Moss Point

December 11, 2007

Moss Point, Mississippi is a smallish city just north of Pascagoula. Unlike most of the coastal cities, it is oriented not towards a beach and casinos but towards its riverfront, which is quite picturesque. They are rebuilding from flood damage sustained during Katrina, and the city government has decided to use this opportunity to revamp its vision for the city, focusing on becoming a progressive city with a first-class downtown, scenic riverfront, opportunities for eco-tourism and recreation, and revitalized neighborhoods. For anyone interested in community-based design and hurricane recovery, Moss Point’s past two years have been very interesting. It turns …

A House for Danny

December 5, 2007

This is Danny: Danny’s house was flooded by several feet of water during Hurricane Katrina, and needed to be gutted. He then hired a company to raise his house onto a new foundation to bring the floor up to around 4 feet above the ground. However, during this process they found the rear 2/3 of the house to be structurally unsuitable for raising. The result is a house in which the front is still standing and simply needs refurbishing, while the rear is essentially being rebuilt from the ground up: I worked with Danny to come up with a new …

Treehouse Update!

November 29, 2007

We’ve made a lot of progress on Patty’s house. Thanks to the efforts of a number of volunteer groups, particularly First Presbyterian, the exterior of the house is more or less finished. It finally looks like a real house, it’s great! A couple more pictures below…

Cookies and Turkeys

November 21, 2007

Getting into the culinary swing of the holidays by making gingersnaps for a Thanksgiving potluck lunch at work today (which I see as a training session for dinner) and planning my first attempt at making orange rolls, an excellent family recipe, for dinner with studio friends tomorrow. Aside from all of that, there will be Guitar Hero. Oh yes. Let there be Guitar Hero, and there shall be much rejoicing. Happy Thanksgiving!

Rehab

November 21, 2007

No, not that kind. Unless these houses are going into rehab for their terrible, terrible addiction to being in disrepair. This is a house in East Biloxi for which we’ll be drawing up rehab plans, and it’s one of the many that have sat mostly untouched for the past two years. Sorry for the crappy quality, they’re cell-phone pictures. They show it well enough though to see the ugly stucco job (why you would take a beautiful wood siding and put this over it, I do not know) and the state of the interior. The second picture shows the view …

New Orleans, and Things

November 14, 2007

The weekend before last I took my second trip to New Orleans and my first since moving to Biloxi (the other time was with Peter Waldman and other architecture students in early 2006). Not so much a high-minded humanitarian trip, as I didn’t make it out of the French Quarter, stayed in the fancy Holiday Inn Du Moyne, went to lots of restaurants and bars, and generally spent a pleasant weekend, way outside my budget, hanging out with Price and his friends from up north. Trips aside, life’s begun to settle into some routines. Lunch at the fantastic Le Bakery …