Having been involved with the MASSIVE amounts of money wasted building low-income multi-family housing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I believe that I might have a little insight into the solutions.

Mainly, do not build housing where there are no jobs.  This seems like a no brainer to me, but we built twenty-two low income housing complexes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast where there were very few jobs other than construction work.  While most people that are not involved with construction might think that a laborer would fall within the classification of low-income, nothing could be further from the truth.  Even the person that is doing the cleaning on the typical construction project would not qualify for the housing that we built.

Not only that, but the apartments had an average per square foot cost that will never be recovered.  They were not economically viable by any metrics.

In the news lately are even more terrible ideas about disaster housing.  One idea was originally conceived to alleviate the problems experienced in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans from the levee failure.  This idea has been modified because of the flooding problems in Pakistan.  Not to put too fine a point on things, but you know what people being devastated in a flood don’t need?  An entire house barreling down upon them in a raging flood.

This idea was also proposed for New Orleans after the failure of levees.  I have another novel idea.  Why not make BETTER LEVEES?  Please keep in mind, these levees were constructed using the lowest, qualified bid process.  Instead of trying to make housing to deal with outside failures of government or natural disaster, why not concentrate on the actual problems?

Or, if portable, quickly constructed temporary housing is desired, why not focus on making those quarters as portable and durable as possible in order to reuse them?  Here is a good example of a very workable design.

By the way, the photo at the top of this post is Mississippi after Katrina.  I wonder how successful a floating house would have worked in that example?

Here is news about the New Orleans Katrina Exhibit.

Related articles

• International Relief & Development Officers and Staff Build Home for Katrina Survivors in Woolmarket, Mississippi (prweb.com)
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This past week, I read an article published by the Associated Press heralding the cost of a new school in Los Angeles. The school’s reported cost was five hundred seventy-eight million dollars ($578,000,000). This facility shall serve four thousand two hundred (4,200) students.

Using the most liberal standard for square footage per student, this leads us to the conclusion that the building is minimally two hundred ten thousand square feet (210,000sf). But, that simply cannot be right because that works out to around two thousand eight hundred dollars ($2800) per foot. Only a poorly managed government project could waste money at that rate.

From the article:

“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”

I’m terribly sorry, but I do not remember those buildings from the 1970s. What I remember is that there was MUCH glass and many windows because none of the buildings were air conditioned. Since I actually went to school during that time, I have first hand knowledge of 1970s school buildings. Of course, that does not touch on the revisionist’s history of educational facilities and the attempt to promote a FAILING philosophy on education and school design.

Also, when we discount the fact of why those buildings were constructed from concrete masonry units, for their durability and economy, we lose sight of what the building’s FUNCTION is. I thought that was what the focus of our designs were supposed to be?

In a very odd turn of events, Kawneer and the AIA are announcing the jurors for the Schools of Tomorrow competition today. I can only imagine what kind of new age pap that this competition shall produce.

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Watch the full episode. See more Citizen Architect.

The client needs to expand the building.

The outcry against the expansion is based upon one thing, adulation for the man that designed the original building, again at the expense of the entity that paid to build it in the first place.

Read more about this growing problem.

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Such is definitely the case when architects or designers attempt to “solve” the problem with cities or planning.  They think very little about actual REALITY and tend to focus more on their Utopian dream of everyone living in harmonious existence, all stacked into urban environments like cordwood, surrounded by sterile, man-created “green space.”

I don’t know about you, but this is certainly NOT the type of existence that I want for my family and me.

Philips even has a design competition based on those one hundred year old concepts. Yet, Change.org is promoting an entirely different ideology after the total urban planning of Detroit has utterly failed.

Instead of focusing on attempting to solve what they perceive as all of the world’s ills, I think that architects should began to focus more on client satisfaction and try to solve the problem at hand.  When the needs and desires of the individual are met, time and time again, the ills of society are in turn abated.  Instead of trying to solve the problems of the collective world as a whole, solving the needs of the individual client produces the end result that has been desired if one is truly attempting to satisfy the world.

If you would like to see examples of buildings that we at PMD find fascinating, check out the projects of other architects posted at our Tumblr.

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