New city designs possible

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation along the Gulf Coast may become a boon to traditionalist architects. Advocates of “new urbanism,” a national movement to stop sprawl with pedestrian-friendly, compact communities, have hatched plans for 11 cities along the wrecked Mississippi coast.

Should their visions be realized, Mississippi’s shoreline might change from redneck to Ralph Lauren, following such tony new urbanist models as Florida’s Seaside and Montgomery County’s Kentlands.

Among the scores of traditionalists involved in the planning is a trio of architects from the Silver Spring firm Torti Gallas and Partners. In mid-October, Neal Payton, Murphy Antoine and Greg Moore flew to Biloxi to participate in an ambitious six-day workshop convened by Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Haley Barbour as part of the post-Katrina rebuilding effort.

“The governor’s charge to us was not just to think about repairing the damage,” Mr. Payton said via a video hookup from the firm’s newly opened Los Angeles office. “He wanted a vision of how to go forward for the next 20 years.”

This week, the Torti Gallas team’s long-range plans for Gautier, Miss., were presented for the first time to city officials, developers and property owners in that sprawling bedroom community of 19,500 people. Designs for a riverfront fish camp, village greens and mixed-use town centers were sketched at last month’s workshop and later assembled into a detailed master plan for the city.

“I was skeptical at first,” said Jeff Wilkinson, Gautier’s Republican mayor pro tem and council member at large, of the planning process. “We thought about recovery [after the hurricane] as just a Target and a new grocery store.”

At Mr. Barbour’s planning workshop in Biloxi, called the Mississippi Renewal Forum, Torti Gallas followed the charge of new urbanist gurus Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The Miami-based husband-and-wife planners, who masterminded Seaside and Kentlands, were originally invited by the governor to submit their own blueprint for renewal.

Realizing that the job was too big to do alone, the duo called upon members of the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism, a group of like-minded traditionalists, to brainstorm ideas for repairing hard-hit cities and towns in three coastal counties.

Such intensive, collaborative workshops, called charrettes, are routine for Torti Gallas. In the past year alone, the architects have sketched proposals for reshaping downtown Gaithersburg and the troubled Sursum Corda housing complex on North Capitol Street.

In developing plans for Gautier, a suburban area west of industrial Pascagoula and east of Biloxi, they joined forces with Mississippi architects Bruce Tolar and Jeff Elder, New Orleans landscape architect Frank Burandt and Chapel Hill, N.C., engineer Tony Sease. The team spent a day touring the 32-square-mile city with local officials.

“There were houses that were wiped out by the hurricane,” Mr. Payton recalled, “but in comparison to other cities, the devastation was not that severe because Gautier is built on higher ground.”

While other architects at the Biloxi workshop tackled the rebuilding of gambling casinos and historic main streets, the Torti Gallas team confronted a problem national in scope — characterless sprawl. The group suggested a typical new urbanist remedy of centering the city on a traditional downtown surrounded by walkable neighborhoods.

The concepts initially weren’t met with enthusiasm.

“I didn’t think they would work here,” said Mr. Wilkinson. “Our town is only 20 years old. It has a highway, a junior college and a mall. A series of developers built a lot of dead-end subdivisions here. As I told the architects, ‘Don’t be surprised, y’all, but we don’t have city blocks.’ Thank goodness, they ignored me.”

What Mr. Payton and his team did next was to do what new urbanists do best — they based their plans on the distinctive features of the place. In most areas, that means recalling regional architectural traditions, such as porches or hipped roofs, in new buildings.

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