tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

Faulkner called New Orleans “the city where imagination takes precedence over fact.” The most persistent cultural influence to me is the fact that New Orleans was a port city and a crossroads, a collector of people and things, the end of the river. And it’s still that way. It’s hard to overstate how much New Orleans loomed in the imaginations of 19th century frontier settlers, for instance. Once you got over the Appalachians and through the Cumberland Plateau and into the Mississippi drainage, one’s orientation to the world shifted from an east-west movement to a north-south one; or more specifically, an upriver-downriver one. And at the end of that river sat New Orleans. Nearly every outlaw legend that sprang up in the western territory in the early 19th century has some aspect that takes place in, or is related to, New Orleans. There is no legend of the Natchez Trace without New Orleans. The city is where crooks, race-traitors, Catholics, vagabonds, and every other marginalized person could go to hide and, sometimes, recreate themselves. To a great extent, it’s still that way.

read the rest here

(Source: fwriction)

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Monaghan set out to create eight prototype homes based in classic New Orleans styles. ‘Having lived there so long I thought I knew everything,’ he said. ‘I’m an architect, I’ve done a lot of historic preservation work. I thought I’d just design some houses that looked like New Orleans houses.’

That proved trickier than he’d thought. He explored the city with tape measure in hand, conducting a sort or architectural phrenology to figure out the proportions and details that made New Orleans house so New Orleans—the depths of the porches, the sizes of the pediments, the angles of the hip roofs, the ratio of height to width. It turned out that while these measurements tended to be quirky and irregular, they made a lot of sense for the culture and climate of New Orleans. For instance, almost every old house has tall ceilings that allow residents to live below the worst of the summer heat. Single shotgun cottages lack hallways, allowing for efficient cross-ventilation in every room…Monaghan’s mission is to build houses that New Orleanians have shown, through a process of architectural natural selection spanning more than a century, that they love.

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-Wayne Curtis, Houses of the Future

Having lived in a New Orleans mansion that was, quite literally, sinking, and having a fierce and protective love of the city in general, I found this portion of the essay somewhat heartening. The architecture of New Orleans is so intrinsic to who it is. My connection to New Orleans in all of its crumbling, haphazard, ominous glory may very well be born of the fact that I grew up deep in the heart (or abyss!) of an ‘Edward Scissorhands’-like suburb, where one had to petition a community board in order to paint one’s mailbox a sanctioned color. Waking up in New Orleans the first day was like waking up up in one of those strange and wonderful landscapes of deja vu that only seem to inhabit dreams. I had dreamed it before somehow, had dreamed that binary heaviness and carelessness of place and time that seems exclusive to New Orleans alone.

When I returned to New Orleans post-Katrina, I wept for many things. Tied up in all that sense of collective loss was a perhaps somewhat snobbish worry: what will it look like when it is rebuilt? To imagine a New Orleans of postmodern tract housing made my stomach turn, and not just for aesthetic reasons, but for the reasons pointed out in this article: a sense of collective identity that showed itself in overgrown porches, of shotgun-room living. It calls to mind Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, wherein he explores how intrinsic our notions of architectural space, memory, and dreams really are.