 PINK PROJECT |
Triggered by an idea that struck actor Brad Pitt on a film-shoot in New Orleans, the Pink Project inaugurated an ambitious rebuilding program, designed as puzzle-piece house parts flung across the city's Hurricane-Katrina-wrecked Lower Ninth Ward.NOURISHING NEW ORLEANSFrom a distance in the daytime, they might almost look like bright flowers in a field. At night, these odd, pink structural units glow like fantastic embers, strewn across tracts of land once crowded with the homes of New Orleans' proud Lower Ninth Ward. The story of New Orleans since 29 August 2005 is one of tragedy in a great center of the developed world. Louisiana's famous hub of music, food, literature, trade and commerce was easily one of the best-known and most colorful of the "regional hubs" in the United States. And, as often happens in these situations, some of the main numbers are the ones forgotten the fastest.
Despite persistent chamber-of-commerce efforts to insist the city is rebounding, no politician today can deny that major parts of New Orleans simply have never come back. Acres of wasteland can't be hidden. In 2007, actor Brad Pitt, while filming in New Orleans and seeing what some describe as a "lunar landscape" of devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, noticed a bright pink fabric "house" on the film set. He talked with the Los Angeles offices of the GRAFT architectural firm and the resulting concept was the Pink Project. The project was the kick-off event of a still-ongoing effort at rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward. It featured large sections of pink-clad structures, easily visualized as parts of houses like the toy homes of a Monopoly game, lying spread in a seemingly haphazard way over 14 blocks of the razed Lower Ninth Ward. As seen from various viewing platforms, the project caused these "house parts" to come together into gradually rebuilt homes, symbolizing the rejuvenation needed by the area. As donations were made to pull the pink units together, actual houses were being sponsored. Pitt seeded the Make It Right effort with a pledge of $5 million as it was kicked off in December 2007. "You know, I'm hoping we can expand over the rest of New Orleans," beyond the Lower Ninth Ward, Pitt told NBC News at that point, standing amid the pink structures of his project. The Make It Right site, founded by Pitt, tracks how many of a targeted 150 homes have being sponsored. The city's newspaper of record, the Times-Picayune, reported on 29 April 2009 that New Orleans civic activists and leaders were presenting Pitt with $150,000 to underwrite the construction of another new home under his Make It Right plan. As of that date, the Times-Picayune reported, 25 families were either living in homes built by the program or were scheduled to move into one being built.
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