While so much of the news out of New Orleans of late has been of incompetence and inadequacy – the toxic FEMA trailers, the melting ice, the soaring murder rate — it is so refreshing to come upon that occasional story of the individual who has turned the aftermath of Katrina into an artistic triumph. In this case, it is artist Takashi Horisaki, who was born in Japan but spent his first three years in the U.S. as an art student at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Now living in New York, Horisaki found a unique way to preserve Katrina’s painful aftermath before the destroyed homes of the Lower Ninth Ward have all been demolished or rebuilt. He somehow came upon the idea of making a latex mold of the remains of the prototypically shotgun-style house at 1941 Caffin Avenue. Strangely mimicking the “death masks” used to preserve the faces of the famous in days past, Horisaki — with painstaking effort and at great expense — transported the latex mask of 1941 Caffin to the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. There, the latex skin was stretched over a newly-constructed frame to recreate the house—this time, set against the New York City skyline. The finished product, entitled Social Dress New Orleans – 730 Days After, opened July 29 and will be on display through October 28.

“He’s capturing our heart and soul and the emptiness in there by taking the skin of the house,” Mary Len Costa of the Arts Council of New Orleans told the Washington Post in a recent profile of Horisaki’s work. “It’d be hard for him to take the skin of a person, so he’s taken the protective area that we all go to, the second skin, the home.”

On a blog documenting the progress of Social Dress New Orleans, Horisaki describes it as “a project to raise awareness about the situation in New Orleans.” By bringing a piece of the Lower Ninth Ward to New York, his project can expose thousands of people miles away to the physical reality of Katrina. For students in the area, this would make a wonderful field trip on a sunny fall day. (If you can’t make it to Long Island City, a slideshow of the exhibit is well worth taking a look at.) Even more importantly, the juxtaposition of this crumbling home against the most magnificent skyline in the nation makes a powerful statement about the meaning of Katrina to our nation’s identity and rephrases the question of what kind of country are we in a provocative and inspiring way.

Please share your thoughts about Social Dress New Orleans – 730 Days After, particularly if you have the opportunity to visit the exhibit personally (directions to the Socrates Sculpture Park are available at the park’s website). If you visit with students, please send us pictures and student reaction.

Is it possible to view Katrina as a simple “failure of infrastructure,” no more, no less?

In the aftermath of the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the mainstream media seem to be drawing a straight line from Katrina, through the July steam pipe explosion in midtown Manhattan, to the I-35 disaster.

Take this, for example, from the August 4 Wall Street Journal:

A dramatic rush-hour collapse of the eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis into the Mississippi River left at least five confirmed dead and more missing.

The disaster raised anew questions about the safety of the country’s aging infrastructure.

Last month, a steam-pipe explosion in Manhattan killed one person, while in April an Oakland highway overpass collapsed after a tanker truck carrying gasoline crashed into a highway support, melting the steel roadway support. Those accidents follow the 2005 failure of levees during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans….

The following day, The New York Times editorialized:

The nation’s physical foundations seem to be crumbling beneath us. Last week, a 40-year-old interstate highway bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, plunging rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River 60 feet below. Two weeks earlier, an 83-year-old steam pipe under the streets of Manhattan exploded in a volcano-like blast, showering asbestos-laden debris. And two years before that, substandard levees gave way in New Orleans, opening the way for the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina….

In the black-and-white mindset of the press, it seems, these incidents are all of a piece, symptoms of a nation that simply does not adequately invest in “infrastructure.”

But such (over?)simplification seems to obscure a host of larger issues. It would be nice to place the blame for all three incidents squarely on the shoulders of the engineers and inspectors, but they hardly function in a vacuum.

The Minneapolis and New York incidents took place in downtown areas traversed by people of all walks of life. Their damage, while alarming to city residents and tragic for the victims and their families, was contained within small areas. And they certainly did not discriminate: among the victims were a pregnant 23-year-old refugee from Somalia and her two-year-old daughter, a construction worker, a security consultant, a truck driver, an exercise therapist and a Native American mother of two.

The failure of the levees in New Orleans, on the other hand, discriminated heavily against the poor and the African-American population of the city. (See Brown University professor John R. Logan’s report, “The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods” for documentation. And for a lesson plan that asks students to consider whether or not the storm’s impact on the poor was merely coincidental, or the direct result of specific policy choices, see the Katrina and Environmental Justice lesson on the Teaching the Levees website.)

While residents of Minneapolis were stunned by the I-35 bridge collapse, for the most part their lives went on unaffected. By coincidence, I was in Minneapolis two days after the incident, which did not keep the crowds away from the cafes on Nicollet Mall Friday night or away from a free outdoor concert downtown. The Minnesota Twins did skip a game Thursday, but continued to play through the weekend at the Metrodome, within eyeshot of the downed bridge. Had we not seen the extensive coverage of the incident on television from our downtown hotel room, we probably would not have even known that it had happened. In New York, my husband could see the plume of steam from his office window after the pipe explosion in July, but our lives were hardly affected.

By contrast, there is no one in New Orleans unaffected by the failure of the levees.

So, here is the question: does classifying Katrina as a “failure of infrastructure” make it too easy for everyone to ignore all the larger issues raised by the failure of the levees? Is everything that has happened in New Orleans since August, 2005, the simple result of subpar engineering? Is it fair to put the near-destruction of a major city in the same docket as a roadway collapse or a pipe explosion?

Or, on the other hand, is the lesson of Katrina so simple that we are straining to read too much into a problem that would have been completely avoided by more competent engineers?

Let us know what you think.

Welcome to the beginning of an exciting new venture in educational cyberspace. In the coming weeks and months, we will be using this space to stimulate debate and discussion about some of the most pressing issues facing us as citizens of the United States and the world. We hope to create a dynamic online community in which educators, students and all concerned citizens can actively participate in the kind of discussion so vital to our survival as a democratic society.

To that end, we will be posting regular blogs about a wide variety of topics and issues of civic importance, using Spike Lee’s masterful documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and the accompanying curricular materials, Teaching the Levees:A Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement, as our starting points. The goal is not simply to have our say, but to provoke a series of democratic dialogues in which teachers and students from all over the country can engage in meaningful conversation about the many issues raised by Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath. Your participation is crucial to the success of this undertaking and we actively encourage you to take the time to make your voice heard.

We also encourage you to post any comments you may have about the film, the curriculum, New Orleans, or any of the many issues raised by Katrina – issues of race, class, government responsibility, environment, the role of the media, and so on – on our discussion board. There is also a separate space for sharing lesson plans and curricular materials on this website. And if you are interested in submitting a guest blog, or have other comments or suggestions you are not comfortable making publicly, please feel free to contact us at levees@tc.columbia.edu.

If you are an educator and have not yet ordered your free copy of the Teaching the Levees package, please sign up to do so on this website as soon as possible, as there are only a limited number of copies still available.

We are opening the blog with two posts – one about a fascinating project in which an artist recreated the dilapidated shell of a home destroyed by Katrina against the New York City skyline, and another about the link between the failed levees in New Orleans and the recent Minneapolis bridge collapse. We hope you will take the time to post responses to these blogs and continue to participate in the discussions they will promote.

Dialogue and debate are the lifeblood of democracy. We are genuinely excited about the prospect of stimulating that debate in the days to come on this website. We are looking forward to hearing from you!