In the days leading up to August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina began to unwind like a watch spring, swelling to fill the Gulf of Mexico as it cycled landward.
In the Big Easy, mounting unease seized the public, as meteorological predictions began pointing the storm’s destination at the heart of New Orleans. Closer to the moment of landfall, however, a slight perturbation readjusted Katrina’s probable path east, to the Mississippi/Louisiana border. By the time it had left, 98,000 square miles of terrain had been affected, with some of the hardest hit areas along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In his synopsis of Katrina, The Great Deluge, Douglas Brinkley likened the horror to the Civil War landscape of the South after William Tecumseh Sherman’s apocalyptic destruction. “Not since Atlanta had been burned to the ground had a swath of Dixie looked so wretchedly barren,” he wrote.
In the city of Gulfport, Miss., Katrina unleashed unprecedented devastation. Officials reported that buildings downtown “imploded” during the morning hours under the combined impact of raging wind and catastrophic flooding.
The Man With the Plan
Shortly after the storm’s passing and some 880 miles to the northwest of Gulfport, IIT Professor of Architecture Frank Flury followed the stories of destruction with the rest of the nation. The news hit Flury hard, especially the devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he’d spent many good times and had developed a deep affection for the people and unique Southern culture there.
“It is powerful for a student to gain a sensual understanding of building by cutting and crafting a piece of wood or feeling the heat, weight, and odor involved in welding steel, and the astonishment of opening concrete formwork.” —Frank Flury
Flury hoped to take a more personal approach to the recovery effort, and he planned to include IIT—in particular, his architecture students—in his ambitious vision. The idea was simple: use his talents and resources to rebuild just one structure Hurricane Katrina had pitilessly demolished.
The first person Flury enlisted in the undertaking was Dean Donna Robertson, who pledged her fundraising, public relations, and institutional support. The path to rebuilding was now paved, though the project’s challenges had just begun.
Despite urgent need across the broad stretch of the storm’s path, finding a client for a rebuilding effort was not as easy as one might expect. As Flury, a native of Germany, recalls: “Well, we couldn’t just have this strange guy with a German accent call and say, ‘I want to send you a building!’” After researching the devastation, Flury was put in contact with the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center, a unique facility whose award-winning interactive children’s museum opened in 1998. With Katrina, the school and exhibition space had fallen drearily silent. The Artist Studio and office were reduced to rubble and the grounds littered with the mangled remnants of homes, cars, trees, and power lines.
Lynn Meadows Executive Director Betsy Grant recalls a serendipitous meeting with the Gulfport superintendent of schools: “He told me some guy from Chicago wants to come and make a building in Gulfport, asking if I wanted to meet him. ‘A building?’ I asked. You better believe it!”
Thus, a perfect architect-client relationship was born.
Flury’s plan was to design a new multi-purpose community center remotely with his IIT students, fabricate the sections, ship the entire structure to the site in Mississippi, and build it.
Flury has long been dedicated to the design/build ethos, which stresses both sides of the architecture experience: “It is powerful for a student to gain a sensual understanding of building by cutting and crafting a piece of wood or feeling the heat, weight, and odor involved in welding steel, and the astonishment of opening concrete formwork,” he explained in a Chicago symposium devoted to design/build theory.
Following Katrina, Flury established three separate teams devoted to design, construction, and fund-raising efforts. That each of the students involved participated without college credit—contributing to a worthy cause and gaining valuable experience—is testament to their dedication.
Obtaining necessary funding for the complicated undertaking was a challenge. As David Baker, IIT vice president for External Affairs, who coordinated the fundraising, explains, there was a danger of Katrina fatigue among potential donors, and local resources in the Gulfport region were already massively overextended as the struggling community attempted to cope with the storm’s aftermath. Thus began a series of miracles as contributors appeared, often seemingly out of thin air, to offer money, materials, manpower, expertise, and equipment.
The House That IIT Built
The design phase of the project began to take shape in Chicago, with Flury and 10 students batting around possibilities before poring over architectural sketches the students had rendered of the future structure. The creative process was tempered not only by financial constraints, but also by climate considerations, client needs, and an aggressive time frame that allowed the students only 10 days in Gulfport to complete the structure.
Various designs were explored, including a domed building able to withstand high winds. The final choice was for a vernacular schoolhouse of elegant, weather-resistant cedar. It would feature a large, 24x16 room suitable for a variety of activities, as well as a screened porch so that the children could enjoy learning outside, safe from the region’s notorious insect life.
Flury also stresses the energy-efficiency of the design: “The building is very highly insulated, with 2x6 rather than 2x4 walls and lots of crossventilation, reducing the need for air conditioning.”
After pre-fabrication of the structure, a task involving 25 IIT students, the materials were trucked to Mississippi in a tractor-trailer donated through the Rotary Club of Darien, Ill. Meeting the truck, Flury and a nine-member construction team immediately set to work. Most of the building of the outer structure was completed in a lightning-speed two days of intense labor.
After a vigorous 10 days, the structure was almost complete. It was time for the students to return home. Flury stayed on in Gulfport to see the project through to completion, a little nervous about the daunting task ahead: “Less than 10 percent was left to do, but that’s a lot. It’s a little like standing next to a mountain with a shovel, and you have to move it!” he laughs.
But new miracles were afoot as the Gulfport community, inspired by the efforts of the strangers from Illinois, contributed on multiple levels to get the job done. Volunteers from both AmeriCorps and Hands On joined individual community members. As part of the Rotary connection, Long Beach, Miss., Rotary President Robert D. Kranz secured a free air conditioning unit, surprising Flury with it one day. Gulfport’s Mandal Roofing sent a team of 20 to crown the finished center with the gift of a first-class roof, ideally suited to the Mississippi climate.
The IIT community responded as well. Ten alumni, trustees, and friends joined three corporations in their support of the project, donating everything from financial contributions to construction and electrical supplies toward the completion of the structure.
Design/Build It, and They Will Come
The center was completed just in time for a gala opening ceremony, which took place on July 1. Two IIT students, Kaitlin Streyle (ARCH 3rd year) and Hollister, were fortunate enough to be part of the emotional event, a time of looking back and of gratification. “Everyone gave 100 percent to the project,” Streyle recalls, adding, “It was amazing to see the finished building and to see Betsy and everyone at Lynn Meadows again.”
Hollister, who had been involved with the project since its inception, stresses the cohesiveness of the effort: “One of the most important things was the attitude of everybody down there,” he says. Both students agreed that despite the long, hot days and sore muscles, the experience was deeply rewarding. “It was the first time I’d been involved in construction,” says Streyle. “It was a great learning experience. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
The Lynn Meadows facility was the first rebuilding effort along this stricken area of Mississippi coast, a beacon of rejuvenation. As Director Betsy Grant notes: “When people are living in a FEMA trailer with four kids, they really need a place to go!”
Today, innovative programs at Lynn Meadows are again inspiring children and their parents, with lively, interactive museum displays, theater workshops, dance classes, and more. The new 1,000-square-foot building donated and assembled by Flury and his students has proven remarkably versatile for the school’s needs.
“All of us were hell-bent and determined. And we got it done,” says Grant.
Back at IIT, architecture students inspired by their work in Gulfport have formed a new group, Architecture That Matters, which will pursue other design/build efforts useful to the community and informed by social consciousness.
www.iit.edu/colleges/arch
Richard Harth is a writer based in New Orleans.
The Cornerstone of Design/Build
IIT’s Frank Flury teaches design/build architecture, which encourages students to explore the synergistic relationship between the mind that conceptualizes and the hands that make things. The process itself dates from man’s earliest architectural efforts, such as the dwellings of mammoth bone and animal hide found in the Central Russian Plain. Later, Renaissance architects were intimately involved with all phases of construction of their cathedrals and other structures.
Specialization, however, eventually drew the fields of design and building apart, and many architects began to lose their intimate familiarity with materials and techniques of construction. A resurgence of the design/build approach took off in the late twentieth century, as new attempts were made to reintegrate conceptualization with a tactile awareness of materials and building techniques. Advantages of the design-build approach include:
- Instilling sensitivity to material costs and constructability
- Establishing of a seamless, end-to-end process, limiting miscommunication between designer and builder, and reducing downtime for project completion
- Balancing beauty and utility—traditionally, a central concern for the architect
- Fostering continual learning and refinement through a circular process leading from idea to built structure and back to idea
At IIT, a comprehensive approach—one that identifies architectural design as but a first step in the process of a building’s creation—is encouraged and taught. Flury and students have applied this model in various environments, including a design/build island sculpture pavilion and a rural housing project for the disadvantaged in Alabama. Plans also are underway for a design/build studio and exhibition space in Pass Christian, Miss. Meanwhile, a new student organization, Architecture That Matters, seeks to explore other design/build opportunities of benefit to communities in need.