Prefabricated Housing for Post-Katrina New Orleans

In fall 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the College of Design offered the Tulane University School of Architecture space for as many of its graduate students as they could send. Thirty-eight students and five faculty made the journey and stayed the semester, working in rapidly renovated studio space on the Tempe campus. The post-disaster studio strengthened interschool connections that have continued, as exemplified in a recent housing studio taught by School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture faculty Wendell Burnette, Mark Ryan, and Michael Underhill. The studio took as its problem the design of prefabricated housing for post-disaster reconstruction.

PURL and SALA are collaborating on a book about these design investigations.

Studio Summary
Spring 2007

by

Wendell Burnette

Mark Ryan

Michael Underhill

School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

In the last fifty years, the understanding of house, family, neighborhood, community, and city have radically changed. In our studio, we sought to examine those changes and their implications for the future by asking the complex question: how do we now dwell, both individually and collectively? We expanded this inquiry by looking at the nature of dwelling through the lens of prefabricated housing. Prefab is not new, but its viability for a range of building types, particularly housing, has increased with the advent of the worldwide web. New trends in prefab are emerging, and as architects we feel obligated to contribute to their meaningful development.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it seemed meaningful to apply our studio investigations to the work of rebuilding New Orleans—to explore how this type of construction might help to meet the city’s acute need not only for immediate shelter but also for new ways of building housing in an unpredictable environment.

Following a period of research and a field trip to New Orleans, the studio examined how it could inform the future of prefab. Through schematic and then more developed design studies, we confronted issues big and small as related to mass fabrication, modes of making, and notions of “place” in the contemporary, air-conditioned world. Students were expected to develop personal methodologies reflecting critiques of traditional architecture and to test and express their ideas through their projects. They studied the methodologies of other artists and professionals to further understand their own work, realizing that in architecture the process is as important as the product. But always the underlying spirit of the studio was grounded in the realities of critical making, the tectonics of poetic construction. All work addresses architecture's realities of space, light, structure, and material, and its lived experiences of the body through synesthesia and consciousness.