, a limousine bathing in mud, and a house where only the wooden frame and a staircase remain, with scattered items such as faded ID cards, a kitchen knife coated in dry mud, broken glass, a typewriter. I wonder what town existed under the palm trees six months ago, when August was shining hot. I go out driving, one day before dusk, and find a house where three white steps and a concrete floor remain. There is a memorial altar of a water-damaged photo album, a 1976 tennis trophy and silk flowers. We realise from one intact photo that a family of a couple and their teenage son must have died here. Inside the square of concrete that marks the definition of the house are the remnants of the home. I step carefully over a microwave, tools, a toilet, a bath, cabinets, broken bureaus, plates, vases. On one table lies an open accounting book, and close by a book of local business cards for enterprises that no longer exist. A smashed telephone sits on the dusty ground amidst papers wrinkled by dried water, lying still in the motionless air. I notice an old record, one side bent but the label still visible – ‘The Last Waltz’. 107
The lasting impression of New Orleans is that it still has spirit. One student comments on his impression of the trashed city: ‘We went into one house and it was awful – there was alcohol everywhere!’ There is a kind of Southern Comfort to this Revelation. We stay in Elysian Fields for a while before receiving orders to clean up a cemetery close by – a smaller territory of this aptly named district. I cannot help but feel that the remnants of New Orleans – its names and rum bottles, its jazz playing softly from the food tent – are playing a joke against their great abuser, Katrina. Like spirits in a graveyard, everything left in Elysian Fields laughs in the dark. Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons. Images: pp 106-7 © Christiana Spens; p 108(t) © Erich Schlegel/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS; p 108(b) © Ted Soqui/CORBIS 108
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4 Landscape Architecture: Site/Non-
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4Architectural Design Forthcoming T
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ISBN-13 9780470034798 ISBN-10 04700
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Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper La
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Introduction Site/Non-Site Extendin
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The most dramatic case of the expan
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Dixon and Jones Architects, Exhibit
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From Mound to Sponge How Peter Cook
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The Oslo Patch investigates a new w
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The Frenzy of Theorising In our tim
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Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna of th
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landscape architects, not only one
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Recombinant Landscapes in the Ameri
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West 8 and du Toit Allsopp Hillier
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Cooper, Robertson & Partners, Coast
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Cooper Carry, Mizner Park, Boca Rat
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Brian McGrath and Victoria Marshall
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forest in terms of human carbon pro
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Urban American Landscape
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Patricia Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon
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flights up extending for 22 city bl
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City, a new mixed-used neighbourhoo
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Ken Smith, Mary Miss, Enrique Norte
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Toronto Waterfront Revitalisation S
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Running the entire length of the sc
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Operationalising Patch Dynamics Vic
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TILL, Monroe Center for the Arts Wa
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Page 61 and 62: urban-interface, Megalopolis Now, B
Page 63 and 64: Recent Works by Bernard Lassus At t
Page 65 and 66: Bernard Lassus, motorway landscapes
Page 67 and 68: View of the upper terrace of the ol
Page 69 and 70: Deep Explorations into Site/Non-Sit
Page 71 and 72: Aerial photo of the site showing th
Page 73 and 74: Gustafson Porter, Hadiqat As-Samah
Page 75 and 76: Gustafson Porter, Shoreline Walk, B
Page 77 and 78: Gustafson Porter, Gardens by the Ba
Page 79 and 80: ‘Activating Nature’ The Magic R
Page 81 and 82: Collage of the Garden for a Plant C
Page 83 and 84: Zaha Hadid Architects and Gross.Max
Page 85 and 86: Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Bota
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Page 89 and 90: West 8, Luxury Village, Moscow, Rus
Page 91 and 92: Landscapes of the Second Nature Emp
Page 93 and 94: The recent work of Beigel and Chris
Page 95 and 96: Structures on the new harbour ramp.
Page 97 and 98: Architecture Research Unit, Paju Bo
Page 99 and 100: ARU design model of Paju landscape
Page 101 and 102: City in Suspension New Orleans and
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Page 112 and 113: Is There a Digital Future Landscape
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Page 123 and 124: Building Profile Louise T Blouin In
Page 125 and 126: 1 Entrance lobby void 2 North stair
Page 127 and 128: 7 6 7 5 4 1 2 3 1 Exhibition space
Page 129 and 130: Practice Profile The Tailored Home
Page 131 and 132: Front and back elevations. Bungalow
Page 133 and 134: Entry detail. 130+
Page 135 and 136: Loft area. Split-Level to Loft, sou
Page 137 and 138: Home Run Dosson in Casier, Italy Va
Page 139 and 140: The subsidised residential housing
Page 141 and 142: In the complex next to the countrys
Page 143 and 144: McLean’s Nuggets Learning from th
Page 145 and 146: Site Lines Night Pilgrimage Chapel
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