Lexicon: Hi-Lo

In the late 1920s, New Orleans realtors began advertising “Hi-Lo”s to indicate a new type of raised basement bungalow that accommodated ground-level parking.  Edward Sporl proposed a Craftsman Hi-Lo elevated nine feet above grade (above).

Hi-Lo Bungalows, Hi-Lo Houses and Spanish Hi-Los came to describe story-and-a-half residences with garages. Colonial Revival and  Mission Style residences most frequently adopted the bi-level profile. “La Jolla,” the house at  6 Trianon Place (built circa 1925), originally had a two-car garage.

While the phraseology seems to have originated in New Orleans, Hi-Los became a national phenomenon when direct mail catalogs adopted the expression. The Southern Pine Association first featured a Hi-Lo in its 1937 catalog, Livable Homes of Southern Pine. The Ideal Plan Service published its Hi-Lo ten years later.

Early bi-level residences in San Francisco were referred to as "Doelgers," named for the developer -- Henry Doelger -- who frequently built them. Hi-Los and Doelgers were precursors to split levels.

Image above:  Edward F. Sporl. Raised  Basement [“Hi-Lo”] Bungalow. Ink and colored ink on linen. Undated. Edward F. Sporl Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Lexicon: Bodine

We encountered a new building term yesterday in a trade catalog titled The Complete House Builder (1890). Bodine was a patented roofing product developed by the Bodine Roofing Company of Mansfield, Ohio in the early 1880s. Comprised of polychromed white poplar and spruce wood pulp, bodine's advantage over slate was its affordability and the ease with which any DIYer could install it. For the "Cheap Cottage Set on Posts" illustrated above, it was one option that the M.A. Donohue & Company considered economical. An added benefit for those with rain barrels and cisterns was its inconspicuous flavor. The Architect, Builder and Woodworker reported that rain water flowing off a bodine roof imparted "no unpleasant taste," unlike that experienced with composition roofs (gravel, pitch, chemical, asbestos or felt).(1)

(1)"The Bodine Patent Roof," The Architect, Builder and Woodworker 19 (October 1883): p. 188.

Image above: "No. 1--Front Elevation," The Complete House Builder with Hints on Building (Chicago: M.A. Donohue & Company, 407-429 Dearborn Street, 9 April 1890), n.p. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Lexicon: Trembling Prairies

Trembling prairie. [Tr. F. prairie tremblante : limited in use to parts of Louisiana : also called shaking prairie.] Also, in the vicinity of the numerous lakes of the parish [LaFourche, Louisiana] exist immense tracts called trembling prairies. These seem to be a surface composed of the matted roots and decayed stalks of the marsh vegetation, floating upon water in some instances, and upon very soft mud in others. Over these prairies it is practicable to walk, and cattle graze upon them, although they vibrate at every tread, and a cut of a few feet in depth will always discover a substratum of water. S.H. Lockett, Sec. Ann. Rep. Topog. Surv. of Louisiana, 1871, p. 10.  From The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 1911, p. 6457 available via googlebooks.

Above:  Plat of T. 19 S. - R. 16 E. South Eastern District, La.  East of the Mississippi.  Surveyor General's Office, Donaldsonville, La. October 24th, 1854.  Photostat of old plat.  Bohemia Spillway Files, Guy Seghers Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

To find other historic Louisiana plats, see the Louisiana Division of Administration's Historical Records page, and select under "Document Type" "Plats, Old."  Then enter appropriate Land District, Township and/or Range.

To ascertain Township and Range coordinates related to the Public Land Survey System [PLSS], consult the Land Survey Information System online.

Lexicon: Nogged

An early blog entry addressed the use of bousillage, bouzillage, barreaux, and briquette-entre-poteaux to describe Louisiana wattle and daub construction. The 1895 Sanborn Atlas for New Orleans uses another term altogether, nogged. Some structures are labelled "br. nogged" for "brick-nogged." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was first used in the late seventeenth century, in reference to a wall. The related term "nogging" was used in medieval accounts of the late fifteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the expression was associated with a South Worcestershire dialect. For the 1895 Sanborn atlases, brick-nogged structures are indicated with alternating pink (masonry) and yellow (timber) bands along the perimeter walls.

To view historic Sanborn atlases for the region, consult the Southeastern Architectural Archive's collection of fire insurance atlases. Some atlases are also available through Digital Sanborn online, a subscription database available via Tulane University Libraries. Do note that the digital format lacks the color indicators and holographic additions of the physical copies.

Lexicon: Brunspile

As reported in Engineering News-Record 6 August 1964:

A 45-story, steel-framed skyscraper under construction in downtown New Orleans will set several structural records. The tallest building in the Old South, Plaza Tower will sit on pre-stressed concrete piles designed for bearing values of 180 tons, the greatest pile load ever approved in that city.

The $10-million tower will rise from one corner of an 18-story base building devoted largely to parking 500 cars. Duranodic aluminum will sheath closely spaced exterior columns. Between the columns, white marble spandrels will alternate vertically with bronze-tinted windows.

Before approving the 180-ton pile value, city building officials required load tests held for at least two days at more than double the allowable design load. Driven successively through strata of compressible clay again into a hard Pleistocene stratum (glacial till consisting mainly of hard clay) about 155 ft below grade, a 168-ft pile passed the test with ease. It held 400 tons for two days with only 3/8 in. residual settlement. At 462 tons, the test pile failed in compression (5,600 psi); the foundation soil still held.

Known as Brunspile, the piles are pre-stressed, precast units up to 70 ft long, octagonal in cross section. The splice detail comprises a cast-steel, cylindrical wedge connector into which fits the ferrule end of the top unit. The pile units are separated by a steel impact plate, and pile hammer blows wedge the two sections together in a moment-resisting joint...

To read more, consult ENR in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Architect for the Plaza Tower was Leonard Spangenberg, Jr. & Assoc. Tulane University's William J. Mouton was consulting engineer, George A. Fuller of Dallas was general contractor, and Stephen K. Whitty of New Orleans was pile subcontractor.

Lexicon: blog

The Media Ecology Association list recently advertised Andrew Sullivan's piece "Why I Blog," published in November 2008's The Atlantic. Sullivan began blogging eight years ago, as a means of publishing new writing in a spontaneous fashion. What began as an outlet created by a web designer friend developed into an addiction "like taking a narcotic."

Sullivan traces the etymology of the word blog and delves into the early and recent history of blogging. He also acknowledges a historic legacy of written expressions of immediate thought:

"If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas."

To link to the Top 30 Design/Architecture Blogs, click here.

Lexicon: Sacs des sable entre poteaux

Thursday's Architects Newspaper features an article about this year's recipient of the University of Kentucky College of Design's Curry Stone Design Prize, which honors innovative achievement in humanitarian architecture and design.

The Cape Town, South Africa firm of MMA Architects won the $100,000 award for their 10x10 house, built for just over $6,000 with sandbags and timber. It's similar to local briquette-entre-poteaux. To read more, click here.

One could always plan for flooding in the spirit of historic relocatable beach structures, such as those featured on Pruned's blog.

[Photograph: MMA Architects, 10x10 House, 2008. University of Kentucky College of Design as it appears in Architects Newspaper 09.25.2008]

Lexicon: Sgrafitto

Banksy at the Listen Drop In Center, Rampart Street, New Orleans, LA. September 2008.

British graffiti artist Banksy has been leaving a trail in New Orleans, in his quest to do battle with the city's Gray Ghost, the anti-grafitti vigilanate Frank Radtke. Times Picayune art critic Doug MacCash recently addressed the friction between property owners and graffiti artists on the nola blog. Flickr subscriber anthonyturducken has posted some amazing photographs of the NOLA banksies here and has mapped their locations:


View Larger Map

Federal Way, Washington blogger-activist James Lamb has been using the Internet and GIS to map graffiti in his community. The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune have both published stories on "citizen cartographers", who are exploring new GIS technologies annotated with images, text, video, etc. and significantly changing the world of map-making. One of my favorites is Nikolas Schiller, who extensively uses historic maps, aerial photographs, and other imagery to create kaleidoscopic quilts.

To access archived NY Times or the International Tribune, Tulane University affiliates may use the database Lexis Nexis Academic Universe.

Architecture: sgraffito(Italian)

A type of decoration executed by covering a surface, as of plaster or enamel, of one color, with a thin coat of a similar material of another color, and then scratching or scoring through the outer coat to show the color beneath. Eg. Michelozzo, Palazzo Medici Courtyard, Florence, 1445-1460.
sgraffiti (plural)

Decoration:Graffito (English/OED): A drawing or writing scratched on a wall or other surface; a scribbling on an ancient wall, as those at Pompeii and Rome. Also, a method of decoration in which designs are produced by scratches through a superficial layer of plaster, glazing, etc., revealing a ground of different colour; chiefly attrib., as in graffito-decoration, -pottery, -ware.
Graffiti (plural)

To access the Oxford English Dictionary, Tulane University affiliates may follow the link here.

Lexicon: Lexan Polycarbonate

In the early 1970s, Edward B. Silverstein and Associates was contacted by the Tharp-Sontheimer-Tharp Causeway Funeral Home to renovate its building and parking accommodations. The funeral home supplied the firm with promotional materials from different makers of stained glass windows in hopes of commissioning a "Tree of Life" for its chapel. One potential supplier was Glass Crafts of La Crosse, Wisconsin, who specialized in "vandal-proof" stained glass windows reinforced with Lexan polycarbonate.

The resin was first accidentally discovered by chemist Dr. Daniel Fox, who was working on developing a new wire insulation substance. By the early 1960s, NASA had adapted it for use; later, the 1969 Apollo 11 astronauts wore Lexan polycarbonate pressure helmets and visors. Lexan's use as a window material began in 1968. Today it is associated with a wide variety of products, from Nalgene bottles to riot shields to cellular phones. Click here for a Lexan Timeline.

The Tharp-Sontheimer-Tharp owners ultimately decided to commission two Blanko antique glass windows in a "contemporary style broken up in linear patterns" from the New Orleans manufacturer and designer of art glass, Henry J. Lips, Inc. (Correspondence, 6 July 1971. Edward B. Silverstein Collection).

[Image: Advertising from Glass Crafts, 604 So. Third Street, La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1971. Job #845, Edward B. Silverstein Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries].

Lexicon: Batture Dwellers

Batture, the raised driftland between the levée and the normal level of the river, was considered public land by French Louisiana law. Thomas Jefferson entered the debate in 1811, when a New Orleans resident (and former mayor of New York) named Edward Livingston brought suit against the President for violating his right to batture, in removing him from the Mississippi River's alluvial soil along the Faubourg St. Marie (today encompassed by Julia, Girod, Commerce and St. Peters).

The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration reported on the Riverbend area New Orleans Batture Dwellers in 1938:

"[They] build their houses of driftwood salvaged from the Mississippi, inhabit a ramshackle shanty town sometimes called 'Depression Colony,' located between Carrollton Ave. and the protection levee at the Jefferson Parish line. It is composed of a wide variety of shacks, neat little cottages, and houseboats. The houses are built on stilts and are safe from all but the highest flood stages. During low water the batture is laid out in little gardens with chicken coops and pig pens. When the water rises, the livestock is taken up on the little galleries that run at least part way around each house and the occupants remain at home until 'Ole Man River' becomes too dangerous. Driftwood in the river supplies ample fuel; the river plenty of fish; and the near-by willows, material out of which wicker furniture can be made and sold from house to house in the city. There is no rent to pay, as the batture is part of the river and the property of the United States, and consequently beyond the reach of local ownership or taxation." [p. 280]

In 1953 The Atlanta Daily World reported that New Orleans batture dwellers had won a legal battle against the Orleans levee board:

"The Orleans Levee board had contended that the batture. . . should have been vacated so that the United States engineers in New Orleans could make repairs along the Mississippi Levee in the area of the Batture.

Justice Luther E. Hail ruled in the civil district court, however, that the board failed to establish ownership of the Batture property, and therefore dismissed each of the suits.

The battle for possession of the Batture has been going on for some time in New Orleans and some 30 dwellings along the river are involved.

Although the houses are imperiled by the river whenever the city experiences a heavy rainfall such as yesterday's three inch downpour, the dwellers refuse to move out of their homes and live elsewhere.

The buildings--constructed of stilts on the river--are rickety Weather-beaten affairs that don't give the appearance of being too soundly built. The occupants, however, all express satisfaction in the construction of their dwellings."
[17 July 1953 available from Proquest].

[Photograph: Detail of a Works Progress Administration photograph. Batture Dwellings near Audubon Park, 1930s. Collection of the State Library of Louisiana]

Lexicon: bousillage, bouzillage, barreaux, briquette-entre-poteaux, wattle and daub

Enterprise Truck through Spanish Moss, City Park. 05.2008 by K. Rylance

Did you know that some 3 billion people live or work in buildings constructed of earth?

"Bousillage, or bouzillage, a hybrid mud brick/cob/wattle and daub technique is a mixture of clay and Spanish moss or clay and grass that is used as a plaster to fill the spaces between structural framing and particularly found in French Vernacular architecture of Louisiana of the early 1700s. A series of wood bars (barreaux), set between the posts, helped to hold the plaster in place. Bousillage, molded into bricks, was also used as infilling between posts; then called briquette-entre-poteaux. The bousillage formed a solid mud wall that was plastered and then painted. The bousillage also formed a very effective insulation." [Earth Architecture. Viewed 08.12.2008]

Ronald Rael's Earth Architecture is forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press (anticipated December 2008). His related website has been ranked one of the Top 30 Design Blogs & Resources for Architects.

FOR RENT: Briquette-entre-Poteaux at St. Anthony and N. Rampart.
03.2008 by K. Rylance

Lexicon: alberca, algibe, citerne, cuve, cistern, réservoir

Newspapers across the country were reporting a drought in late nineteenth-century New Orleans. The 5 June 1898 New York Times commented:

It is hard for us rain-soaked Northerners to believe, but there has been a long
drought all through the region of which New Orleans is the centre, and the
people of that city are face to face with a water famine. It is true that despite
the failure of the clouds to do their duty, the Mississippi has not yet run dry, and
as the water works of New Orleans gets their supply from the river, one
unacquainted with the circumstances might suppose that no scarcity could
exist. The trouble is that the city doesn't own its water works, and the company
which does charges such enormous prices for its service that a large majority of
the people still trust to ancient cisterns. The contents of these have been
getting steadily lower for some time; now many of them are empty and the
others might as well be, for the small amount of semi-liquid matter in them is
a peril to the health of everybody that drinks it.

Cisterns were known in local parlance by a number of different names: alberca, algibe, citerne, cuve, réservoir. The above-ground variety, shown here, were normally used in the late 18th-19th centuries, were iron-strapped cedar barrels. A pipe connected to the house supplied running water. The house depicted in this picture is roofed with shakes, also called known by variant names merrain, merin, miren (called pickets in English). [For more information on the nomenclature, see: Jay Dearborn Edwards and Nicolas Kariouk Pecquet du Bellay de Verton's A Creole Lexicon. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2004]. anthonyturducken has posted a current-day Uptown New Orleans cistern on flickr.

Today's New Orleans is witnessing the daily loss of millions of gallons of potable water. To listen to John Burnett's National Public Radio report, click here.

The image above is one of many unidentified photographs in the collection of the Southeastern Architectural Archive. Handwritten on the back is the notation: "N.O. housing -- slums." Any assistance in identifying the location of the photograph would be much appreciated!