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Posted on 02/17/2006 8:08:51 AM PST by Lorianne
ORLANDO, Fla. - At a mere 308 square feet, Katrina Cottage 1 was dwarfed by the big-volume show houses that overwhelmed the recent annual International Builders Show.
And unlike the show houses, which are the stuff dreams are made of, the cottage and others like it represent the new reality for thousands of Mississippi Gulf Coast residents displaced by the hurricane for which it is named.
"This isn't temporary housing," said Sandy Sorlien, a professor of photography at the University of Pennsylvania who is part of the process to rebuild the 11 Mississippi communities torn asunder by Katrina. "It is permanent housing, designed and built to be beautiful and functional."
"It is actually permanent emergency housing," said Marianne Cusato of New York, the designer, who with Sorlien was among more than 100 planning specialists brought to Biloxi, Miss., for almost a week in October by the Mississippi Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal.
Katrina Cottage 1 is just one result of efforts by Gov. Haley Barbour, who said he saw in the hurricane's tragedy a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild this state the right way."
To get the process started quickly, Barbour turned to the Congress of the New Urbanism, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to adapting traditional city- and town-planning principles to modern communities. Leading the New Urbanist charge is the father of neotraditionalism, Miami architect Andres Duany. "Gov. Barbour is serious about doing this right," Duany told an audience at the builders show last month. "He asked me very few things before he told me to go ahead, but three times the governor asked me if I had ever worked in Mississippi or along the state's Gulf Coast, just to make sure there was no conflict of interest." "He wanted a clean process," Duany said.
It left out builders and casino operators, whose presence would have "overwhelmed the process," he said. "It would have been like having an elephant in the room," Sorlien said of the casino owners and residential builders. "They were brought in after the charette (the October brainstorming session) had finished its work." "Most of the builders seem to think what we want to do can be done, or are willing to try," Duany said, indicating that Katrina engendered a spirit of cooperation that has yet to dissipate.
Officials and residents of the 11 Gulf Coast towns hit hardest by the storm participated in the October sessions, Duany said. A report was submitted to Barbour Dec. 31.
"What the commission searched for are recommendations for Mississippi's renewal that are sensible, doable and truly make a difference to our citizens' lives," said commission chairman Jim Barksdale. While not all of those 238 recommendations may be agreeable to everyone, "together they reflect our determination to move toward a renewal of South Mississippi that includes everyone."
Although many communities have embraced the charette's proposals, Biloxi hasn't done so wholeheartedly, said Sorlien, who was head of the building-codes team. "I think it is because Biloxi depended on casinos for its income, and that when the hurricane hit, there were more casinos in the pipeline."
Housing is part of the renewal plan, and the idea behind Katrina Cottage 1 is to provide real, rather than temporary, housing to help people feel as if things are getting back to normal.
"During the charette, Andres talked about the long-term effect FEMA's temporary trailers had on Dade County in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew," Sorlien said. "Thirteen years after Andrew, people are still living in those trailers. He didn't want that to happen in Mississippi."
The cottage Cusato designed is just one of several included in a "Patternbook for Gulf Coast Neighborhoods" developed by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh along the lines of similar plan books that exist for towns such as Celebration and Seaside in Florida and the Kentlands in Maryland. Some of the other cottages are larger - one is 800 square feet - but all are designed in keeping with the vernacular architecture of South Mississippi.
Cusato said her cottage, a downsized version of the Mississippi coastal-style house, is designed for both residents and emergency workers as an alternative to the FEMA trailer, but for about the same price - $35,000 - "once the cottage goes into mass production." The house can be manufactured or modular, panelized or built on site with traditional construction.
Unlike the FEMA trailer, the cottage (there are three versions) and other houses that will be offered "are designed to withstand hurricanes, since we know that they will continue to occur," Cusato said. "It is a secure house that you can live in and build from," she said, designed either to be the first piece of a larger permanent house or to be placed at the back of a lot and turned into a guest house or other outbuilding after a permanent house is completed. One of the cottage's three rooms is the front porch. "It is designed to be used and be comfortable, and comes with storage," Cusato said.
The porch opens to a combination living room and dining room, then to the kitchen, "which defines the space between that room and the bedroom, which has bunk beds for the family with storage underneath," she said. "We use every inch of space in that house. They are not large spaces, because we've found that people tend to gravitate to small spaces because they are secure and cozy."
Cusato compared her cottage with the 10,000-square-foot New American Home and other large-scale show houses that were open to those attending the builders show, saying that with that much space, "those houses aren't planned at all well."
"Sarah Susanka (author of `The Not So Big House') has proved that we can live in smaller spaces as long as we use them well," Cusato said. "Properly designed and planned, a 1,000-square-foot house can meet a family's needs perfectly, whether it is permanent or emergency housing."
That's why Cusato is creating a series of these cottages, including a two-bedroom house of almost 400 square feet. She's been surprised at the interest Katrina Cottage 1 generated.
"Developer after developer came up to me, asking for the plans so they could build the cottage as beach-front housing or in ski resorts," she said.
"I insisted that this is, first and foremost, emergency housing for the people of the Gulf Coast, but that once their needs have been met, I would consider it. "Then it hit me that what I had done was to come up with a prototype that could take off as a new way of building," she said. "The irony is that these builders never realized that affordable housing can be attractive."
Anyone who would use a 'word' like "charette" is probably suffering from a cranial-rectal inversion.
From one online dictionary:
No entry found for charette.
Googling the word makes it appear that it is an artificial word created by liberals to hide what they are really doing.
That's a cute little cottage. I wouldn't mind having one somewhere in the mountains when it comes time to retire. :)
Read the "Little House" books. There's one where the family (can't recall if there were still 2 daughters or already 3 by then) moved into a one room structure built from boards in a day or two by the father. And another where they (definitely at least a family of 5 by this time) lived in a one room sod dugout.
It's nice to have a bigger home, but hardly essential.
If one cannot get a loaf, settle for half a loaf, have seen the time when I would have been satisfied with the heel.
Ha.
There's a French word, "charabia" that translates in English to "gibberish."
No "charette" even in French.
This article musta' spelled an expression incorrectly or else it's from some language I've never heard of.
Maybe people were saying (I'll spell this phonetically), "SHAR-A" (hard 'a') and the writer thought it was 'some french word' and wrote it "charette" the way someone who isn't knowledgeable of French THOUGHT a French word would be spelled, thus, "charette" which is probably pronounced as I spelled it phonetically...'SHAR-A' (hard 'a').
Here's the deal - much of the space in your average builder-designed house is utterly wasted. Our little house had a central hub plan, NO hallways (a tremendous space-waster - all you do is walk through them), high ceilings to make the space look bigger, a combined living-dining area with a pass through kitchen and breakfast nook, and two-room bathroom (one for the commode, one for the bathtub/shower & sink). Lots of clever storage in places like under the stairs and along baseboards. All the closets were on the north wall to help insulate the living space.
The house we bought when we moved is your typical builder house - it makes me cry when I look at all the wasted space I'm heating and cooling! Two long hallways, a master bath the size of a soccer field (ostentatious but chilly in the winter, and think of mopping all that tile!), a useless dining room separated from the kitchen and the rest of the house . . . I could go on and on.
The good news is that even with all the square footage in this house, we're still paying less taxes than on our old one!
The architect mentioned in the article, Sarah Susanka, does a column for Fine Homebuilding magazine. She has definitely got it figured out. More space does not mean more comfort - sometimes it can mean less.
I think these cabins for Mississippi look really dear. And yes, they could be lived in year round and for a while if someone chose to...if not, move them to the back/front of the lot and rent them as coastal vacationer cabins. They would EASILY rent out for vacationers. It's like people are getting new homes and an added revenue stream for later. Pretty darned sweet, if you ask me.
Thanks for the info...We're living in a 1000sqft apartment right now, so something like this would be a dream.
doesn't seem out of line, and, you can move it.
thanks for the link
http://www.goodkarmadomes.com/
there's always a dome, the most hurricane-resistant structure yet designed
I get the impression that one of the main, but unspoken, driving forces behind the 308 sq. feet is, Keep it so small the families will find incentive to expand their living space quickly.
Another FEMA-funded project ---
http://architecture.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.zdomes.com/
Yes, but cabins are so much nicer. Many built in the 1800's are still standing and some still habitable and lived in today. I've seen them and used to own one, as a matter of fact and would still own it if I'd had my way with the issue...it's still being lived in today, however, and by a family of four.
But that place is three storied and five bedroom'd, but still a split-log home with split-log barn built in the 1800's.
Cabin life (smaller version) is still a sweet and snug way o' life and enjoyed by many people, if not preferred.
Those cabins sure look far more appealing than the FEMA trailers. And, I think, to the dome. If I had to chose, dome or tepee, I'd go with teepee.
YES. Or, be single and live out their old age there, OR, be a family and use the resource for revenue later.
Don't be too sure about that.
I've lived in 400 sq. feet as a family of 4.
Is it small? Yes. Can it be comfortable? Yes, if done correctly.
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