
Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978, August Perez and Associates, and Charles Moore for Urban Innovations Group. Bounded by Poydras, Tchoupitoulas, Lafayette, and Commerce Streets
“New Orleans isn’t like other cities,” Stella tells her sister Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Cradled in the crescent of the Mississippi River and surrounded by water, the city has faced numerous challenges since its founding as a French colonial outpost in 1718. This detailed guidebook to New Orleans architecture—an authoritative, comprehensive, post–Hurricane Katrina overview of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes—tells a compelling and fascinating story of the city through concise descriptions of nearly 300 significant structures, open spaces, and lesser-known places, enhanced by 175 photographs and 23 maps.

