Pitt's Burg

"Lagniappe House", Concordia — Image: Concordia

You may have seen news stories earlier this week about "Make It Right", the project that Brad Pitt is leading to promote the reconstruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, the New Orleans neighborhood that was demolished two years ago by Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm I went down to New Orleans for Time, and I learned something about how big the hurdles are to rebuilding in some parts of that city and how many schemes have been put forward not just for rebuilding the city but for reimagining it.

Even given all that, the Pitt project actually looks promising to me. (And if it takes a movie star to get things moving there, why not? Pitt has a home in the French Quarter, so he's not a stranger to the place.) The goal for now is to raise money to build 150 houses in the Lower Ninth Ward "with an emphasis on developing an affordable system that could be replicated." Pitt has partnered with William McDonough, the "Cradle to Cradle" environmental thinker and designer. To design model houses for the project he's also brought in 14 well chosen architectural firms, including the Nigerian-born British architect David Adjaye, Thom Mayne's endlessly inventive Morphosis and Shigeru Ban, who's been involved throughout his career with humanitarian housing projects and questions of sustainability.

And unlike the New Urbanists, who have also been contributing ideas to the reconstruction of New Orleans, and who can be valuable as city planners but tend to be nostalgia-prone as architects, the firms working in the Make It Right Project are commited to contemporary design, not Disney-fication, They've already come up with models that look interesting, at least at this phase. The model above is by the New Orleans firm Concordia. You can learn more about Make It Right here.