Design Like You Give a Damn

The future of design is in all our hands

Suzanne Batchelor interviews Marlon Blackwell May 14th, 2007

Architecture for Humanity invited Blackwell and 14 other architects to submit designs to re-house Biloxi, Mississippi residents left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

Marlon Blackwell, architect and professor designed the Porchdog home for Hurricane Katrina survivors in Biloxi, Mississippi and posted the design on the Open Architecture Network. The award-winning designer and professor got his undergrad degree at Auburn University, where he met Samuel Mockbee (Rural Studio), who became, Blackwell says, a lifelong friend and "spiritual mentor."

To meet new FEMA guidelines for the site, Blackwell designed a home 12 feet off the ground that still offers a stoop and a porch. It's breezy, sustainable, low-cost and tough as steel.

Biloxi's Tyler family (a father and two sons) then chose the Porchdog design for their new home.

The Porchdog is posted at Open Architecture Network under a Creative Commons license here, available for building around the world in other challenging coastal areas.

Blackwell, working with his firm's three other architects, designed the Porchdog home to provide an affordable, hurricane and storm surge-resistant home that meets new FEMA regulations for housing in the Hurricane Katrina disaster area. Biloxi's Tyler family chose the Porchdog design for their family's new home, the first Porchdog to be built.

The Porchdog home is one of six designs selected by Architecture for Humanity for presentation to the those choosing to re-build in the aftermath of Katrina.

Suzanne Batchelor: Has the Porchdog been built yet?

Marlon Blackwell: It's not built yet, but it's starting construction in the next couple of weeks. We’re finishing up the working drawings.

Q. And funds for building the home have come from FEMA?

A: It was funded by the Angel Network.

Q: As part of Katrina relief?

A: Yes, Architecture for Humanity is the organization. They invited 15 architects to propose prototypes for Biloxi, the only Gulf Coast city that rejected the New Urbanist designs on their city--which I would applaud on a certain level. So, in lieu of that, how about some prototypes? And to solve problems of how to deal with the new FEMA regulations.

Q: Did FEMA regulations specify that you design the house 10 feet up?

A: Houses are having to be built as much as six, nine or ten feet off the ground, it varies through the city, by FEMA regulations. How do you maintain some sense of urban or street culture while sitting up in the air?

So, we stacked the house. It's three floors, really [ground level, elevated first floor and a loft area.]. And it keeps to a small footprint for small sites. There's a clearly defined porch where you can still have the social activity that is part of Gulf Coast and Southern culture. The large storage space is part of the structure; not everything needs to go upstairs. Bicycles, a small wood shop [for example], can be stored in [that area of the] carport. The design is very responsive to the environment.

We did the concept, elevations, all architectural working drawings, everything but the structural engineering.

It’s a true prototype, defined as a project in search of a site. It [Porchdog] is designed to accommodate a beach or urban site. It's done in white metal for the reflective [quality; desirable in a hot climate]. Sliding louvers and roll-down louvers are metal.

Q: Your design features an unusual east-west orientation. On the coast, it's typical to build to face the Gulf breeze, although that's not so good during a hurricane.

A: The east-west orientation allows you to control the amount of sun and still get breezes through the house; you open the louvers.

Q: When do you expect the Porchdog home will be completed?

A: Before Christmas [2007]. Richard Tyler is an African-American single father with two children living with him. Currently, they're living in a FEMA trailer next to the lot. Nice guy. House painter, I think.

Q: So what's the next step, if someone else wants to use your Porchdog design?

A: Contact us. [www.marlonblackwell.com]

Q: How will this work, the open architecture use of your Porchdog plan?

A: The people from Open Architecture Network put that up, and I don’t really understand it. This is new for me. OAN put it up as a way to showcase our design and designs of the other architects. I think five of the initial 15 architects were selected. The 15 architects were asked to do two proposals each, and we presented those to the public and to Architecture for Humanity.

Q: So the public had input on your design?

A: Yes. Tyler’s son really liked what we did, and he was very influential with his father to chose this one. It worked with their site. A lot of people had designed long, shotgun bungalows. We were only one that stacked it higher to accommodate the site and to use the space underneath.

Q: What do you see as the future of open-source architectural design? What are the possible benefits, and the dangers?

A: I think the idea of sharing ideas, sharing collective responses to the environmental tragedy, but also responses that transcend a disaster or even current issues, such as being green. We think we have a good design that can be deployed in a variety of different types of regions. It is adaptable enough to be adjusted to an area where there’s a volatile relationship between land and water. And it could very well be an urban construction.

Q: Is there money to be made with crowdsourcing? If so, why will some people work for free so that others can profit?

A: We were paid by being selected. Initially, every architect was paid a bit for some travel to present their designs. Then, we entered into a contract with the Architecture for Humanity, a modest fee for your work. [Moneywise,] We lost our shirts.

We never went into it to make money, but [to ask], how the [rebuilding] can be done otherwise? Ours was an alternate take on New Urbanist propositions. It’s a type of a modernization of a neighborhood or part of a city that attempts to root itself in the vernacular more stylistically.

We see the vernacular as more than style. The vernacular is what you do when you can’t afford to get it wrong. It’s work that is much more sensitive to the environment, to a particular place, to materials, and the way the building is put together, and it anticipates and welcomes the present.

Q: Sustainable, green aspects of the Porchdog design are also noted on OAN.

A: The orientation, the materials. It’s basically all steel and will weather quite well in the coastal environment. There’s certain limitations on doing waterless toilets because of cost.

Q: How close to the Gulf is the site?

A: The site is in the city, but Biloxi is surrounded by water on three sides. We also did prototypes for New Orleans, for the Ogden Museum there. Those designs were exhibited last August [by the Ogden].

Q: Potentially New Orleans could have sites for other Porchdog homes?

A: We also have one called the Slipshot and one the Shotback–-based on the 'shotgun' vernacular [narrow, long, rectangular houses; named from "if you fired a shotgun through the front door, it would exit the back door']. Illustrates how we take the vernacular and expand it-–[he quickly describes various design alterations they made to the basic 'shotgun house'], develop a series of inter-block spaces, a richer urban condition. Took it … and did a camelback, flip it upside down, for a house you can park underneath from an alleyway. Still connected to the street level (environment); and [answering], how do you make these houses for the handicapped.

Q: How many worked on the Porchdog design?

A: About four of us; it’s my firm.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to say about the work?

A: More than anything we feel fortunate to be asked. That somebody valued our ideas. And then doubly fortunate that in this case an about-13-year-old boy saw the potential in what we’re doing [the Tyler youngest son]. He got excited about it, got his father excited about it.

[The first meeting with Biloxi residents] It was like a flea market, we had to sit in a disaster tent [with the design], people came in and asked us about it. The pre-qualified families were embedded in that group [architects didn't know who was pre-qualified and who wasn't, of those viewing the designs]. The next day they [residents] had breakfast and voted; they also had contacts with Architecture for Humanity, which felt we’d be a good fit with the family.

Q: Do you remember what the Tyler son said about the design?

A: He just thought it was cool. We had the renderings. We were joking around with them, saying, "You know, with one of these, you get a porch dog with it." They laughed and said, 'no, thanks, we've got seven now already' because there are so many homeless dogs from the hurricane. Coincidentally, it fit their lives.

Q: What's really new about crowdsourcing architectural design, and where is it going next?

A: Where do I think it will go? Hopefully to those who want to build some houses! These are things I don’t think a whole lot about; maybe, it's kind of a generation thing. [Open-sourcing] It’s more information it's useless information unless you do something about it.

The question is, what do you do with it? If it’s one of those things that suggests, the question we all deal with, "How do I embrace the world without being consumed by it?" How do I enrich the experience in a dignified way of those who see the work? Who consider architecture for what it is-–a fulfillment of a desire for a way of living. All the better that people know more.

Q: Open architecture, donating designs, also helps the social service agencies who do disaster relief. When they get rebuilding funds, now they have designs to fund.

A: [Yes,] They’ve got some options now.

Q: Do you think there's wisdom in crowds? If so, what's the clearest example you know of?

A: It depends on the context. If you are looking at a design through a magazine, maybe thousands are looking at it, too, but does it register with all of them? The proof of that is, we’ve been published almost twenty years. [Blackwell's designs have been honored by the American Institute of Architects and been featured in magazines such as Architecture Today, and books including The New American Cottage.] I can count on one hand the amount of commissions I've gotten from that. I don’t know what makes the context of the Internet different from a magazine, other than more people can see it.

My belief is that architecture doesn’t happen very often. We live in a culture, our American culture, that isn't founded on beauty, that is more instrumental, utilitarian. There are aspects of beauty in design [in some places]. But, look around at the built environment, and tell me if it’s beautiful. Tell me if, as a culture, we don’t demand very much from our designers. I think we’re becoming more so, but mostly at the scale of the hand, as in computer design.

The availability of good design for everyone is severely limited. It’s also limited by what people can imagine. If you are surrounded by banal and impoverished conditions [you may not imagine experiencing something better]…

Through the pornography of photographs, we can make them [home designs] appear how we’d like them to appear, but not exactly how they are. To actually experience a building and find 'wow, that was better than the photos.'

Strive in your work to make work that is useable and has aspirations, that people can live in, experience and really be moved by. I question whether the lion's share of the profession even aspires to do that.

What you try to do in architecture is build and live by a set of principles. Then use tactics to realize the principles. In that way, perhaps there are those who see the work and may not need it, but maybe it meets another type of need. That there are principled ways of building and conceiving the world--that can have its own effect. The stone thrown into a pond, the ripple that emanates. Maybe that’s the value, at the scale of the Internet--that these are stones thrown into the pond, and have an effect on those who experience them.

The other thing, I would think that these responses to tragic situations that aren’t driven by how can I make a buck off this, but perhaps by higher aspirations, that they will help create an atmosphere of hope. That we can respond, and that response can be potentially more pragmatic, in the best sense of the word, and useful.

Q: Giving these designs (to Architecture for Humanity and OAN), it's -- generosity?

A: Architects have given gifts. They were paid practically nothing for their efforts, they were invited and knew going in that in the best case scenario, their design might get built and they could have a great affect on people’s lives.

Having visited with the families out there [Biloxi], listening to their testimonies when they were qualifying us and our designs, [I think] that the home represents the most stable thing in people’s families, and it has a stabilizing affect on the extended family.

Q: Were the people in Biloxi surprised that architects would come and donate their designs?

A: They were very realistic, they were hopeful. They have suffered a lot. They had decided not to leave [Biloxi]; they were hopeful and gracious. At the same time, they’ve heard it all before. Until they see the earth being broken [for the building], they remain reserved about it.

Even so, the client we have, we’d ask him, are there any changes you’d like us to make? Maybe a different way of laying out your bedroom, or any other change you'd like? He kept saying, everything is fine. Wow, that’s not what we’re used to! Finally, we got him out of the way [by himself]. He said to us, "Tell you the truth, man, it doesn’t matter. Y'all can do anything you want. I’m just grateful something’s being done. I'm going to have a new home for me and my family. Whatever you build will be better than what I’m in right now.”

For more information:

Marlon Blackwell architect:
http://www.marlonblackwell.com

Porchdog home design:
http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/node/359

Architecture for Humanity:
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org