In New Orleans, the first sustainable low-income housing community in the Ninth Ward, the Holy Cross Project, is now rising up out of the mud.  It took a movie star, Brad Pitt, who happens to be passionate about architecture and justice, and Global Green, whose mission is to save us all, to get it up.  The single-family Nolahouse, designed by NYC-based Workshop/APD, is turning into a three-dimensional dwelling. Just in time.

I was reminded of the Holy Cross Project while looking at this morning's satellite photos of Hurricane Dean, which slammed into the Mexican coast as a category 5, otherwise known as home-wrecker strength. The whirling, fleshy turbulence of a hurricane has become eerily familiar since Katrina. Yesterday, Oklahoma turned into chocolate soup from the remains of Hurricane Erin: another all-too-common sight (my own road was flooded last year after a "100-year event"). We have entered a new era, undoubtedly. Once-in-a-century concentrated downpours, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires: Clearly there has to be a way to rebuild and reshelter fast. There isn't, yet. FEMA certainly didn't have the answer. But soon, they say....

Today Dwell's daily blog features a mini cabin by Carib Daniel Martin, called the microHOME: 100 square feet for around $40,000. It looks almost old-fashioned-- part trailer, part fixed-up cabin on a budget. Hmm. Not sure.

Looking at the hokey-quaint surfaces in the photos made me look up the swankier Euro counterpart, the German-engineered m-ch, or micro compact home. It was developed for short-stay living and has a certain calm order inside that's influenced by the Japanese tea-house. It's all tech, tricked-out, prog materials, very smart, compact, and efficient, as vertically arranged as it is horizontally  It's built in Austria. For between 25,000 and 34,000 Euros, depending on features, you get a tiny, movable dwelling with everything, all packed into about 77 square feet. In Europe, you'll wait up to 10 weeks from order to delivery. I don't see my 80-year-old father in it. I somehow see it winding up as really high-end housing at Harvard. Imagine if a hurricane hit Cambridge.

My favorite modernist prefab website, fabprefab, asserts that mod pre-fab isn't yet a reality; it's still half pipe dream, half millionaire's whim. Yet we're inching closer. Tiny houses are a massive pendulum swing from McMansions, but something else that may shrink our domestic footprints besides the weather is the rising tide of foreclosures. Merciless as they are, they may curb a bit of hubris even as they shutter us out of the old-fashioned, out-dated, downright counter-productive American dream. 

In the meantime you could always order up a few premade mini-barns. The ceilings can be low, the designs may be anything but mod, and you probably want to stay away from most of the color schemes, but you can build them out any way you like. Imagine linking together a playhouse, hunter's cabin, and gazebo to form your own mini-complex. Just wire it up, insulate, put some solar panels on the roof, add some eco plumbing, and you're all set. Don't laugh....

Jana Martin is The MOLI View's contributing editor for Fashion & Design.