Global Green USA held a competition to design a sustainable community in New Orleans. The Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward, damaged by floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, was the site of the competition. Multidisciplinary teams were asked to design six single-family houses, a mixed-use building which included apartments and community services, and the site itself. Though entrants were encouraged to think beyond the site, balancing sustainability with affordability was a key component of the competition. The entry by Litmus Architects stressed the site’s adjacency to the Mississippi River by locating the mixed-use building at the southern edge, creating a River Boulevard and open-air amphitheater at the levee for concerts and parades. The organizing strategy for the site was a north-south grid of walls that could rise at the north end to become pre-engineered foundations for houses (saving the owners time and money), define the playgrounds, wetlands and public gardens at the heart of the site, and extend south across the levee into the river to become breakwaters to control erosion of the banks.
The entry also concentrated on learning from the inside/outside spaces often seen in New Orleans and the low-tech ways of shading places, keeping out the sun in summer while admitting natural light and breezes. Some striking spatial compositions resulted, such the internal courtyard in the mixed-use building with the upper floor apartments linked by bridges.

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