The Kitchen Sisters Present

As this year's hurricane season ramps up, we go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed to educate, inspire and to save its neighborhood from flooding.New Orleans. Surrounded by The Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, besieged by hurricanes and tropical storms, permeated with man made canals, levees, pumping stations …. Water is a deep and controversial issue in New Orleans. What to do with it? Where to put it? How to get rid of it? How to live with it?David Waggonner, of Waggonner & Ball architecture and environment firm has been thinking and dreaming about these questions for years. One of the primary architects behind the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, David envisions floating streets, pervious pavement, planting bioswales—“living