The Louisiana School: On the Future of a Regional Vernacular

THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 1 The Louisiana School: On the Future of a Regional Vernacular WILLIAM T. WILLOUGHBY Louisiana Tech University Abstract This essay introduces a collection of architects practicing in Louisiana who work in a growing context of franchised sprawl and struggle to make a relevant future from the remains of Louisiana’s vibrant regional culture. A small cross-section of talented architects have taken pre-engineered metal buildings, the trailer home, and off-the-shelf materials from Home Depot™ as overt emblems of ‘the new’ and merged these items with the vestiges of Louisiana’s rich architectural heritage. Their architecture is not nostalgic, but hopeful and forward-looking in gaze. This question is addressed: What makes this work representative of the future of Louisiana’s unique regional architecture? “In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: they are the mind’s indispensible relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a person lives, but not a human life; without hope, a person dies.”— Ursula K. LeGuin1 A sense of the folk has never left Louisiana. A folksy manner pervades the food, the dress, the language, the music, and the architecture. Place-bound traditions make up the mettle of the Louisianan’s identity. As native Carl A. Brasseaux can testify to, “Some folks might consider us to be rooted losers. But I think there is a quality of life here that is unsurpassed.”2 A constituency of architects practicing in Louisiana today has tapped into a vernacular sensibility discovered in farm buildings of the Mississippi Delta, log-hewn dog-trots in the piney hills of north Louisiana, grand plantation homes along River Road, shotgun houses of New Orleans, and raised boat houses built by Creoles and Acadians in the Atchafalaya basin. These architects have taken Louisiana's regional mixture and alloyed it with the contemporary landscape of Texacos, WalMarts, and truck stops evident along the interstates girdling Louisiana. Two landscapes fused into singular architectural expressions: the commercial present creolized with the culturally-engrained past. The excess of inexpensive, globally available products obliterates the choice to use local materials exclusively. The wide-scale transporting of goods by cargo ship, tractortrailer, and commercial distribution systems encourages monolithic economies that focus on producing a single product, agricultural good, or resource for export. In order to specialize, places forfeit their regional diversity and must now depend on imports to replace what they no longer produce locally. But as of yet there remains a stalwart preference in Louisiana for the locale’s bounty and a distain for items from outside the region. No doubt, much has been written about Louisiana and its fragile architectural legacy—especially in light of the ravaging of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Since those disastrous events in 2005 there has been a rush of proposed architectures and visions for Louisiana’s Gulf coast—How do these visions of reconstruction offer continuity with the past, and how will they harmonize with Louisiana’s architectural heritage? Beyond the return of the people, the food, and the music of Louisiana—the heritage of vernacular building must return also. Three practitioners and two firms—five practices overall (Stephen Atkinson, Robert Fakelmann, Emery/McClure, Ashe Broussard Weinzettle, and W. Geoff Gjerston)—constitute 2 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR what can be termed a Louisiana School. The work of this Louisiana School is not disenchanted with industrialization or corporate globalization; their designs simply affirm the architectural identity of a land, a climate and a culture as first and foremost in creating a practical expression for Louisiana. The Louisiana School architects value examples from their local vernacular as much as international examples of contemporary regionalist architecture. In these five examples of their work, a selective synthesis is sought— a fit that fulfils the continuities of place and the realities of the current global economic scene. Their architecture can be considered the newest emblems of this locale—their buildings are champions of place. The Louisiana School “Simplicity, sincerity, repose, directness, and frankness are moral qualities as essential to good architecture as to good [people]. All the culture derived from the study of existing buildings, foreign or otherwise, which reflect these qualities, will not enable us to reproduce them, unless we first have love of them in ourselves; and the full recognition of these qualities will check the tendency to imitate foreign nations, or disregard our own [local] characteristics and conditions.”3 — C.F.A. Voysey (1911) To be regional, architects must work within regional ‘schools of thought’ that address particular geographic, climactic, sociopolitical, historical, and cultural circumstances. If the work of this Louisiana School is modern, then it is a realistic modernism that begins with fundamentals: that buildings occupy a particular piece of ground and empirically interact with a unique climate. It is a modernism that avoids utopias and addresses facts found in Louisiana’s unique microclimates. This is a modernism that sees progress in the rediscovery and advancement of its region. In some way or another, each of these Louisiana School architects has been influenced by internationally celebrated “regional” architects—a chain of intellectual compatriots starting with Voysey and leading to Ostberg, Asplund, Aalto, Barragan, Murcutt, Ando, Mockbee-Coker, Lake/Flato, Patkau, and MacKay-Lyons. Each architect listed above has created touching buildings attuned to their respective culture and lands.4 The regionally- inflected buildings of the Louisiana School typify the connection to their particular landscape’s timeless surround. The work of this Louisiana School is not a return to the past but rather a fusion between a fallow tradition and contemporary techniques. The historic homes and farm buildings of Louisiana are compelling in the way they pioneered a creolized architecture— Indigenous traditions fused with those brought from Spain, France, Africa, and England. This mongrelized architectural heritage has an impure beauty that these architect embrace. Louisiana has never been held to the question of purity. The region’s future, due to local limits, flows contiguous with its past; adaptations of former techniques merge with material sourced internationally and the adoption of industrial innovations. Regional and Regionalistic To be “regional” is to seek out a sincere regional expression deriving organically from geologic, climactic, and cultural conditions—including historic responses to the built environment. There is an innate poetry in relating a building directly to its climate, breezes, rain patterns, hydrology, soil, and sun; in this way an architect translates the call of a landscape into building. Louisiana is a relatively flat region with diverse hydrological and soil conditions constituting flood plains, river deltas, and costal marshes. Besides the subtle but hilly uplands of north Louisiana, the only relief along the flat line horizon are the levees shaped around meandering rivers. In Louisiana, the dynamic interval between land and climate is close and interactive. Since much of the land is flat river delta, inland swamp, and marshy coastline, you have places in a constant cycle of being washed into existence or being obliterated by wash. Only an indigenously invented architecture could cope with such unique climactic conditions such as hurricanes, extraordinary heat, humidity, and soil instability. A frank and audacious dialogue with climate and land characterizes the regional approach—distinguishing it from the “regionalistic” dalliance of imitating stylized forms and simulating the built past. To be regional is to stress the circumstantial quirks and tectonic solutions that differ from locale to locale. To be regional is to make buildings THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR contiguous with a region’s ordinary ways. The thrill for the regional architect is when their work adds to an existent tradition, making something at once contemporary and contiguous with the past. Sometimes the most prosaic alternates into the most profound. Stephen Atkinson, Zachary, Louisiana Zachary House; Resonant of Louisiana, Stephen Atkinson’s Zachary House points back to the timeless situation of building with the land.5 Its appeal extends from its very connectedness to the traditional building arts. The Zachary House refines the ageless expression of shelter—the folding of human life into the land’s native order. In Louisiana, to build with the land you must build above it. Whether a building’s first floor touches the ground or is raised on post and beam foundations, it cannot help but float above viscous soils that may just as soon heave through super-saturation, wash away, or sink due to long-term drought. Buildings in Louisiana, dance like boats upon an ever shifting land; foundations are continuously adjusted—floors are re-leveled, jacked-up, and shimmed beneath. The Zachary House, like any good example of architecture, serves as an intercession between culture and nature—and thereby evokes all the potential meanings that arise when human culture emerges from a place. The house is not named for its owners but rather for the place it occupies. The house is a possession of the locale. Zachary, Louisiana is north of Baton Rouge; a landscape crossed by a strata that geologists classify as prairie. The mildly undulating terrain is populated by pines and deciduous trees that prefer a sandier soil. Perched on low post foundations, the building fits into its immediate context of grove and open field. [Figure 1] After traversing four low brick steps that engage a freestanding hearth, the Zachary House frames its landscape through the open volume dividing the house. [Figure 2] The small retreat was designed to take advantage of the kinds of standardized material easily purchased at Home Depot™ and at the regional farm supply store. Stephen Atkinson intentionally fashioned the building from these ready made components. Materials had to be readily purchased and assembled by common techniques. The structure’s form is inseparable from its tectonic simplicity. Kindred 3 to its place by both materials and building methods, the little retreat derives its tectonic expression from the region’s vernacular structures. [Figure 3] The building is more than what it is sometimes maligned as being: a shotgun house turned perpendicularly into a dog-trot.6 If Atkinson’s intentions were this simplistic, then the architecture would be nothing beyond a conceptual trope. But the small retreat resounds as more than an intellectual folly— the structure exudes a sensitive concomitant to land, cultural context, and occasion. Atkinson’s initial method was one of careful observation of local buildings—drawing comparisons between vernacular and genteel structures, fixing his attention to the differences in the way local buildings are sited on the land, employing a sober consideration of the building’s use as a contemplative retreat, and then synthesizing these influences together with timeless architectural principles of order and proportion. In the end, Atkinson reduced his array of local and distant influences into a simple and unique whole that fits its place. Like Mies’ Farnsworth House, photographs alone won’t fully suffice. The only way to really know the extent to which the architecture fulfills its locale is to visit it yourself, and then judge. Robert Fakelmann, Louisiana Metal Building Studies; Mississippi Delta Region, Louisiana Robert Fakelmann has explored Louisiana’s regionally distinct architecture for well over a decade. On his excursions, Robert has mapped and photographed vernacular farm buildings in their Delta landscape. Indicative of its simple expression, the farm vernacular fits to the needs of the harvest. Throughout the Delta are buildings that grow from the land as if they were agronomic facts— like plantings deeply rooted to the characteristics of climate, soil type, and place. [Figure 4] In the northeast section of Louisiana we see evidence of Virgil’s timeless advice that the farmer should match human ingenuity against the “native traits and habits of the place, what each locale permits, and what denies.”7 For Fakelmann, the farm buildings of the Mississippi Delta are stark examples of knowing how to build in a tough landscape; their lesson is this: look closely at what has worked here before. Robert spent many days 4 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR immersed in vernacular Louisiana architecture—sojourning, observing, photographing, and feeling the land these buildings occupy. He came to appreciate the lonely farm building in the landscape and to question the role the pre-engineered metal building portrays in the distinct Louisiana climate. As Fakelmann states, “Knowing a ‘place’ however, occurs over time. To the local culture, the image of a familiar figure on the landscape carries a more comprehensive history in which social rituals and day-to-day experiences are equally implicit.” Furthering his point, he adds, “The colloquial landscape is the distinctive image that accompanies seeing a regionally distinctive building anchored in a rural landscape – it is the ethos of a ‘place.’”8 Fakelmann supposes that the ethos of architecture is to produce work that acts as a resounding identifier for a distinct and regionally explicit culture. Architecture is evidence of humanity’s place in the world. Fakelmann critiques the contemporary approach to standardizing buildings which employ the same structure and same skin, irrespective of climate or culture. This homogenous approach to building in the United States is something he calls a ‘nation of standardized containers.’9 Albeit valued as pragmatic and economical, the pre-engineered metal building that dots the Mississippi Delta disregards the distinct climate, the local culture, and the ethos of the land. Fakelmann’s remedy is one that considers the customization of standardized buildings in order to fit the distinct locale in which they will sit. He seeks to challenge the metal building industry to consider the evolving potential for mass-customization in lieu of the isotropic approach of massstandardization. In other words, to manufacture the standard pre-engineered metal building in such away that it no longer singularly imposes its generic presence upon a region. Instead, the metal building can adapt in form to fit the requirements of its microclimate and cultural context. Fakelmann’s work supposes to reconcile the deductive standards for metal buildings with the inherencies of place. [Figures 5, 6, and 7] How might Fakelmann’s ‘reconciliatory approach’ serve to critique the standardized container of the temporary, but most likely permanent, FEMA trailer and fit it into the distinct cultural landscape of Louisiana’s Gulf coast? The use of pre-engineered metal or wood construction is efficient and inexpensive—and therefore desirable, ubiquitous, and inevitable in Louisiana where frugality is a necessity. Nonetheless, the challenge remains: how to use premanufactured components and yet embrace local ingenuity and fit? Emery/McClure, ABF Barn (Arabian horse Breeding Facility); New Roads, Louisiana The ABF Barn by Emery/McClure (Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure) takes the rural vernacular of Louisiana as a past fact to be transformed by contemporary demands. Louisiana’s architectural heritage makes for a rich point of departure, worthy of close observation and sturdy enough to withstand harsh critique. The architects describe the ABF Barn as such: “There is a rural Southern Louisiana site with a program that requires simultaneously both rough and finite finishes (stall and laboratory respectively). There are two varied scales of occupants, horse and human. Lastly, there exists the loaded architectural ‘breed’: BARN. The BARN breed is both a normative condition, and a pragmatic necessity. These origins must be synthesized into a unique environment. They become stories that tell not only the present and the past, but also allow for the future.”10 This project takes site, climate, and the tectonic of the normative horse barn as an initial fact. [Figure 8] This acceptance of the barn’s familiar tectonic expression roots the building immediately to its locale and culture. Demonstrated in parallel section cuts, the ABF barn transforms procedurally as the demands imposed by the dichotomous program deform each structural bay of the initial unadulterated barn form. [Figure 9; four sequential section cuts] Not only sensibly aware of the connection of their work to its unique south Louisiana context, these architects are also attuned to global trends in architectural practice. Their work is reconciliatory; reflecting on the inherencies of place and historical continuity, and then sticking them through the contemporary wringer. This phase of Emery/McClure’s work derives from an axiomatic interpretation of Kenneth Frampton’s assessment of critical THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR regionalism: keep what is innate to a region and a culture (or suppose the persistent and essential components of place), critically assess the significance, and then incorporate the most culturally appropriate agents of contemporary globalization.11 It is the struggle between the economic needs of insipid tourism, placeless interstate commerce, and the cultural enthrall that persists in the swamps, bayous, and honkytonks hidden behind the cypresses of Louisiana. Louisianans are fiercely possessive of their culture; change is always seen askance and through a veil of critical reserve. The global change that other regions have readily absorbed has been slow to take root in this languid land. By most national economic metrics, Louisiana measures consistently poor—but qualitatively, its people are filled with resolute local pride. The same corporate franchises which have afflicted the rest of the United States have only recently entered onto the Louisiana landscape. As the architects have stated, “Southern Louisiana has kept its architectural detritus [and historical heritage]. It is a zone not separated from modernity.”12 Thus, Louisiana is progressively regressed; images of the bayou and the interstate coexist simultaneously as agents of tourism. Through their writings and work, Emery/McClure presents a Louisiana that, “is not a simplified and sanitized version of entertainment (Disneyland) or a regressive capsule of the past (Williamsburg, Virginia) yet neither is it a vibrant contemporary cultural and economic center (New York, Chicago). It is partly all of these, and not really any of them.”13 Whether regressive or progressive, the Cajun character is one of adaptation to land with a fervor unlike what may exist in other regions. Hence the conjunctive phrase, localculture: a culture so much a part of the local ecology as to remain inseparably bound; a people entrenched. As Flannery O’Connor informs us, “To know one’s self is to know one’s region.”14 In Emery/McClure’s writings, the architects cite the words of Glenn Petre, Louisiana filmmaker, “It’s easy to pick up and move when the culture you know is all McDonalds. But if you grow up the way I did, in Louisiana, you don’t in your travels, find anything like it. Some of it is the cuisine, but mostly it is a mind-set.”15 Emery/McClure recognize the ‘Louisiana mind-set’ while at the same time 5 seek reconciliation with the contemporary exegeses of the ‘global economic mind-set’— which if left unchecked would neutralize the unique flavor of Louisiana. The hope of any critical regionalist is that Louisiana will reinvent itself in contemporary guise only on its own terns, not by terms imposed by outsiders. Ashe Broussard Weinzettle, Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse; Alexandria, Louisiana Ashe Broussard Weinzettle’s program brief states that, “In 1998, the citizens of Alexandria voted to build an 18-hole public golf course, located on 173 acres of flat farmland west of the city. They were able to incorporate a tree-lined bayou bordering the course’s west edge into the course.”16 Made from humble materials, and forms reminiscent of farm out-buildings, the architects sensitively arranged the built ensemble to give an overall expression of elegance and refinement. The architects took the regional vernacular and reshaped select elements into a distinct ensemble undeniably Louisianan. [Figure 10] The Clubhouse takes on the same general plan distribution of the River Road plantation home by elevating the main social structure over the utilitarian cart storage and maintenance facility. This raised landscape is bermed and arranged to allow for its striking roofline to be visible at a distance along the approach drive—like a farmstead perched upon a levee. Yet, the figure and tectonics of the facility recalls farm structures that frequent the prairie and pine landscape of central Louisiana. This particular region is an agriculturally rich landscape with slow bayous, frequent heavy rains, and long building overhangs. [Figure 11] In Louisiana, there is a tradition of metal structures, mostly derived from reconstituted oil drilling equipment, redeployed scrap metal used in farm building construction, and remnants from the railroad heydays. The tin roof is a terminal solution to inevitable roofing problems where torrential rain alternates with sun harsh enough to bake tar roofs brittle and crackles the surface into something like alligator hide. The humidity, coupled with intense sun makes for a daunting environment—a liquid heat; like a sky-high convection oven baking and steaming everything inside it. So, metal structures and seamed metal roofing make for a sensible 6 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR solution in this clime—and remain palatable (if not preferable) to the local aesthetic sensibilities. A prominent portion of the facility’s Pro Shop, the ‘tower,’ is reminiscent of a pigeonnier—a small tower found on historic plantations where pigeons would roost in nesting boxes to be eaten as delicacies. Not only does the reference to a pigeonnier reflect the emphasis locals place upon cuisine, but also the Pro Shop’s tower becomes a vertical figure in the landscape. This combination of landmark and pigeonnier compliments the Louisianan’s sense of repose, palatial leisure, and genteel cultivation. The clubhouse is an unlikely amalgam of plantation home and farm building. [Figure 12] The architects state, “The clubhouse draws its form from a series of cascading shed roofs with expressed framing and ribbed metal siding, which relates to its rural context.”17 The building’s broken pitch roofs of varying, overlapping slopes—ranging from steep to slight—remind a person of ad hoc barn structures cobbled together over time from amalgamated lean-to additions. The site, once open farmland, reclaims its rustic, agrarian roots in the aesthetic of this new clubhouse. W. Geoff Gjertson, Wedge House: Golden Residence; Mandeville, Louisiana As a rather sensitive rendition of dwelling, Geoff Gjerston’s Golden Residence exemplifies the architect as reconciler of competing demands.18 Foremost, the building must offer all it can while remaining economical to build—the most space for the least expenditure. A pre-manufactured metal building frame satisfied this need. Like the inexpensive carports that dot the suburban and rural landscape of Louisiana, the house’s initial volume is constructed of a standard system mono-slope metal frame anchored to a concrete slab; the shed’s slope provides enough inner height to allow for a mezzanine. [Figure 13] Gjertson and his client conceived of the residence as a critique of the ubiquitous suburban spec house. It is the unspoken dream of many Southerners to live in a metal building—to spare the expense of structuring a subdivided interior; yet this whimsy is rarely followed through to reality. Gjertson combines old and new by accepting antique architectural components into the plan of the new building, connecting the new structure back to a past. In Louisiana, there is a deep and longstanding cultural tradition of salvaging and reusing of architectural components; this tactic joins the ever practical mindset of the frugal Louisianan with the proud sentimentality felt toward reclaimed pieces of an ancestral home. According to the architect, the house is a contemporary recapitulation of the Charleston side-porch house. The image may seem apt, but the context and microclimate required to generate such a comparison could not differ more. The side porch is not entirely unique to Charleston. The porch, generous roof overhang, antique transomed French doors flanking the porch, and exterior ceiling fan make for a quintessential Louisiana space. The combination of these porch elements, albeit supported by steel, runs to the core of Louisianan architecture—pointing back to the first local adaptations of Acadian settlers. [Figure 14] The articulate porch space is the place of conversation, of storytelling, of neighborly greeting, of shucking corn and snapping beans, and of Southern hospitality—a setting for lemonade and sweet tea on a languid summer’s day. In most parts of Louisiana, to make a house without a porch is to eschew the foundations of social propriety. It is about a transition between inside and out that unites the inner life of the Golden Residence to the wetland beyond. The porch is part of the symbolic, spatial, and cultural legacy that persists even in contemporary, air-conditioned architecture. By combining these elements to compose a porch, Gjerston accepts this spatial legacy and intertwines the historical decorum of the Louisiana porch with a wholly contemporary structure. Louisiana’s Past and Future Now It would be rash to consider this regional architecture as the formation of a “style.” Nonetheless, these practitioners are responding to a region’s traditions and clime; yet all their tools and methods are contemporary and personal. What is termed a ‘school’ is really no more than a collection of like-minded individuals designing in and occupying the same region. Today, all regional architecture is influenced by the published works of other regions. What seems to translate and transfer THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR in the published work of other regionalists is the sense of rootedness to place—a relation to local climate and a celebration of vernacular buildings. In these cases, the architecture interacts with the region and figures its histories into built form. The site for a building, a respect for the climate, and a reverence for the value of the vernacular are what each of these architects share with other regionalists from around the world. Just as Glenn Murcutt’s very principled and empirically derived architecture is so implicit to its place as to be fully Australian, so the work of these architects comes across as championing Louisiana. The work of the Louisiana School demonstrates that an architect should never be held captive to the past or enslaved by change. To dispose of the past in favor of progress—or to avoid progress in fear of losing touch with one’s traditions—is to be exiled from the present.19 Architecture should be seen as continuity in time: a continuous flow forward from elements of the past into present designs. The past is prologue to the present; and futures are made up of contemporary yearnings. Idealizing a past that never was (nostalgia), or a future that will never be (utopia), eschews the only present we can rightfully inhabit. In order to continue living, the advice given in the quote that began this essay was to trust life, and live with hope. So in order to build with relevance—architects must trust the bounty of their individual region, configure a contemporary architecture that continues a tradition, and press on with hope toward the future. Endnotes Ursula K. LeGuin, City of Illusions (New York: Ace Books, 1967) 168-169. 1 Carl A. Brasseaux, quoted in “Born on the Bayou With Little Urge to Roam,” story by Blaine Harden, The New York Times; Sept. 30, 2002. 2 C.F.A. Voysey, “The English Home,” from David Gebhard’s Charles F. A. Voysey, Architect (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1975) 62. I included the bracketed words as substitutions in the original quote in order to make it more general and less narrowly applicable to England. 3 7 A list inferred through Alan Colquhoun’s essay “The Concept of Regionalism,” from Postcolonial Space(s); edited by Nalbantoğlu and Wong (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) 13-23. 4 See Stephen Atkinson and William T Willoughby, “Between Land and Sky: Reduction in the Work of Stephen Atkinson,” from Oz Journal 25 (Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University College of Architecture, Planning, and Design, 2003) 22-29. Though no longer living in the region, Stephen Atkinson is a native of Louisiana. 5 Stephen Atkinson was undoubtedly aware of Steven Holl’s “Rural & Urban House Types in North America,” Pamphlet Architecture 9 (New York: Pamphlet Architecture, 1982). 6 I first came across this quote of Virgil in William Bryant Logan’s Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995) 164. Taken in fuller context, Virgil begins his Georgics [Book I] with these instructions, “Before we plow an unfamiliar patch / It is well to be informed about the winds, / About the variations in the sky, / The native traits and habits of the place, / What each locale permits, and what denies.” 7 Robert J. Fakelmann, “The Colloquial Landscape,” from Architecture:Landscape; 2001 ACSA West Central Conference Proceedings (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Continuing Education , 2001) 238. 8 Paraphrased from Robert J. Fakelmann, “The Colloquial Landscape,” from Architecture:Landscape; 2001 ACSA West Central Conference Proceedings (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Continuing Education , 2001) 239-241. 9 Ursula Emery McClure’s and Michael A. McClure, Terra Viscus…Terra Accommodo: writing and building in the hybrid tectonic nature (Self Published: Lulu.com, 2007) 141. Information on the ABF Barn can also be found in Batture Vol.2, No. 1 (Baton Rouge, LA, LSU School of Architecture, 2006) 48-49. 10 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” from The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) 16-30. 11 8 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure, “Supersaturated Solution – A Suspended Tourist Landscape,” from Terra Viscus…Terra Accommodo: writing and building in the hybrid tectonic nature (Self Published: Lulu.com, 2007) 45. 12 Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure, “Supersaturated Solution – A Suspended Tourist Landscape,” from Terra Viscus…Terra Accommodo: writing and building in the hybrid tectonic nature (Self Published: Lulu.com, 2007) 47. 13 14 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1970) 35. Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure use an extended version of this quote in their essay, “Supersaturated Solution – A Suspended Tourist Landscape,” from Terra Viscus…Terra Accommodo: writing and building in the hybrid tectonic nature (Self Published: Lulu.com, 2007) 45. Reported by Blaine Harden in “Born on the Bayou With Little Urge to Roam,” The New York Times; Sept. 30, 2002. 15 Taken from the 2006 AIA Gulf States Region Honor Awards project brief statement on Ashe Broussard Weinzettle’s winning entry, Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse. 16 Again, taken from the 2006 AIA Gulf States Region Honor Awards project brief statement on Ashe Broussard Weinzettle’s winning entry, Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse. 17 In 2003, Geoff Gjertson’s project won a Gulf States Region AIA Chapter Annual Design Award. 18 This statement paraphrases Aldo van Eyck, “The Interior of Time,” from Meaning in Architecture; edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1970) 171. In the essay Aldo van Eyck states, “Architects nowadays are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either hinders, runs after, or, at best, keeps up with. This I suggest, is why they tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible— without temporal dimension.” . . . “If the lasting validity of humanity’s past environmental experience (its contemporaneousness) is acknowledged, the paralyzing conflicts between past, present, and future” . . . “will be mitigated.” . . . “I have heard it 19 said that an architect cannot be a prisoner of tradition in a time of change. It seems to me that an architect cannot be a prisoner of any kind. And at no time can he or she be a prisoner of change.” THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 1. View from field, Zachary House (courtesy of the architect) 2. View of model, Zachary House (courtesy of the architect) 3. View from grove, Zachary House (courtesy of the architect) 9 10 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 4. Mississippi Delta (Photo by Robert Fakelmann) 5. View of model; Louisiana Metal Building Studies (courtesy of the architect) 6. Elevation; Louisiana Metal Building Studies (courtesy of the architect) 7. Assembly of customized components; Louisiana Metal Building Studies (courtesy of the architect) THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 8. Composite board; ABF Barn (courtesy of the architects) 9. Parallel section cuts; ABF Barn (courtesy of the architects) 11 12 THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 10. View of facility; Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse (photo by author) 12. View; Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse (photo by author) 11. View of overlapping roof slopes; Links on the Bayou Golf Clubhouse (photo by author) THE LOUISIANA SCHOOL: ON THE FUTURE OF A REGIONAL VERNACULAR 13. Overall View; Wedge House: Golden Residence (courtesy of the architect, photo by Hyatt Hood) 14. View of side porch; Wedge House: Golden Residence (courtesy of the architect, photo by Hyatt Hood) 13