"Architecture School," a new documentary series about college kids designing and building state-of-the-art low-income housing in post-Katrina New Orleans, belies its bland, Fred Wisemanesque title. This is an unexpectedly engaging, fast-paced show with an edge. It's got form and function.
While in Los Angeles, I interviewed four of the principals involved in the show. As we began, I took out my audio recorder -- and four sets of eyes landed on it.
"I didn't know you could do that!" says Michael Selditch, the show's co-creator.
"I didn't either!" says Reed Kroloff, the former dean of Tulane University's architecture school.
They didn't know you could record with an iPod. Just by snapping on an elegant mic attachment, my output device becomes an input device. As we praised this gizmo, it occurred to me that here was an example of design and the impact it has on our everyday lives.
And that is the subtext of "Architecture School," which uses the extreme case of New Orleans to illustrate how important it is to prebuild correctly, whether designing a music player that fits in your shirt pocket or a home that can survive a hurricane.
The show's producers are both architects by training, although Selditch now works in film and TV. Stan Bertheaud, his producing partner, still teaches at Woodbury University in California. They said they spent years knocking around the idea of an architecture show. They always knew there was something inherently interesting about this line of work. The trick was finding a way to make it interesting enough for TV.
They found what they were looking for at Tulane University's prestigious School of Architecture. In 2005, shortly after Katrina, the school set up UrbanBUILD, a program to design new housing in neighborhoods ravaged by the storm's aftermath.
While the social-charitable angle of UrbanBUILD was obviously appealing, what grabbed the producers' attention was the way Tulane decided to carry it out. Fourth-year architecture students would have a competition, judged by their teachers, to design the most innovative and appealing model home ... and then they and their classmates would leave the campus, go into the inner city and help build it.
Inserting architects into the building process sounds obvious, since it was the way things got built for centuries. But only in the past 15 years or so has the idea come back into vogue.
"Architecture over the past 100 years has divorced itself quite significantly from the building process," said Kroloff, the former Tulane dean. "That's allowed architects to do many more things than they've done before" -- design iPods, for instance -- "but it's limited their ability to be part of the build process. It's a two-edged sword."
One corrective has come in the form of a movement, called simply "design-build," which seeks to integrate the two processes. It's practiced in a growing number of architecture firms and taught on more than two dozen college campuses, including Tulane, where it's supervised by Byron Mouton, an avuncular but tough-minded professor who's seen often in "Architecture School," usually chiding or encouraging one of his charges (in the photo, he's with Steve Smith).
Design-build, said Mouton, "takes the student out of the familiar, safe zone" of sketching plans on a computer. For many Tulane students, it's their first experience working with a contractor.
"So much about architecture is just about gravity," said Selditch. "And they forget about gravity when they're in school. They just draw these crazy things ..." and as he said this, the other three teachers in the room laughed knowingly.
Indeed, you'll see projects pitched in the opening episode of "Architecture School" that make you wonder what they were thinking: an S-shaped house with no visible means of support, a design that suspends the plumbing in midair, and so on. Some students hadn't shown how they would make the homes hurricane-proof, which seems odd given the daily visual reminders of poor design that still haunt New Orleans.
"I've taught architecture for a long time," said Bertheaud. "I love it. But sometimes the abstractness of it bugs me. So I love the fact that (they're) building the stuff they design."
Of course, none of this will come easily. Who would watch that? In the clash of new and old, some viewers will draw parallels between "Architecture School" and Planet Green's docu-series "Greensburg," about the struggles of rebuilding the Kansas town flattened by an EF-5 tornado with eco-friendly materials.
"In a city that is authentically old -- it's not Disneyfied old -- the people in the city are comfortable living amongst things they know," said Mouton. "The (students) are learning to build a house, but they're also dealing with the guy in the neighborhood who says their building is ugly."
At the end of the school year -- the show follows the 2007-2008 UrbanBUILD project -- the city gains one livable piece of progressive architecture.
"I think every one of these kids that does this goes through something deeply connecting them to the people," said Bertheaud. "They have a social agenda when they come out. They don't know it. It's not fully formed. But they're like, 'I built a house.'"
Kroloff thinks this kind of engagement is part of a broader trend to address the chronic socio-economic needs of New Orleans, and offers a model to other inner-city zones, like Detroit's, where he now directs the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum.
"It comes down to hope," he said. "When we first began to kick this around, we wanted it to show once and for all that our architecture school, and by extension Tulane University, could be something that works effectively toward restoring the civic fiber of our lives.
"That's something that's badly deteriorated in this country the last 50 years. We need to be able to stand up and show that (a) it can be done, (b) it can be done simply and (c) it can be done with modest acts by people with no training. Those three things are so significant in a place like New Orleans, where the social covenant has been broken, and we can show in those three ways how it can be rebuilt."
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