Over the past few weeks three new Annunciation Interactive projects have gone live. We're really proud of them all.
I designed and built the templates for the new Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra website, www.lpomusic.org, which just launched today. The site is built on a drupal customization by Tim Soslow. We designed and developed it together as a pro-bono service to the Orchestra and the citizens of our fair city.
www.ideavillage.org is a site that we built with Trumpet. It's built on a bespoke CMS that was built from scratch with lead developer Willcore Trufant, the crispist PHP guru in the land.
education.tulane.edu is the website of the Tulane University Cowen Institute of Public Education. Peter Rigney handled design, templates and built it into a Dreamweaver / Contribute framework, which perfectly suits their needs.
Faub.org is a neighborhood for creative New Orleanians. I've been involved with the group since it's inception in February 2007. Faub.org recently launched a temporary site, while the full site, that seemslikeitstakingforever, gets finished. Check out some of the work on there, pretty amazing stuff. The temporary site was designed by Erik Kiesewetter and Ness Higson.
We're throwing a launch party sometime next month. Details TBD.
dwell.com has been lovingly redesigned. It's a beautiful and subtle site, full of great design resources and interesting content.
Yesterday Mayor Nagin and Strategic Hotels, the corporation that owns the Hyatt, announced plans for a major overhaul of a large chunk of Downtown. Many old and/or damaged buildings will be demolished including City Hall and the New Orleans Centre to make way for a new Jazz Park/Center, a new civic courthouse and new municipal buildings among other structures. City Hall will be relocated to the renovated Dominion Towers.
I applaud Strategic Hotels for their initiative here. I think that partnerships like this one, between government and private corporations, neighborhoods or non-profits are the only way anything will actually get accomplished down here.
The result will be a swath of green space leading from Tulane Avenue to the sports complexes of the Superdome and New Orleans Arena surrounded by modern buildings designed by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thom Mayne in association with local architect Ray Manning. Developers on a panel convened by Hyatt and working with other stakeholders from New Orleans envision an internationally known destination for the arts and tourism that will be used day and night.
The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra would be based there, which would also be a destination for national touring jazz acts. Ron Markham, president of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, said the site, near the birthplace of Louis Armstrong, would be branded as the international home for jazz. Wynton Marsalis led the design of the $120 million National Jazz Center.
I'm really interested to see the Thom Mayne building(s) in detail. Here's a sample of his work from the NYT after he won the Pritzker.
Here's the proposed map:
Finally something to be excited about!
The Times-Picayune ran a great profile of Jazzfest signmaker and guerilla graphics extraordinaire Nan Parati today. I love her handmade marker signage that fills the fairgrounds during Jazzfest. She lived on our street pre-K and every morning during the fest you could see her packing all of the days signs into the back of her pickup truck.
Makes me miss Solomon Street.
Jane Jacobs, the great urban thinker and activist, has died. She was 89 years old.
She was a true champion of the people, always fighting for the survival of neighborhoods over the mass-development and sprawl that dominated most of the 20th century. We need her ideas and words now more than ever with what is happening in New Orleans and in other places.
I urge anyone who isn't familiar with her work to immediately go out and purchase The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It will completely change the way you think about cities and communities.
Here's the very informative Wikipedia entry on Jane Jacobs.
Architect Witold Rybczynski's memorialization.
From her NYT Obituary:
In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.
Ms. Jacobs's thesis was supported and enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street.
She puts out her garbage, children go to school, the drycleaner and barber open their shops, housewives come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.
My friends at Dirty Coast, makers of fine NOLA-riffic t-shirts and stickers, have just launched their full website. I love the layout and all of the functionality. It's a great example of a well balanced CSS/Flash/XHTML site. They gave me a nice shout out on their Friends and Neighbors page, too!
Go ahead and order a few t-shirts today. The first 200 customers get 20% off and if you order 3 shirts you get a stack of "Be a New Orleanian Wherever You Are" stickers.