New Orleans is the most architecturally distinctive city in the United States. This is not a matter of opinion. The French Quarter, the Garden District, the shotgun houses of the Seventh Ward — these are building traditions that exist nowhere else in the country, and they are the product of a specific history: French colonialism, Spanish rule, the plantation economy, the Caribbean diaspora, and the particular geography of a city built on a delta.
The shotgun house is the most interesting of these traditions. A long, narrow building, one room wide and several rooms deep, with doors aligned front to back so that a shotgun blast could pass through the entire house without hitting a wall. The form is African in origin, brought to New Orleans by enslaved people from Haiti, and it spread throughout the city and the South as the dominant form of working-class housing.
After Katrina
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the largest urban disaster in American history. The flooding destroyed or damaged more than 200,000 homes. The recovery has been slow, uneven, and in many respects incomplete. The Lower Ninth Ward, which was among the most severely flooded neighborhoods, has recovered only partially. Many of its residents never returned.
The recovery from Katrina revealed the politics of American urbanism with unusual clarity. Who gets rebuilt, and who does not, is a political question.
The recovery also produced some interesting architecture. The Make It Right Foundation, founded by Brad Pitt, commissioned a series of houses in the Lower Ninth Ward from prominent architects. The results were mixed — some of the houses were well-designed, others were not — but the project demonstrated that there was an audience for serious architecture in a neighborhood that had never had it.