Michael Bell, AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Michael Bell, AIA, is the president of five-person Bell Architects in New Orleans and 2007 president of AIA New Orleans. A native New Orleanian, Bell received both his MArch and JD from Tulane University. Although his firm is full-service, Bell Architects recently has focused its efforts on single and multi-family housing in an effort to contribute to the post-Katrina housing needs in New Orleans and the Gulf States. The firm also has designed homes for New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, including several for the new Musicians’ Village in the Ninth Ward.

Education: I attended and got a MArch from Tulane. Actually, it was a bachelor’s at the time and became a master’s when they decided that five years was worthy of a master’s degree, but that was in 1984.

Professional background: I practiced architecture in Dallas as an intern for four years after graduating, then took a little diversion for a while. I came back to New Orleans and went to Tulane Law School. I spent three years there, followed by two-and-a-half years with a law firm here in New Orleans defending architects. I got to know a lot of our local architects that way. I learned much about how to run a practice, but in doing all of that I realized how much I missed architecture. To specialize in construction law would’ve been a very lucrative profession, but as far as interesting, practicing architecture turned out to be a lot more fun. I left the law firm to start my own practice in 1993 and never looked back. I’ve enjoyed every minute of my practice.

Involvement with AIA New Orleans: I’ve always been interested in community activities. I’ve served on the boards of my church and my children’s school and the Louisiana Children’s Museum. After serving the community in these capacities, it was natural that I migrated to trying to help my profession. I got involved with the legislative committee here and went to the board meetings and soon found I was enjoying it a lot and getting a lot out of it.

Growing the chapter: My predecessors Angela O’Byrne, AIA, who was AIA New Orleans president in 2005, and Steven Braquet, AIA, who was president in 2006, and I started to develop a vision of a bigger, more active, and more prominent AIA New Orleans. We had a good chapter, but with the addition of a full-time executive director [in 2006], we saw that we could do so much more. Angela, Steve, and I went to New York in late 2005—about four months after the storm—to appeal to the AIA New York Chapter for some help in all the ways that New Orleans needed help, particularly the architecture profession after Katrina.

As Steve put it, when we saw AIA New York, we saw what we wanted to be when we grew up. They have an excellent storefront and home. We had never had a storefront or a physical presence in the city. They had that and it was an excellent resource for their members. We decided that that’s what we wanted to try to accomplish and we started setting goals for being an important part of the rebuilding of New Orleans. We created an entity called City Works here in New Orleans. It’s the go-to source for information about rebuilding, and it’s taken on a life of its own. We’re now finding other activities that we want to be involved with and really raising the profile of architects here in New Orleans.

Katrina recovery: It’s all happening much more slowly than we thought it would, but it is happening and I’m very optimistic about the future of New Orleans. Single-family homes have been the early successes, with a lot of people finding ways to rebuild. I think that the commercial and larger multifamily residential projects are starting to happen now. Congress has authorized tax incentives for multifamily projects, but there is a shortage of housing, or there will be as the boom really kicks into gear. I’m starting to see a lot more pile drivers around town than just a couple of months ago, so things seem to be starting to happen.

AIA New Orleans’ role post Katrina: One of the most important efforts was to create City Works. Also, AIA New Orleans—with the help of AIA national—put on what many people have called the most important conference about how New Orleans would be rebuilt, the Louisiana Rebuilding and Recovery Conference, which took place in November 2005. AIA national has been a wonderful friend in all this. They came up with a blueprint establishing the principles that I’ve seen carried forward in various planning initiatives since that time.

We also hired a wonderful executive director, Melissa Urcan. We’ve been able to more than triple our budget in one year, and that represents a lot more initiatives, activities, and programming that we can provide our members as well as the public. At the beginning of this year, we had our design awards program, which was about double the number of submissions in previous years, and the attendance was triple. Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu spoke, as did Secretary of Economic Development Michael Olivier and some other notable speakers, so it became a real community event, as opposed to previously when it had really been an event for architects to look at each other’s work. We also now have a regular column, written through the help of AIA members, in the Times-Picayune daily newspaper.

I think that all this dovetailed. We thought it was time to take the chapter to the next level, then Katrina happened and it seemed like we really should be playing a very important part in the recovery. Architects are being seen more as leaders in the community here in New Orleans than they ever had been, and a lot of it is at the grassroots level, not just at the chapter level. Rather than waiting for somebody to tell them how the city was going to be replanned and rethought, neighborhoods started undertaking these efforts themselves.

The most notable is probably the Broadmoor neighborhood, which is geographically in the middle of New Orleans, and architects took a very prominent role in these efforts. One of my senior associates here, J.C. Carroll, was very active in putting together the graphics for the client for the Broadmoor neighborhood. It’s an exciting time to be an architect in New Orleans because it’s a time when we truly can make a difference in both individual projects and city planning.

Challenges ahead: We’re living and breathing it. It’s hard to get our arms around what we’re a part of and it’s hard to get perspective on it. A lot of people did leave, but there has been some reversal of the brain drain that has been widely publicized. I have one young lady right here in my office who moved here from Texas because she wanted to be a part of rebuilding New Orleans. New Orleanians have always been pretty hardy individuals. To live out here with hurricanes always a possibility, it takes a certain mindset.

Now that we’ve lost a good percentage of our population, I think those who are here are now more than ever committed to this city. I think there’s a general feeling that there’s an opportunity here to change things. There are structural changes happening in the public school system, local government, tax assessment processes, and crime control—which does remain the biggest challenge right now—but all of these things are being addresses by a citizenry that is more engaged than it has been, so a long-term outlook for New Orleans in my opinion is that not only will it come back, but it will be much better than it was before. It may not be as big as it was, but I firmly believe it’ll be a much better city.

Our biggest challenge right now that we live with hanging over our heads is the prospect that the levies won’t be where we need them to be for another three or four years, so we remain vulnerable to storm surges. We’re not as vulnerable as we were prior to Katrina, but we do remain vulnerable. I think most of us like our chances. It was 40 years since the last direct hit on New Orleans and if we can just hang in there a little longer, we will have the flood protection that we thought we had prior to Katrina.

Politics of rebuilding: One common misconception is that New Orleans is entirely below sea level. Over half of New Orleans is above sea level—some of it is several feet above sea level—but as New Orleans grew, it became overconfident in the ability to keep the water at bay and a lot of New Orleans was built below sea level. After the storm, it was discussed that maybe we should have a smaller footprint and confine it to the higher ground, but really the window for doing that was early on and the political leadership was not there to make that tough call. To say that certain areas should not be rebuilt is effectively writing off votes. Unfortunately, in our system that’s not lightly done, so it was never said that certain areas shouldn’t be rebuilt. Meanwhile people started to venture back. In areas like the lower Ninth Ward, which is below the Industrial Canal and much more vulnerable, very few people have ventured back in but at this point, those who have invested in building their homes in these areas would find it disagreeable to hear that they shouldn’t build. The default circumstances we find ourselves in through the lack of any leadership on the issue is that the city is basically being built back into its old footprint.

The real unfortunate thing of that is that the tax base is drastically reduced, and it is very difficult to provide services to that old footprint. Anybody can move back to their old home. If they build new, they do have to raise their homes to new base flood elevation requirements, but if they choose to renovate their home, they can just renovate it back to the way it was. I don’t think it should’ve happened that way, but that’s where we find ourselves.

On pro bono work being done: I don’t think the percentage is especially large; the reason being that architects like myself lost staff to the exodus and then were greeted with so much work that we all are under major financial pressures, whether we lost our home, lost valuable personnel in our business, or our businesses were physically damaged. Those kinds of constraints put enormous financial pressures on us, so New Orleans architects are very challenged to perform pro bono work. It’s the proverbial squeezing blood from a turnip. Although, as challenged as we are, we have found time to do a lot of it. Our firm and other firms even to a greater extent have done what I think is a significant amount of pro bono work in light of the situation in which we find ourselves, but one of the things that we would love to organize—and we’ve tried at AIA New Orleans to get this off the ground—is some type of clearinghouse or means by which we can bring in architects from outside of New Orleans who are willing to do some pro bono work here.

There are examples of architects coming down here doing some volunteer architectural work, but it seems like there’s an untapped potential there. It doesn’t help that the rest of the United States is experiencing a shortage of architectural labor, so the country moves forward even though we’re down here needing help. People are busy, but I think there are people who would come to help if we could figure out a way to organize that effort.

As with many recovery issues, it all comes down to dollars. We have been trying to find a source for a $50,000 grant, the funds from which we would use to pay a staff person to administer the program. We think this will get the program started. One of the things the initial administrator would do is to seek sources for further funding beyond this initial grant. There is a huge need for pro bono architectural services and we think there is a lot of room for this program to grow and serve local residents.

What architects can do to help: There are a lot of homeowners who don’t have the means to hire an architect and who just really need advice on what to do with their home. Early on, we did have a pro bono effort here and I personally went to a couple of homes that had been flooded in outlying areas to advise homeowners on their options for rebuilding: whether would they have to raise their home, how much it might cost, and what the permitting process was.

There are people who don’t have access to professional advice. If somebody came from out of town to try to offer that type of advice, there’s a little bit of an educational curve but I think it would be terrific. We could educate the out-of-town architects and then turn them loose to go out and help people. It would be a way of leveraging our time and our abilities and knowledge—that’s still needed. There also are folks whose homes are just sitting there while they’re in other cities around the country. They don’t know what to do. They have this asset here in New Orleans and they’re living a life elsewhere. I think a lot of the inaction on repairing homes is really from a lack of knowing where to go. If we could get the word out, if we created this initiative and got the word out as to how people could tap into this service, I think we could get some people the help that they need to make the right decisions about what they should do with their home.