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Brad Pitt built homes in New Orleans after Katrina. Now they're falling apart
- wahern 8y agoThere's the problem: Big-name architects including Frank Gehry and Shigeru Ban donated original designs for modern, innovative homes and “Well, Brad Pitt is a tough boss,” Darden said in the 2010 speech at the PopTech conference, posted on YouTube in 2011. “He said that we had to build houses that were safe, affordable, green, adaptive, durable, designed by award winning architects, designed around residents’ needs.” They went off the rails when they shifted focus away from safe, affordable, and durable. Those are really difficult to do well. They should've taken a hint from the local history and stuck to the tried and true shot-gun style house so that it would be impossible to get the fundamentals (i.e. shedding rain) wrong or for costs to run out control. It then would have been easier to manage quality control on things like dry wall and paint (or lack thereof). Overly ambitious design[1] and cheap finishing is the source of the water and mold damage. [1] Overly ambitious in context. I'm sure the architects tried to keep things simple, but simple is relative. Simple to Frank Gehry or a freshly graduated architect is not the same kind of simple to a seasoned local homebuilder.