On Wednesday afternoon, the Louisiana Recovery Authority and New Urbanist architect Andres Duany unveiled the Creole-style Katrina Cottage II in Chalmette, the seat of St. Bernard Parish, a low-income community east of New Orleans. While FEMA spends roughly $75,000 to deliver and install a 23- to 28-foot temporary travel trailer for Katrina victims, one of these prefabricated cottages can be set up in days for less than $60,000.
With a floor area of 448 square feet (14′ x 32′), plus a loft over the two bedrooms, kitchen and bath, this cottage is considerably larger than Katrina Cottage I. And it has been designed to grow; the two 280-square-foot additions would create a larger kitchen and dining area (the original kitchen is shown as a study area), and a master bedroom and bath. The resulting three-bedroom, two-bath house would be 1048 square feet — about the same size as the three-bedroom apartments in the affordable housing projects that I design.
This new cottage is designed to withstand both hurricane-force winds and flooding. Its panelized walls are constructed of six inches of hard foam insulation sandwiched between sheets of concrete-fiber siding (the same siding used on the exterior of Katrina Cottage I). The roof is also panelized, with steel roofing over 6-inch solid-foam insulation, and a steel finish on the ceiling as well. Because the house has no sheetrock, the structure could be dried out, rather than gutted, after flooding. And Home Front Inc., which built the Chalmette model, says that its company’s homes are lab-tested to withstand 200-mph winds.
Katrina Cottage II is based on New York architect Marianne Cusato’s design for Katrina Cottage I. Steve Oubre, Lafayette architect and president of the Louisiana chapter of the American Institute of Architects, added the second-story loft and increased the square footage.
Did you notice the guy in the FEMA jacket photographed at the press conference for this cottage? I wonder what was going through his head.
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I’ve learned of these homes a little while ago and loved the idea. Steve Oubre lives in our old hometown of Lafayette and is a sharp, creative guy. I wish the project well. With all the corruption and authoritarian incompetence there, though, it is hard to be too optimistic!
I wonder if there is anyway to get the governments money back on those trailers. Perhaps they could sell the thousands of toilet seats that have been stacking up for years, through democratic and republican presidencies. Private enterprise builds better mousetraps than government ones do. This is a cute cottage.. and they can add on to it in stages. When do they start going up?
Tiny Houses and Disaster Relief Architecture are two things I love to talk about. Thank you for the info
Did you hear the spot on NPR this afternoon about the Katrina Cottages? They made the same comparison you have to the crappy alternative, all those mobile homes now mothballed in Arkansas. Also, do you know about the annual TED Conference in Monterrey? I was browsing through their site and came across this guy, winner of one of 3 TEDPrizes this year. http://www.ted.com/tedprize/2006/cameron.cfm. I thought his dream might appeal to you.
FEMA’s hands are tied because they can only fund temporary housing!!
Just call the katrina cottages temporary and they can be funded. Duh!
Little Tiny Houses
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