New Urban Guild Manufactured Architecture Program
Participating Manufacturers:
| Lynn Cove Foundry & Forge | HB&G |
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| http://www.europeanhardware.net |
http://www.hbgcolumns.com |
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Head House Square Shutters |
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http://www.headhousesquare.com |
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Check back for Manufactured Architecture web pages with more product information. |
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News
Guild Workshop VI: Original green AIA/CES LU's September 17-18 Chicago, IL Learn more New Articles Several new articles are being added to the site; new articles are marked with the month they are posted, like this:  KatrinaCottages.com website The New Urban Guild is about to go live with the KatrinaCottages.com website, which will include a wealth of information on Katrina Cottages and will be the nerve center of the Katrina Cottages movement. Check back often. Gulf Coast Emergency House Plans Books Are Here!
Our printer just delivered the first edition of the Gulf Coast Emergency House Plans book, which is the first book of Katrina Cottages. Get your books by calling our office at 786-276-6000. We're working hard to get the Katrina Cottages website up (www.katrinacottages.com) The Katrina Cottages website will contain each of the house plans, and you will be able to place your orders for plan books or house plans online. But for now, just give us a call... thanks!
Guild Architects at Mississippi Mega-Charrette Guild architects Marianne Cusato, Bill Dennis, Milton Grenfell, Michael Imber, Susan Henderson, Gary Justiss, Eric Moser, Steve Mouzon, and Robert Orr joined New Urbanist colleagues R. John Anderson, Manuel deLemos, Grace Dillon, Christine Franck, Francisco Llado, John Massengale, Michael Mehaffy, and Ben Pentreath, and Mississippi architects Allison Anderson, John Anderson, Michael Barranco, and David Hardy on the catastrophically devastated Mississippi Gulf Coast to participate in the largest planning charrette ever conducted. They were part of a much larger team of close to 200 that jammed the ballroom of the Isle of Capri casino in Biloxi until all hours of the night working out a vision of the new Mississippi Gulf Coast that set out to create frameworks for rebuilding that retain the things we all loved the most about the Coast within the framework of new requirements such as the not-yet-official new FEMA flood maps. The challenges are daunting, but the need is great... this is, after all, the worst natural disaster in American history. The Guild website will be posting a number of the architectural tools developed at the charrette in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. In the meantime, Guild members have been quoted repeatedly in both local and national news outlets. Links to some of the articles are as follows: Rebuilding Mississippi after Katrina www.npr.org Guild architect Geoffrey Mouen spoke to the Orlando chapter of the Urban Land Institute on the principles of classical architecture and their survival into the modern era. The event was held at the Orlando Museum of Art June 17 Guild Architects Design Crescent Click here for article. Guild Holds First Double Charrette Click here for article. Designs of the Times: British Modernist/traditional architecture debate Susan Emmett, June 2005 New Ruralism: St. Joe's perspective (pdf) Andres Duany at World Environment Day By Malcolm Maclachlan, June 2005 |
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Features
It was Saturday, September 3, 2005, just five days after Hurricane Katrina, when Andres Duany and Steve Mouzon met in Miami to conceive what would become the foundation concepts of the Katrina Cottage. Andres said early in the meeting that "this disaster is simply too enormous to depend on one type of delivery system to rebuild. We have to have all hands on deck. Houses must be site-built from stock house plans, panelized, modular, and manufactured.First Katrina Cottage Manufactured  Until recently, Katrina Cottages have been built by homebuilders, using panelized methods, and as kit houses, but none had been manufactured. The problem with manufacturing is that an entire American industry needs to be re-tooled in order for Katrina Cottages to be manufactured. The re-tooling is necessary for two reasons. First, the public perception of manufactured housing is rooted in the products it produced years ago, and that looked something like this:  It is clearly necessary to do something strikingly different; Katrina Cottages aren't just decorated trailers. The second reason is because Katrina Cottages are made out of different stuff from what you currently find in a housing factory: different windows, different siding, different porch trim, different eave trim, etc. Re-tooling a factory isn't nearly as simple as picking up a tool belt and starting to build conventionally. But it will be worth the effort, because once the factories have been set up to manufacture Katrina Cottages, they can do them perfectly every time. It has long been considered the hardest dam to break of all the delivery systems we set out to provide for Katrina Cottages, but we knew that once it happened, it could well have the largest impact. That dam was broken September 11, 2006, when Housing International, a California company that recently opened a factory near New Orleans, completed construction of Katrina Cottage VII. This design by Steve Mouzon had originally been published in Gulf Coast Emergency House Plans as Katrina Tiny Cottage III, but for the first dozen Katrina Cottages completed, their names are changed to reflect the sequence in which they were constructed.  Housing International received the New Urban Guild Seal of Approval for this cottage by completing several steps designed to insure that the manufacturer fully carries out the original designer's intent. The first step is to use a design selected by the New Urban Guild that complies with the original goals of the Katrina Cottages: excellent design of cottages that can be manufactured and shipped to regions appropriate to the character of the design. Katrina Cottages are typically designed by prominent architects or designers, often from the core group of Guild members who worked on Katrina Cottages from the beginning of the Katrina recovery process. The manufacturer then takes the design drawings and does their normal shop drawings. But instead of going directly into production process, they instead send the shop drawings to the designer for approval. When all corrections are made, they begin work on a prototype unit. They consult with the designer as necessary during the construction of the prototype, then bring them to the factory when it is complete for a final inspection. Final corrections are made on the spot. Once the unit is complete, the designer photographs the unit in all its detail, and sends the photos, the original design drawings, and the corrected shop drawings to the Guild along with a letter certifying that the prototype matches the original design. The Guild then gives the unit the New Urban Guild Seal of Approval.  The intent of the Seal of Approval is to incentivize the manufacturers to achieve a level of design excellence never previously approached by the manufactured housing industry. Because design is the only remaining reason why people don't want trailers and other manufactured homes in their towns. But the fact is, many manufacturers have been manufacturing houses stronger than site-built for 5 to 10 years. And the assembly line is not the problem... we're able to manufacture rockets, computers, and airplanes to microscopic degrees of precision on the assembly line. Design is the only remaining problem. By assembling plans from some of the best designers out there, we believe that we are creating a phenomenon that will be known as Designer Houses. 70 years ago, almost all clothes were "site-built," or homemade. Today, very few people have homemade clothes; almost everyone wears designer clothes. If the Katrina Cottage movement succeeds, the same thing will happen with houses. Stay tuned... The New Urban Guild In The News
Numerous Guild Architects On Gentilly Charrette Much of the architecture team and significant parts of the planning team at the recently-completed Gentilly charrette in New Orleans was made up of New Urban Guild members. Guild participants included (in alphabetical order) Michael Barranco, Marianne Cusato, Bill Dennis, Susan Henderson, Gary Justiss, Kevin Klinkenberg, Alex Latham, Andrew Martschenko, Steve Mouzon, Robert Orr, Bruce Tolar, & Mike Watkins. Several employees of these Guild participants also participated, including Susan Bridgewater, James Dougherty, and Mike Sherrod. Apologies to anyone not noted. The Gentilly charrette is widely anticipated to set the standard for New Orleans planning districts. Completed several months ahead of other district plans, it follows the eminently rational New Urbanist objectives of compactness, diversity, and walkability. Shadow Places: Guru, South Beach Shadow Places are somewhere on a side street, just half a block off Main. They're back in the shadows somewhere within earshot of the rumble of the Boulevard, but you'll never see them unless you search them out. The storefront window is just a bit dingy, and it's probably next to the laundromat or the honkey-tonk... or maybe it is the honky-tonk. But while there may be about eight coats of paint too many on the dinged-up door casings, the place just may sell the best in town of whatever it is that they sell. Click here for article. Hot Spots: Antigua Guatemala These Hot Spots aren't wireless at all. Quite the contrary, they often seem to be hard-wired right into our human psyche in some timeless sort of way. These Hot Spots, you see, are the Most-Loved Places... places that define the character of entire regions, or occasionally, the character of entire nations. On the one hand, they're far from perfect, bearing the scars of a hundred great storms and ten thousand carriage-wheels scraping the corners of their street walls as they lumber along. But in reality, they're entirely perfect because of how well they serve as nesting-places for the memories of countless generations of humanity down through time. Memories, it seems, have a hard time alighting on some Cartesian grid of a building where one window is just like the next, or one hallway is identical to the one below. They need some place memorable that isn't quite like anything else on earth, and that's what the Most-Loved Places do so well: they let our memories rest in precisely one unique place on the face of the earth. So when time slips by and we're left with little more than the memories, may most of them be memories at rest in the Most-Loved Places rather than those left flittering over the gray wasteland of the sameness that now seems to sprawl on almost forever. Click here for article. |