The implosion of Make It Right (MIR)—Brad Pitt’s post-Katrina housing experiment in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans—is surely one of the most depressing architecture stories of the past decade. Launched, seemingly, with the best of intentions, in a largely African American neighborhood utterly left behind in the post-hurricane reconstruction, the actor famously recruited a roster of high-profile architects, including William McDonogh, David Adjaye, and Pritzker Prize-winners Thom Mayne and Shigeru Ban, along with other prominent national and local firms, to design 150 LEED Platinum homes in the devastated neighborhood.
It began with great fanfare, loads of good press, and a lot of building, but the project began to publicly unravel in 2018 with the demolition of a MIR house and a series of subsequent lawsuits. First, 30 families filed a class action suit against the organizational carcass that is now MIR, demanding repairs to their deteriorating houses. Eleven days later, the organization (a.k.a., Pitt’s lawyers) countersued its longtime executive architect, John C. Williams. Then three years later, in what appears to be some sort of scorched earth strategy, MIR sued its former executive director, Tom Darden, accusing him of “mismanagement.” It was an embarrassing set of finger-pointing that seemed implicitly to concede that something had indeed gone profoundly wrong.
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