In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as a devastated city struggled to recover, the American design community mobilized to help. Even as the official planning process was paralyzed by conflicting visions and interests, federal indifference, missing communities, and the overwhelming magnitude of the crisis, thousands of civic and philanthropic organizations, academic institutions, and individuals – in New Orleans and around the country - rose to the challenge of providing aid, ideas, and labor for re-building. During the year since Katrina struck, remarkable and focused outpourings of architectural and urban creativity has been devoted to the project of examining and addressing the causes – both human and natural – for its present despair, in hopes of revitalizing the New Orleans metropolitan area.

The work gathered in this repository represents a selection of projects undertaken by both professionals and architecture students in the United States. These designs examine the future of New Orleans at all scales – from region to neighborhood to building – and offer proposals that range from practical and immediate to speculative and visionary. Taken together, they offer a remarkable palette of possibilities for a city confronted tasks of restoring its urban fabric while simultaneously imagining a future in which the city finds sustainability, prosperity, justice, and beauty. Project New Orleans seeks to be the definitive archive of this material, with the goal of cataloging and presenting materials to facilitate the on-going process of recovery.

 

Project New Orleans is seeking to catalog and record architectural and planning proposals created for the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans. We are accepting projects at every scale from the architectural to the regional – and from those engaged in thinking about futures for the city in physical terms. Students, professionals, activists and all others are invited to submit graphic and written material. This will be displayed on our web site as an interactive resource for the on-going process of rebuilding.

 

Project New Orleans organized an exhibition that was previewed in the summer of 2006 and comprehensively displayed in fall and winter of 2006. Project New Orleans is also actively engaged in organizing community participation with discussions stimulated by the repository.