Ms. Susanka's staff authorized us to post this request to ask architects around the US to help design flood- and hurricane-proof small home-plans for rebuilding the Gulf Coast and New Orleans 9th Ward, to prevent these coastlines from being re-built only with high rise condo-hotels:


Dear. Ms. Susanka,

My brother is a city alderman in the Gulf Coast city of Long Beach, Mississippi, next to Gulfport. He and two other aldermen were just elected this past November 2004 to help fight against high-rise condo-hotel development in this Gulf Coast town. But now that Katrina has wiped out their coastal homes, high-rise condo-hotel developers are swooping in to persuade folks that there is no safe way to have small or single family homes on the Gulf Shore. The aldermen must find a way to convince their neighbors that there are feasible and aesthetic single- and small-home alternatives to selling their land to the condo-hotel developers. I am not exaggerating when I say that the entire future livability of this beautiful Gulf Coast city is at stake. Just take a look at the dreary dominoes of hotels on the Florida panhandle (Destin, Fort Walton Beach), where architects like you never had the opportunity to exert their architectural influence.

Can you advise us as to whether any US architects have, or can volunteer to make, economical but feasible wind- and flood- proof single and small home designs that can allow Long Beach -- and the sub-sea level wards of New Orleans -- to have single or small family homes that are aesthetic yet safe from future flooding or hurricanes? (e.g., homes on steel stilts, elevatable on a central core pillar, or like a lighthouse? Homes that float on an anchor in a flood? Water-proofable homes?)

Do you (or perhaps a collegial architect group I've seen you work with here in the Twin Cities, SALA architects) have any advice for the Long Beach aldermen? Or could you -- or any US architects' guild or design group -- sponsor a contest or a volunteerism effort to design such plans, to ensure that the devastated areas of the Gulf Coast will not have an inevitable future composed only of high-rise steel-reinforced condo-hotels?

If you have any thoughts, any thoughts at all, on how to help my brother and his fellow Long Beach aldermen before all their coastal land is sold to the condo-hotel developers, please contact me (frank burton) at burto006@umn.edu. We can forward info to them, until their e-mail servers are restored sometime this or next month.

Thank you for considering our unusual request.

frank burton
burto006@umn.edu

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