There is a theory that says when a society is optimistic about the future, its architecture is modern and progressive. But when a societal group is in a depressed state, its design reflects that, too, with a visual longing for the past.
From 1955 to 1961 Louisiana had an average of 22 modern buildings per year featured in national publications. According to the state architectural index, that number dropped to five per year after 1962, a period marred by desegregation protests and racial upheaval.
If architecture is a barometer for the psyche of a city, David Baird, president of newly minted PLUSone Design + Construction, submits that Baton Rouge today is on a positive upturn despite Katrina’s ill effects.
True, retro Acadian cottage-style office parks and strip centers line the Bluebonnet and Perkins Road corridors and probably always will. And Circa 1857 and the like operate a booming industry based completely on the constructions of the past.
But there’s another, newer side: the Louisiana State Museum, the Shaw Center for the Arts, those sugar-white new Iberiabanks and Perkins Rowe. These are frightfully modern monuments to progression, which, when pared with a growing number of forward-leaning homes cropping up in the landscape of the city, shine like needles in a haystack.
Baird owns one of those homes. He is a professor of architecture at LSU and an accomplished architect—just don’t call him one. He prefers the term “designer.”
“‘Architect’ is too elitist,” he says. It may be a subtle distinction, but within that disclaimer hides the motivation for the Iowa native’s work. As an outsider when he first arrived, Baird was struck by the area’s poverty level, more so, perhaps, than many who grow up in Baton Rouge desensitized to it. According to the most recently available U.S. Census, our state ranks above only New Mexico and Mississippi with 17.4% of Louisianians living in poverty. It is these people—low-income families and the working and creative middle classes—that most interest Baird.
His spec designs for Old South Baton Rouge and the old city dock are fantastic, affordable eye-candy that keep the local economy and culture in mind. Three-story live/work townhomes and lush green spaces line Baird’s levee. A pier leans out into the river supporting an art gallery and restaurant on the water with a sunset view that might top the one from Tsunami’s deck. These concepts were funded by a futures grant through the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, which ultimately chose international mega-firm RTKL to render the master plan for the area.
Baird founded PLUSone as a small team of creatives earlier this year with CEO Fritz Embaugh. He has long felt the same temptation that tickles many architects, the one to offer families of moderate means a watered-down version of what affluent families consistently want: lots of rooms designed to serve only one purpose. Now PLUSone provides Baird and his associates a wide conduit for producing the multi-functional, the convertible, spaces that adapt and bend to both work and play. Versatile solutions for modern living—only for real this time.
And Baird practices what he likes to preach. His family’s long, slender ivy-leafed home on Christian Street easily doubles as the PLUSone office and even triples as a gallery. A recent art exhibit at the home raised several thousand dollars for The Baton Rouge International School. Work, play, philanthropy, life: all out of the same affordable building.
“We moved in four years ago, but I feel it wasn’t finished until this year when the ivy came in,” Baird says. Dwell magazine just visited the Baird home and the photo spread that resulted is tentatively scheduled to feature in the March issue of the magazine.
