This is not a story about architecture, rather it is one about walls and the spaces between them.
Toward the edge of Bywater at the coffee plant on Chartres there are two houses, each a little older than the other, pitched at angles so that one supports the other like two old ladies on Bourbon Street. One gray and the other a browner shade of white they stand in silence, for some reason frozen. Their details are still immaculate under thick layers of peeling paint, but beyond paint each is in a state of decay that has offered me something more. Boards of siding have fallen off revealing a deeper history within the body of the walls. The bones of the house are exposed to the point that I am able to imagine the building of this place because I see the nails, dents, and bruises that the wood obtained in the making, and through a sectional peek the thinness of a wall tells me a much deeper story.
I began looking at revealed wall sections of vernacular house types throughout the city in an attempt to begin an analysis of this culturally rich phenomenon through an understanding of their construction. Through deconstruction so much could be revealed about a people by looking at a micro scale, by looking at how the act of building has influenced a housing type and more importantly how the act of building was influenced by the people for whom houses were built. Who built New Orleans? Or rather, who built my neighborhood? As an architecture student whose academic world has revolved thus far around speculation, it feels necessary for me at this time to look at how making has influenced everyday experiences.
Naturally exposed wall sections are often so subtle I have found that they only show enough skin to keep me intrigued, but not enough for a commitment to them in study. However sections through devastation are everywhere, whether natural or man-made forces caused their rapid or prolonged decay through neglect. Crossing over the bridge at St. Claude and Poland I drove into the lower Ninth to look for exposed vernacular construction and it was everywhere, scattered, piled, and standing slanted. I’ll admit that I felt opportunistic snapping photographs of tattered remains of Shotgun houses, as if it were some voyeuristic act, as if I were in one of the white tourist vans driving by doing the same thing. But these sources are invaluable when trying to understanding the building of a vernacular structure. Connection details are revealed that would otherwise be hidden, foundation work can be seen through missing floorboards, and so the house becomes more transparent though it grows more dense in its experiential quality. I have begun to see the simultaneous fragility and strength in this construction, but more importantly in the broader picture of New Orleans. How can the comparison of wall sections of different vernacular house types (Shotgun, Creole Cottage, Bungalow, etc.) reveal not only a history about a single instance but also be compared across different regions of the city? Will different details be revealed across a geographic region? How local is vernacular architecture?
