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New Orleans, Louisiana
No one lives forever love, no one's wise to try
One of the Educational Tours (and arguably one of the better ones) was ET114 Swamp Eco, which was basically a two hour boat ride around a swamp where we passed around a baby alligator, got our pictures taken with it and emerged unscathed with 2.5 HSW credits. HSW stand for health. safety and welfare, important subjects for architects who all have a charge to protect the community. Whether or not a two hour boat ride around a swamp where we passed around a baby alligator qualifies as health, safety or welfare is an open question (it clearly does not),
As for the two pictures, the first one looks a little like a bad, discarded vignette for Monet’s Water Lilies, except with a bad color palette and a gator in the middle, while the second picture looks like the home of either Bobby Boucher, Vicki Vallencourt or possibly even Captain Insano himself.
I did not have all that extra time after the AIA Convention, but I was still able to add in an extra day and see a few things including this, the Chauvin Sculpture Garden in Terrebonne Parish. Originally created by Kenny Hill, who the abandoned it for reasons that only he knows, it has a weird folk art/roadside attraction vibe that pays off, at times.
The other site that I was able to get to was in Vacherie, on the Mississippi River west of New Orleans. Oak Alley Plantation is well named since the best thing about it isn’t the house or gardens (although they’re certainly impressive) but that dramatic and nearly perfect allee of live oak trees framing the way in from the river. An antebellum snapshot from a time when the government said it was ok for rich people to own other people.
We’re going to finish up the New Orleans pictures with one last tour. ET136 was a two and a half hour tour of three New Orleans cemeteries: two St Louis Cemeteries and Metairie. Due to water table issues (and reports of that causing buried coffins occasionally unburying themselves), cemeteries in New Orleans are above ground family crypts, where bodies are stored to decompose and then the surviving bones all mingle together in the end. The above ground crypts have some individual character, and some families put more effort into their crypts than others. So whether you’re famed voodoo woman Marie Laveau (hers is the crypt with all of the X’s on it) or Academy Award winner and future dead guy Nicholas Cage, somewhere there’s a crypt just for you.
Wait- Academy Award winner and future dead guy Nicholas Cage?
There is one tomb that doesn’t quite look like the others, and that’s the pyramid and future eternal resting place for beloved actor Nicholas Cage. In 2009 he spent $40,000 to buy the crypt so that one day, generations and generations and generations from now, school kids wearing jet packs on a class trip to the cemetery can ask: who exactly was Nicholas Cage and why is he buried in a $40,000 pyramid?
Normally when we come to the end of a slideshow, I don’t normally mean this kind of end.
On the tour at Metairie Cemetery, I was somewhat surprised to see this crypt with my name on it. There are really only two explanations for this, an easy to believe one and a hard to believe one. We’ll go today with the easy to believe one: This is incontrovertible proof that one day in the future I will find myself thrust back in time to 19th Century New Orleans, where I will live out the rest of my life (fairly successfully based on the crypt) and be interred at Metairie. Maybe I’ll live a quiet life as a successful local architect (might be fun to design before building codes) or maybe I’ll wager heavily on the outcomes of the War of 1812, presidential elections or the Civil War, although I think anyone with any sense or morals would have known at the time what was going to eventually happen with that last one. And I guess after some time I even got used to the non stop humidity, unless of course that’s what finally killed me in the end. Either way, there’s some comfort in finally knowing your future, even if it involves time travel, non stop humidity and an unending rest at Metairie.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
