The September 24, 2010 issue of the Yale Herald reflects on the history of Morse College, designed by Eero Saarinen, and what it means to bring the buildings into the present day.

Our plan for the Delaware River waterfront is moving toward the final stages. Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer comments on the recommendations, including the proposal to fill Penn's Landing with a mix of housing, cultural uses, and shops.

O, the Oprah Magazine, this month featured Melba Leggett-Barnes, the owner of our Special NO 9 House in New Orleans—part of an effort by Make It Right foundation to rebuild the city sustainably following Hurricane Katrina. Leggett-Barnes says her sustainable home has saved her money due to energy-efficiency features, and she credits the ventilation system with improving her asthma symptoms.

Rebuilding New Orleans—The Green Way 
By Amanda Little 
 
Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina wiped out the life she knew. Now Melba Leggett-Barnes has a place to call her own again—a home that's good for her and the planet. 
 
Melba Leggett-Barnes stands in slippers on the roof of her house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. It's a blazing August afternoon, yet this mother of five and grandmother of six is gripping an orange mop and wiping down 15 metallic solar panels, each about the size of a picnic table. "I like to make sure all the sun gets through," she says over the clamor of nearby construction work. "Every last drop is money in my pocket."  
 
From her roof, Leggett-Barnes can see dozens of other new homes like hers. With their sharp angles and tropical-fruit hues (mango orange, papaya pink, banana yellow), these houses suggest giant origami sculptures more than traditional New Orleans architecture, known for its deep front porches and curvaceous woodwork. In the blighted Lower Ninth, this vibrant micro-neighborhood seems surreal—an architectural mirage.  
 
On the western border of the two-square-mile area, the levees broke on August 29, 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The floodwaters left some 14,000 residents homeless, including Leggett-Barnes and her husband, Baxter. Yielding to the evacuation order, they had packed a few clothes and documents in their car and inched through traffic to her cousin's house in Baker, Louisiana, 100 miles north. They came home to an empty lot. "Scraps were the only thing left," she recalls. "Pieces of the fence, the porch my daddy built, the wheel of my granddaughter's bike."  
 
Today whole city blocks of the Lower Ninth still stand vacant. The hurricane destroyed more than 4,000 homes in the area; fewer than 200 have been rebuilt. Roughly 75 percent of local families are still displaced, staying in FEMA trailers or with relatives across the southeast and beyond.  
 
But Melba Leggett-Barnes is back. The 53-year-old school cafeteria worker, born and bred in New Orleans, is living on the same plot of land her family has owned for generations: one-tenth of an acre just two blocks east of the collapsed floodwall. And in returning to her neighborhood, Leggett-Barnes has also become part of a radical experiment to prove that a 21st-century house can be at once affordable and sustainable. 
 
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The Design for Reuse Primer, a free e-publication project by Public Architecture, was recently released. In this comprehensive guide to repurposing materials directly from the waste stream, read about the reclaimed lumber and stone used at our LEED Platinum-rated Stewart Middle School at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, including lessons learned and material sources.

The Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum announced the winners and finalists of the 2010 National Design Awards, which commend excellence across a variety of disciplines.  
 
The Architecture Design Award recognizes work in commercial, public, or residential architecture. The jury noted the firm's “integration of research with design, guided by a deep environmental ethic.” The award was presented at the White House on July 21, 2010.

The New London Embassy design competition exhibit officially opened today at the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit celebrates the completion of the design competition to select the architect for the New London Embassy for the United States of America. Models and information boards from the final four competing architectural firms—KieranTimberlake, Morphosis Architects, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Richard Meier & Partners—will be on display, along with the model of the current London Embassy designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen in the late 1950s.

Loblolly House was built in just six weeks in 2006, inaugurating a novel approach to building off site using integrated component assemblies that are factory-built and assembled together on site. We recently constructed a full-scale critical detail of Loblolly House in our Philadelphia shop, and it is currently on display at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's National Design Triennial, Why Design Now? exhibition, on view from May 14-January 9, 2011.

In this video, Partners Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, along with Project Architect Marilia Rodrigues, the Production Engineer, and others, discuss the ideas and methodologies behind Loblolly House, a sustainable residence fabricated off site yet fully integrated to its setting on the Chesapeake Bay.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have announced that the Special NO 9 House, designed with New Orleans firm John C. Williams Architects as executive architect, has been named a Top Ten Green Project for 2010. The house is one of thirteen single-family homes designed by prominent architectural firms for Make It Right, an organization founded by actor Brad Pitt to provide storm-resistant, affordable, and sustainable housing for the residents of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The COTE Top Ten Green Projects program, now in its fourteenth year, celebrates projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology.

On February 23, 2010, KieranTimberlake was selected from four finalists as the architecture firm to design the new U.S. embassy in London. In his remarks at the announcement, OBO Acting Director Adam Namm commented on the embassy's potential to be a “net exporter of energy” owing to the various processes in place to capture energy produced by building systems.

He also mentioned that the London competition was one of only four juried design competitions in history to build new U.S. embassies. More information can be found at the official embassy website.