NEW ALGIERS TERREFORM NEW ALGIERS terreformInc 01 CONTENT ANALYSIS 18-41 08 Issues 36 SOLUTIONS 02 64-73 ISSUES Zoning Calculations and Data 08 Solution 36 TERREFORM Mix-use Waterfront Costs 66 01 Issues 20-21 09 Issues 37-38 Income 67 Urban Ecology: Mobility/Economics Calculations 68 Water Drainage 09 Solution 39 Cost Comparisons 69 (Regional Scale) Connection between Existing Building Respiratory Functions 70-72 01 Issues 22 and Mix-use Waterfront Water Drainage Water/Waste NEW ALGIERS 10 Issues 40 (Neighborhood Scale) Topography Energy/Food 01 Solution 23 10 Solution 41 Urban Ecology: 100 yr. Flood Protection Sustainable Drainage System COLOPHON 04 02 Issues 24 SOLUTIONS 01 42-62 APPENDICES 74-81 Urban Ecology: Building Proposal: Bird Migration Habitable Levee Linear Imaginary 76-77 ABOUT TERREFORM 05 (Regional Scale) Barrier Systems (Netherlands) 78-79 02 Solution 25 Barrier Systems (New Orleans) 80-81 Urban Ecology: “Nexus” Urban-Planning 44 INTRODUCTION 06-09 Green Corridors (Regional/ Master Plan - Uses 45 Neighborhood Scale) Master Plan 46 03 Issues 26 Connection to Federal City 47 Urban Ecology: 2010 Street Extension / View Shed 48 Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster Calculation of One Building Unit: 49-51 03 Solution 27 Food Urban Ecology: Renewable Water Energy Practice/Fish Farming Energy/Waste LEVEE HISTORY 10-17 04 Issues 28-29 Bird’s Eye View 52 ALGIERS OVERVIEW Flooding/Land Loss Ground Plan 53 04 Solution 30-31 Sectional Perspective 54-55 Reconceptualize Levees Sectional Perspective 56 Levee Timeline 12-13 05 Issues 32 (View towards neighborhood) Neighborhood Overview 14 Mobility/Economics Roof Plan 57 Demographics/ 15 06 Solution 33 Street View 58 Physiognomy Light Rail (View to Commercial Corridor) Economy 16 07 Issues 34 Street View 59 Cultural Assests 17 Population (View of Boardwalk) 07 Solution 35 Street View 60 Population Projections (Night Activity) Typical Section 61-62 02 NEW ALGIERS TERREFORM 03 COLOPHON EDITORS INTRODUCTION TEXT NEW ALGIERS TEAM LAYOUT&PRINTING MICHAEL SORKIN ROBIN BALLES DESIGN: TRUDY GIORDANO TERREFORM MICHAEL SORKIN NADIA DOUKHI CHRISTIAN EUSEBIO PUBLISHER: LULU.COM? YING LIU PRINTING: LULU.COM? MICHELA BARONE LUMAGA MAKOTO OKAZAKI LUOYI YIN NEW ALGIERS CONTACT INFO TERREFORM INC. 180 VARICK ST. #1220 NEW YORK NY 10014 T 212-627-9121 W TERREFORM.INFO ISBN E [email protected] E [email protected] © terreform inc. 2010 04 NEW ALGIERS TERREFORM IS A NON-PROFIT FOUNDED IN 2006 AND LOCATED IN ABOUT TERREFORM (501.C.3) NEW YORK CITY, TERREFORM UNDERTAKES SELF-INITIATED TERREFORM INVESTIGATIONS INTO BOTH LOCAL AND GLOBAL ISSUES AND MAKES ITSELF AVAILABLE TO COMMUNITY AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS TO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ENVIRONMENTAL AND PLANNING INITIATIVES. BOARD OF DIRECTORS MICHAEL SORKIN, PRESIDENT AND CHAIR JOAN COPJEC, VICE PRESIDENT JONATHAN HOUSE MD, SECRETARY RICHARD FINKELSTEIN CHRISTINE BOYER MAKOTO OKAZAKI 05 INTRODUCTION New Orleans is at once the creature of the Mississippi and a stranger to it. Buffered by its levees, the fabric of the city does not front its rivers with TERREFORM the gracious parks, promenades, and architecture of so many other river towns. Of course, there is indisputable logic to this reserve: New Orleans is perpetually at risk from the waterway that enables it. As Katrina forcefully revealed, the floods can be Biblical. The reconstruction of New Orleans has forced a deep reconsideration of the relationship between city and water, one in which the river is cast as NEW ALGIERS fundamentally malign. This threatening construct relies on an idea of the Mississippi as the central element in a system that is unnatural. We know that the artifice of barriers exists precisely as an interruption to what the river wants to do: to periodacally overflow its banks, to infuse the soil with silt, to drive cycles of fertility and renewal. By privileging the river’s utility as a transportation armature above all, its meaning in both culture and nature is circumscribed. In truth, it is too late (or far too soon) to radically reconsider the status of the river. Although much of the debate in the wake of Katrina was consumed with ideas of urban triage that were tinted green - floated on bromides about sustainability and natural process - the real agenda was founded in logics of race and class or in the actuarial cruelties of the cost - benefit of reconstruction and protection expense. These arguments were buttressed by their apparent symmetry with discussions about rebuilding the Gulf coast as a whole, conflated with logics about withdrawal from the seafront, the restoration of wetlands and barrier islands, the recovery and re-naturalization of the Delta. The result was a useful default that raised the possobility of labeling any territory susceptible to floods as uninhabitable. This sanctimonious, “natural,” risk-aversion could then be tailored to do the useful work of more social forms of engineering. But, whether or not one reads the city as a natural system with an ecology either comparable or supernumerary to other biomes, it’s clear that cities are skeins of contigency that invent their demands at a singular pace and scale. New Orleans grew with the impeccable imperative of a port at one of the world’s most strategic locations. While the ante-bellum city was sequestered behind its natural levees and scaled in greater harmony with natural forces, later development - like the growth of other cities along the Mississippi’s lenght - exceeded this harmonizing scale. And, as the city’s economy changed to embrace such massively distorting activities as energy and chemical production, the disjuncture between the notional bearing capacity of both the site and region grew exponentially. Although the city is now marked by the sinister serendipity of what is likely to be permanent shrinkage, it needs to be protected, enhanced, and directed along far more sustainable lines. The embedded patterns of sprawl and coastal destruction are logical areas of resistance and transfor- mation in any rational scenario as is a continued investigation of the morphologies of the gradient between occupiable land and the river and this latter investigation must be conducted in light of threats and changes that are more planetary in origin. It is clear, for example, that global warming is producing both a rise in sea level and more numerous and energetic storms and hurricanes which put New Orleans at greater and greater risk. The choice will continue to be stark: protect or abandon. Since the latter is unthinkable, the former must be carefully thought and designed. 06 NEW ALGIERS This project investigates the form and purpose of a crucial element in the protective regime: the Mississippi River Levee. These massive, primitive, constructions have proved highly durable, have existed as a feature of the world’s riverbanks for millennia. Their performance in Katrina was much superior to more complexly constructed solutions elsewhere in the city. Indeed, the primary failures in the disaster were of wall-based systems TERREFORM that sought to overcome one of the primary issues of the urban levee, the very high ratio of width to hight necessary to the construction of earthen barriers and their resultingly enormous requirements for urban space. The kinds of thin concrete membranes that failed so spectacularly along the city’s canals had the illusory advantage of preserving vast amounts of real estate. But what if the levee and its hinterland were conceived of not as antithetical but unified? What if the levee could become not simply a piece of nec- esary infrastructure but a more fully integrated element of a riverine urbanism? And, what if this reconfiguration were to lead to a circumstance in which levees became the central component of their own economic sustainability and an armature for infusing their adjoining neighborhoods with a new apparatus of self development and self reliance? Finally, what if such levees might become a prototype that could spread beyond the city? This project investigates the form and function of such an occupied levee. It is meant to suggest both a general strategy and a singularity, an idea contoured to a place. The uses it proposes include not simply food protection but housing, commerce, industry, movement, and recreation. This proposal also pushes its possibilities by including energy and agricultural production, moving towards a paradigm of local self-sufficiency as a strat- egy both of securing greater neighborhood autonomy and of taking responsobility for key aspects of urban respiration by doing the accountancy much closer to home. The area of the city chosen for this proposal is Algiers, a neighborhood that largely escaped Katrina’s ravages. This choice was dictated by the neighborhood’s typical, low-density fabric, its location opposite the center of the city, its embodiment of a number of issues endemic to New Orleans as a whole, and, of course the resonance with the celebrated scheme of Le Corbusier for another city called Algiers. This is important: Our scheme is not sui generis but part of a much longer enterprise to imagine the morphology of the modern city in the context of its enabling infrastructures. In particular, the New Algiers scheme is part of a history of linear city form that has had a special grip on modernist architecture and urbanism, drawn to the search to rationalize its attenuated morphologies according to logics of function. In the most emblematic of these schemes - including those of Soria y Mata, Chambless, Miliutin, Le Corbusier, and Rudolph - the generative logics sprang from the incorporation of mechanical means of transportation as the armature of architecture. The speed of the railway and the car had the effect of establishing a kind of parity among linked sites and the homogenizing, egalitarian mood of modernism easily translated this into a line, replete with its presumptions of the abatement of hier- archy.