LEARNING CURVE
architecture
community
education
“We were this kind of informal
dating service.”
DAN ETHERIDGE, Tulane University
Experimenting
with Disaster
Etheridge directs the architecture school’s Tulane City Center,
which hosts CityBuild, a consortium of schools that has completed
20 design-build projects in New Orleans. Below: Construction
photos of a prefab chicken coop in the Lower Garden District.
In a battered New Orleans, the CityBuild consortium creates
a process for community-based projects.
It would be a good premise for a cult horror flick: gangs of architecture students swarm the site of a natural disaster and prey on its
victims with improbable designs that either cannot be built or collapse in ever more imaginative ways. That was more or less the fear
of Dan Etheridge, a professor at Tulane University, in the fall of 2005,
when his phone began ringing off the hook with calls from architecture schools around the country. They were all interested in putting
together design-build projects to help New Orleans recover from the
devastating hurricanes that flooded the city.
Etheridge had already established a network of connections with
community organizations through his work at the Tulane/Xavier
Center for Bioenvironmental Research, and he was getting ready to
head the Tulane City Center, conceived before the storm by the then
dean, Reed Kroloff, to coordinate a new emphasis on urban research
and outreach at the architecture school. The timing couldn’t have
been better for a massive experiment in community-based design-and-build, but Etheridge was not entirely prepared for the onslaught
of academics who came calling.
“We were this kind of informal dating service because we had
a lot of relationships with community groups, both formal and informal, and we would just connect them,” Etheridge says. “And
then a couple of schools behaved in ways that made us very
uncomfortable. They got expectations up very high and then
didn’t deliver. That was a bit of a scare to us, because we’re like,
‘Shit, we introduced them.’ We didn’t want people experimenting
on victims of the hurricane.”
That was when Etheridge and a fellow professor, Doug Harmon,
proposed creating a consortium of schools called CityBuild, hosted by Tulane but jointly funded, to coordinate projects. Harmon
became the director, and each member chipped in $1,500 for
expenses. “There was no real on-the-ground physical work being
done other than planning meetings and charrettes, and people
were completely exhausted by that process,” Harmon says. “You
really have to earn people’s trust in New Orleans. One of the things
we were able to do was partner schools with organizations that
had a defined and active leadership.” continued on page 96
