This fall is the season of Marianne Cusato. At the end of the month, Lowe's will begin selling two variants of Ms. Cusato's "Katrina Cottage," which she designed as an alternative to the "FEMA trailer" for residents of Louisiana and Mississippi made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. Last month, Ms. Cusato's Katrina Cottage won the People's Design Award of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, an award voted on by the public.


She is co-author, with Richard Sammons, Ben Pentreath, and Leon Krier, of the forthcoming book Get Your House Right: How to Avoid Common Mistakes in Today's Traditional Architecture (Sterling Publishing). And on November 5, Fred A. Bernstein wrote a charming profile of Ms. Cusato for the "Habitats" column in the Sunday New York Times Real Estate section. Ms. Cusato likes to think small--or to think big about small things. Her own apartment in Greenwich Village is all of 300 square feet. But as the article made clear, she sees her home as extending beyond the walls of her own small apartment. Her home includes the view out her window. And it includes the vibrant sidewalks outside her building. Similarly, her Katrina Cottages are small--one is 544 square feet, the other is 936. But they are part of something larger, not only housing the victims of Katrina, but of creating high-quality affordable housing--"her life's goal," as Fred Bernstein noted.
Marianne Cusato studied architecture at the University of Notre Dame and worked in New York for Fairfax & Sammons, a firm with close ties to ICA&CA. (Anne Fairfax is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICA&CA.) The one thing that irked me in Fred Bernstein's piece was his description of Fairfax & Sammons as "designers of expensive homes with classical detailing." He could have written "designers of classical houses that tend to be expensive," which would have been both more accurate and would not have sounded like a dig.
Ms. Cusato's are not the only Katrina Cottages. Katrina Cottages is a movement. Read about it here. Read especially the statement of mission.