“The firm got in touch with us in early December. Our initial reaction was: there’s no way we can fit this to the curriculum. But there was such overwhelming interest from the students, we decided to give it a shot.”

The speaker is Michael Jemtrud, the surprisingly youthful director of McGill University’s School of Architecture. He’s sitting in the lounge of the Renaissance Arts Hotel in the Warehouse District of newly-gentrifying New Orleans, LA – which, believe it or not, currently represents the eighth-strongest region of economic growth in the mainstream United States, according to a new study.

N’awlins’ surprising growth spurt is courtesy a flood of private investment and charity funds that poured into the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Currently, construction and tourism are driving much of the new activity. Hotel occupancy rates are starting to approach levels not seen since before the flood, and excellent new restaurants, such as Cochon in the Warehouse district and Patois on Laurel Street downtown, have sprung up to cater to those visitors. The downtown area and French Quarter bustled with a momentum that was markedly absent the last time I visited in June 2006.  

That said, it’s mostly private and non-profit initiatives that are driving the Big Easy’s signs of new life. The millions that have been supposedly committed by the federal government to the rebuilding effort remain tied up at City Hall. And, as reported by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times last September, a coherent city-wide plan to coordinate the rebuilding project has taken a long time to get off the ground. (There is, now, a city master plan – New Orleans' fifth – spearheaded by David Dixon of Boston firm Goody Clancy.)

Back at the Renaissance Arts, McGill University's Jemtrud, nattily outfitted in black suit and Armani glasses, is talking about his school’s involvement in another intrepid private effort to contribute to the rebuilding effort. That’d be New Orleans design firm Billes Architecture’s call for students to design prototype houses for New Orleans residents that had lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina.

“We made it a special topics course, but it was very much an addition to regular classes,” Jemtrud explains. “The students worked within the brief from Billes, and focused on issues of sustainability and cost.”

Fourteen students – all in their last year of undergraduate or first year of graduate studies – split into teams of two. Timing worked in the Canadian students’ favour: the competition entries were due the day after their reading week break, whereas American entrants had to submit the week before. “They worked right through that week,” Jemtrud says. “None of them really took a holiday.”

The work clearly paid off. As Billes principal and founder Gerald Billes announces to a well-heeled crowd gathered in the ground floor gallery space of the hotel later that night, McGill teams walked away with three of the five awards.

Similar in program to Brad Pitt’s Make It Right initiative to construct affordable housing in the Lower 9th Ward (to which Billes' firm is contributing) the students were asked to design a house that would be sustainable in its engineering, affordable in price, and modest in size: between 1500 and 2000 square feet.

“The houses had to contain three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms,” explains the tall, affable Billes. “It had to fit onto a 30 by 50 foot lot, achieve LEED certification, and be affordable – between US$150,000 and US$200,000 a house.” All of the houses were also raised eight feet in the air.

The ten finalists include The Breezeway House, by McGill students Jessica Dan and Hamza Alhbian. It features a series of modular operable windows on the roof designed to encourage warmer air to rise and escape from the top of the double-height space. It was included in the top five.

By contrast, fellow McGill students Lilia Koleva and Phililppe Larocque’s Wood Frame House incorporate familiar elements of the New Orleans housing vernacular. Slatted shutter doors open onto a porch that stretchs the width of the front façade. An oblong body riffs on the city’s famous Shotgun housing typology, so-named because it was supposed to be possible to shoot a shotgun down the center of such a house, and have the bullet emerge the other side.

Several finalists, including one from local New Orleans talent Thomas Colosino and David Lachin, also an award-winner, use shipping containers as a structural element. It’s a practical choice, given several thousand of the things lie unused around New Orleans on any given week.

Most interesting to this correspondent’s eye is another award-winner, the rather oddly named New Datum for a Topography Under Water, by Justin Boulanger and Ann Rodgers, also of McGill. These designers had focused on the issue of accessibility: how best to access a house raised eight feet in the air. Their solution? A ramp winding around the perimeter of the house, in what director Jemtrud described as a kind of naïve Villa Savoye.

The likely most practical winner, however, is Forever Green, by McGill students David Dworkind and Andrew Hruby. It featured two rows of shipping containers as structural elements. Along one wall, containers were stacked horizontally end by end. The designers had removed those containers’ interior dividing walls to create an open living area. Along the other wall, another row of containers, stacked vertically, created small private rooms. An asymmetric roof linked the two.

“We knew other designers had used shipping containers,” explains Dworkind just prior to the announcement of his win, “so we wanted to find a way to use them that was original.”

“I liked this design,” says Gerry Billes after giving Dworkind and Hruby their prize, US$1000 and a promise to eventually get the design built. (The other four winners all won the same prize.) “But I think it might have won because of Brad Pitt.” (On their submission renderings, Hruby and Dworkind cheekily included shots of Brad and Angelina wandering about the house with some of their large brood of famous children in tow.)

Asked as an aside how he’d made his selections, judge Martin Pedersen – whom design fans would recognize as the executive editor of Metropolis magazine – explains he’d tried to put himself in the feet of those who had lost their houses in the flood, and had decided to come back. His favorite, the Wood Frame House, was not among the winners. “I thought it would have had the strongest ring of familiarity to those residents,” he explained. “Guess I was the only one.”

Promising that the winning design will see light of day was part of the lure to get students to participate in the competition. Billes Architecture has made good on similar enticements before. Another firm-run student competition for product designs resulted in a line of student-designed furniture, Billes Products.

This time around, Billes has set up a local non-profit, New Design New Orleans, to raise the necessary funds.  Those interested in finding out more, or considering donating, should check out the website at www.ndno.org. And those more generally interested in the state of play of rebuilding efforts in New Orleans should watch for Azure’s Great Ideas issue, coming in September 2009.