We go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision forward for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed to educate, inspire and to save its neighborhood from flooding.
New Orleans. Surrounded by The Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, besieged by hurricanes and Tropical Storms, permeated with man made canals, levees, pumping stations …. Water is a deep and controversial issue in New Orleans. What to do with it. Where to put it. How to get rid of it? How to live with it?
David Wagonner, of Waggonner and Ball Architects and Environment has been thinking and dreaming about these questions for years. One of the primary architects behind the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, David envisions floating streets, pervious pavement, planting bioswales—“living with water” rather than pushing it down and pumping it out.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the Sisters of St. Joseph’ convent in New Orleans was under 8 feet of water. A year later, on a clear blue day, the building was struck by lightening. The Sisters prayed for a sign. And in walked David Waggonner with a vision.
The Mirabeau Water Garden will become one of the largest urban wetlands in the country and a campus for water research and environmental education, demonstrating best practices for construction and urban water management in the city's lowest-lying and most vulnerable neighborhoods.
The 25-acre parcel was donated to the City of New Orleans by the Sisters of Saint Joseph on condition that it be used to enhance and protect the neighborhood to “evoke a huge systemic shift in the way humans relate with water and land.”
Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977
A Floating City Vision - Mirabeau Water Garden, New Orleans
Dissident Kitchens
Eleanor Coppola: Notes on a Life
Cool Hair, Great Smile: Remembering Knox Phillips
The Romance and Sex Life of the Date
Parsi New Year—First Day of Spring
Buildings Speak: Stories of Pioneering Women Architects hosted by Frances McDormand
Black Chef, White House—African American Chefs in the President's Kitchen
The Mardi Gras Indians—Stories from New Orleans
230 - Architecture, Family Style – Sarah Harkness & Jean Fletcher
229 - The Pancake Years - For Lenny on Christmas Eve
Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen—Black Cake
227 - Lou Reed's Tai Chi
226 - Kimchi Diplomacy—Hidden Kitchens: War & Peace and Food
Architect Anna Wagner Keichline: The Legacy of Invention
224 - Make Coffee Black Again
223 - Losing Lincoln
222 - Filmmaker Wim Wenders—The Entire Caboddle
221 - Lena Richard - America's Unknown Celebrity Chef
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Criminal
Ear Hustle
Song Exploder
The Truth
the memory palace