Cool Hunting

A fresh take on disaster relief, the New Orleans-based Green Project is a positive approach to the deconstruction of damaged or collapsed homes and buildings. Rather than simply tearing the destroyed properties of new Orleans apart to make room for new structures with bulldozers, the Green Project carefully salvages and deconstructs the buildings by hand. Focusing on the importance of New Orleans' unique architectural history and respect for personal property, the hand-done process saves between 45 and 70 percent of the materials. They even have their own garden and interactive community space promoting recycling and salvaging garbage for everything from soil to artistic material.

Whether assisting individuals to reconstruct their homes, selling high quality, salvaged building materials at low cost or promoting recycling and rebuilding in the community, the Green Project has played an integral part in the rebuilding of New Orleans. We have a few Green project t-shirts to give away so follow the contact link at the bottom of the page, select "Green Project" from the pull-down menu and tell us your favorite architectural example of creative reuse before this Thursday, 14 June 2007, 11:59 EST. We'll choose a winner at random.

by Seth Brau