Brad Pitt launches new book on New Orleans rebuilding effort

Pitt's efforts to help rebuild New Orlean's Lower Ninth Ward are featured in a new book.

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This column reported on Brad Pitt’s involvement in New Orleans’s ‘Make It Right’ Foundation in an effort to help rebuild the city’s Lower Ninth Ward with sustainably-built homes some time ago.  Now a new book, Architecture In Times of Need, chronicles this ongoing program.

Architecture in Times of Need: Make It Right Rebuilding New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward,  documents the progress of rebuilding in this area after Hurricane Katrina.  The book includes contributions by founder Brad Pitt and architectural renderings of the green, affordable cutting-edge Make It Right homes. 

Make It Right was launched by actor Brad Pitt, architecture firms Graft and McDonough + Partners and Cherokee Gives Back in 2007, two years after the storm, when the neighborhood was still in ruins and devastated. The founders invited a group of high-profile and influential New Orleans, national and international architects to participate in the project and presented them with a daunting set of challenges: They were asked to base their designs of single and multi-family homes upon traditional New Orleans typologies, such as the “shotgun” and the duplex. The homes were to be green, affordable, and durable enough to weather the storms to come. And the architects were expected to design smart, healthy, sustainable homes that would be built using materials inspired by Cradle to Cradle^TM thinking and verified to be non-toxic and reusable.

 “We knew it would be no easy task, but it presented a great opportunity to help families in need who had been ignored, rebuild a neighborhood that had been forgotten in the New Orleans recovery effort and rethink how to build homes better, smarter and with the future in mind,” explained Alejandra Lillo, a partner in the Graft architecture firm. 

Graft developed and assembled the book, which focuses on the design process and the designs, and also features essays on the history and people of the Lower 9th Ward, the hurricane and its impact, and tracks the development and progress of the Make It Right project.  Lillo also noted, “The Make It Right designs for green affordable homes were created for New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, but this approach to building homes could - and should - be replicated around the world.   We want to share what we have learned from this project and this book will help us reach other people who believe we need to change the way buildings are built and that we have a responsibility to make sustainable homes and green technology available to everyone.” 

The contributions to the project from Adjaye Associates, GRAFT, Concordia, Gehry Partners and Shigeru Ban, among others, are shown in numerous photographs and renderings with sketches, floor plans, and informative commentary. The book includes contributions by founder Brad Pitt and architectural renderings of the green, safe, affordable cutting-edge Make It Right homes.