1676 Architects join forces to sketch a new Mississippi
Miami-based architect Andres Duany says Mississippi had been destroyed by urban sprawl long before Katrina, and now he has a vision to rebuild it without strip malls, office parks, and housing subdivisions. So he's gathered some of like mind and they're dreaming: Chicago Trib story reprinted in Archi-Tect."For Biloxi, the designers advocated tearing down an elevated highway and replacing it with a ground-level boulevard that would feed traffic into the depressed downtown business district, instead of bypassing it. They also would return two-way traffic to the downtown's forlorn pedestrian mall and encourage casinos, the engine of the city's economy, to have shops that faced outward toward the street rather than turning inward, as suburban malls do."
No one really expects Mississippi will be rebuilt on the dreams of outsiders, but some fresh ideas couldn't hurt. Afterall, who but architects have designed the mess we have now inside and outside our cities?
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It's true that architects designed the urban sprawl that consumers wanted, and so we lost our little foot paths into the quiet woods, where we could bird watch and listen to the quiet. I miss that, living in urban sprawl, and now just a bird-feeder in my back yard will have to do. There is a hunger for quiet places, without the sound of garbage trucks, lawn mowers, and barking dogs.
Frank Lloyd Wright blended the structures with the landscape, and it looked lovely and organic, but nowdays, nobody wants their house to look nestled into the organics of the land...they favor ostentation, to stand out. It's a competitive world out there, and the sounds of birds and flowing water aren't in the competition anymore. A bit of a shame, for those of us who need things like this as if it were our breath.
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