opposite: a 1726 map of New Orleans, showing the number of gardens it took to sustain that number of blocks. above: the 1856 San Francisco plantation house, left: the Lower Ninth Ward, open land, sitting idle for various economic and political reasons. San Francisco’s attic today, with 1974 intrusions, rendering it too, idle. (low-technology, based on free energy and cheap labour), the present (medium- technology based on cheap energy and expensive labour) and the future (sophisticated technology based on expensive energy and expensive labour). In the short term, given that before Katrina, 19,000 people lived in the Lower Ninth Ward and just 3,600 live there now, why shouldn’t all that empty land, so vulnerable to inundation still, be seasonal crops. The difference in duration between building and occupying a house, and the time it takes to grow beans, is so disparate that a great opportunity to re-establish some sense of food security in New Orleans is being overlooked. Two of the keys to a sustainable energy future is a return to passive technology for building design and to urban agriculture. In New Orleans’ distant past, these were not strategies that required an incentive program. They were used, by choice, because they made sense. *
beside the house. A pipe at the top level in each was for the rainwater from the roof providing running water to ground floor sinks. With the groundwater so high adjacent to the river, all sink water was returned to the yard in what must have been a nearly continuous run of buckets, and sprinkled over the lawn outside the back door. This avoided standing water and the malaria that mosquitoes would bring. An outdoor kitchen, separate from the house and quite a few hundred yards away kept the house itself cooler in the summer. An indoor winter kitchen has herringbone brick floors, set into mud, allowing flood water to seep in and back out again. Clay storage vessels, watertight and immersed in ground water, are set into the floor, their interiors cool enough for limited food preservation. Rooms are enfilad e; large shuttered openings are aligned to the prevailing breeze. The top storey is shuttered on all
sides as an open sleeping porch. From this floor two stairwells to the attic are stacks in a natural ventilation strategy – and what a glorious space this attic is, with a view from what was the top of the world. The house no longer functions as a passive system: recent air conditioning ducts and sprinkler systems look like the true invaders that they are, clumsy with their promises and obligations. The flaws of socio-economic system of slavery led to the downfall of the plantations; the flaws of a socio-economic system of subsidised fossil fuels and overdevelopment in unsafe geographies with inadequate infrastructure has led to the downfall of New Orleans. In the long durée, for New Orleans to bring itself into a post-carbon world, to prepare for the future as more than an energy-consuming historic reconstruction like the San Francisco Plantation House, it must take a conscious review of socio-economic systems of the past
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weather matters: On Site review 21
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