This past weekend I went to Biloxi to finish my documentary
on disaster relief shelters, which I've been working on
since the tsunami last December. After seeing what happened
to the downtown area my view of architecture might have
changed completely, or at least matured a great bit. Just
know this, I'm sure you have seen the same things on CNN
that I have and the images don't even come close to what
happened. I was at least a hundred feet away from every
building I saw on CNN and the atomic bomb analogies are not
an exaggeration. I'm not sure if you've ever been to the
Grand Canyon but I felt like the film footage we shot this
weekend was like looking at my photos of the Grand Canyon;
they don't even capture a small sense of what I saw.

The worst part of it all was driving through the
neighborhoods that are completely empty except for a few
people that are sifting through the rubble (and when I say
rubble I mean blocks of flattened homes covering a desolate
cityscape). It was very easy to see that the poorest people
were the hardest hit, and that is no media hype or political
bias.

Outside most of the houses were roughly cut sheets of
plywood with an address spray painted on them and some even
had a message like, "We're all o.k." or "State Farm Call
Me." One of the most dramatic images was set in the middle
of street after street of collapsed houses. A single stone
house sat on a corner and appeared completely untouched,
even the yard looked fine. Their piece of plywood
said, "Surviving Katrina . . . Priceless." For what it's
worth, I'll never see those trite MasterCard commercials the
same way again.

The impact of what I saw didn't quite set in until I drove
back into Atlanta and was surrounded by familiar buildings
and homes (all of which were standing). As for my view of
architecture, I'm not sure how to put it just yet. What was
going through my mind while driving through those
neighborhoods was, "it doesn't matter what color the house
was painted or the style of the columns on the front porch."
No house was saved because of style or floor plan, color or
material, height or width. The houses failed in one of their
functions, to provide shelter from the environment, and that
led to the destruction of another function, emotional
attachment to a space. I suppose that is why I am
questioning architecture after seeing this; in the same
manner, we question life after we witness death. Granted, no
amount of engineering could have protected from the
magnitude of this storm, but when something we truly believe
in is challenged (and I truly believe in architecture) we
always expect for it to transcend those challenges. When I
saw hundreds of destroyed homes, one after the other, what I
saw was the failure of dreams and memories not just
structures.

I am not in any position to speculate which direction the
rebuilding effort should go or if/how money should be
appropriated. The only thing I know is what I saw and how it
made me feel. I am going to do my part to make sure that my
discipline of design does not fail again. And if it does,
then I’ll make sure that my discipline is there to fill the
hole of its own failings. I would encourage everyone to
respond to disaster in the same way no matter what your
discipline, even if you haven’t seen the former downtown of
Biloxi in person.

Kit Hughes