The manhut. Want!

"I visited five of the new houses. I sat on their porches—New Orleans’s original green technology, offering shade in summer and shelter during deluges, connecting the home with the street—and I considered a city in flux."

Wayne Curis, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, examines the future of New Orleans architecture. People sometimes forget that houses built before the advent of air conditioning needed by necessity to save energy. Big windows, high ceilings, multiple interior doors that can be opened or closed to increase air circulation or hold heat in — many of these techniques (including a nice front porch) need to rediscovered.

"Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. “The very core of sustainability,” he said, “can be found in a simple question: ‘Can it be loved?’” All those solar panels from the first eco-boom in the 1970s, and those clunky, angular houses they sat atop? Most are demolished and gone. “The carbon footprint of a building is meaningless once its parts are carted off to a landfill in a generation or two,” Mouzon told the crowd. The rebuilding of New Orleans by the people who love it, he suggested, may provide the most lasting green lesson of all."

Houses of the Future again. Green houses need to be loved.

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The architecture of sprawl is often an architecture of convenience for the developers, rather than a source of comfort and delight for the homes’ intended residents. Artist Travis Shaffer’s Residential Facades explores the sometimes downright inhospitable results, examining “Southern suburban architecture and the unnerving anomaly of street-oriented residential facades without doors or windows.”

A man in Utah recreates the house from Up, via this NYT story.

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laphamsquarterly:

The Panic of 1893 was the worst depression America would experience until 1929, and its effects triggered a new symbol of American gothic: the haunted house. Newly built homes with their gingerbread shingles, turrets, and wide-eyed windows were abandoned and shuttered by owners who could no longer pay for them. 

Will the half-empty suburban lot become the iconic haunted house of the next century? Or has it already begun?