FLOAT House defies nature in a New Orleans neighborhood

Last year, when UCLA’s renowned architect Professor Thom Mayne and seven graduate students from the Department of Architecture and Urban Design sent their technologically innovative FLOAT House across the country on a flatbed trailer to New Orleans’ devastated Lower 9th Ward, they knew they were joining a conversation of national scope about whether the city could — or even should — be rebuilt.

 

Over five academic quarters, the Mayne team, working with his architectural firm, Morphosis, designed and helped construct the house to survive the extreme conditions that made the Lower 9^th nearly uninhabitable: hurricanes that slammed the region every 2.8 years on average, massive flooding, a location below sea level and dependence on an antiquated levee system that utterly failed to hold back storm surges.

 

“For me, the most important aspect of this project was that students touched reality,” Mayne observed. “They learned to deal with risk, and they started to understand the consequences of their actions as architects and urban planners. They began to realize that what they produced was going to have a social, political and cultural component.”

 

After months of research, deliberation and design, they built a sturdy, self-contained, 1,000-square-foot house on a chassis that functions as a raft. Housed inside the chassis, which sits on dry ground, are complete electrical (solar-powered), mechanical and plumbing systems. There are even storage tanks for rainwater that can be collected by its inverted roof.

 

As the very first floating house to be permitted in the United States, the house was a micro project with macro implications, Mayne said. “That’s what made it a very interesting project for my students — this micro-macro dimension,” said the winner of architecture’s most sought-after honor, the Pritzker Prize, and the internationally-known designer of large, public buildings such as an office tower in Paris.

 

“Here you have a small-scale environment — a small house — that is completely connected to much broader issues — political, economical, social, cultural and urban issues. And that became the focus of our study.”

 

The FLOAT House was among 13 prototype projects selected by actor Brad Pitt’s Make It Right organization, which challenged architects from all over the country to re-imagine traditional New Orleans housing styles and come up with an affordable, sustainable house of high-quality design. The organization’s goal is to stimulate redevelopment of the Lower 9^th Ward by providing displaced residents with a flood-safe home that preserves the area’s cultural values.

 

Today, the FLOAT House has managed to achieve just that. Built along the lines of a typical New Orleans house, the two-bedroom, two-bath house is currently the home of a longtime resident of the Lower 9th, a fisherman, appropriately enough, in his 80s. Typically, Make It Right offers its homes for $150,000, much less than the actual cost of construction. Most homeowners contribute about $75,000 toward the sale price, and the organization makes up the difference with donations, said Taylor Royle, communications director for Make It Right. So far, the organization has built 50 homes and is about to start construction on 28 more.

 

Equipped with the most energy-efficient appliances available as well as a contemporary version of a traditional front porch, the house is not meant to provide a safe haven for occupants during a hurricane. But when they return after the storm, it’s highly likely that the house will be there for them. As floodwaters rise, the concrete-coated chassis is intended to rise as well, sliding up two steel pylons that have been anchored into the foundation and positioned at either end of the chassis. Guided by these pylons, the house can securely float in up to 12 feet of water.

 

If Mayne has one wish for the new occupant, it is that he “claim this building by changing it,” the architect said. Nothing is sacred about its design or color palette, Mayne emphasized. “Until he changes it, it still belongs to us, meaning my collective group.”

 

Students who worked with Mayne and architects from Morphosis, said they are elated to learn that someone is living in the home. “Throughout the entire process, the student team was pushing parallel agendas dealing with design, social issues and technological innovation,” said Ryan Whitacre, now an intern architect with a Los Angeles firm. “But we always knew that in reality, this was an amazing opportunity to provide a home for an individual or family displaced by the storm.”

 

Both Whitacre and Saji Matuk, another former student, relished the invaluable experience of working on the FLOAT House, taking it from conceptual design through to construction.

 

“In the academic environment, it is easy to get lost in creating designs that are not necessarily subject to the constraints of budget and constructability,” Matuk said. “Working on this project gave me a reality check … and taught me how to work within a team of different disciplines to produce what we felt was a viable solution for a disaster-stricken area.”

 

As for Mayne, who was involved in an earlier study that broadly probed the question of whether these flood-prone areas should be re-urbanized or converted to an ecological reserve, he remains unconvinced that it is worthwhile to spend billions of dollars making the area safe when the ground is already sinking a quarter-inch a year and water is rising a quarter-inch a year.

 

Can an economically ailing nation afford to spend vast amounts of money to build back infrastructure for a sparsely populated, flood-prone area? “My sense is that not a lot of people are willing to talk about that,” Mayne said.

 

View a time-lapse video of the house being built: