New Orleans 2.0 will be greener, taller and edgier judging by the winning entries of a the New Orleans American Institute of Architects design competition.

A jury of three internationally renowned architects gave the top four honors in the 2008 New Orleans AIA Design Competition to projects featuring sustainable design features. Judges included Sylvia Lavin, professor of architectural history and theory at UCLA, and architects Eric Owen Moss and Peter Zellner.

The winners:

- a three-story Lowerline Street duplex by Bild Design Studio;

- the Rebuild Center at St. Joseph Church by Wayne Troyer Architects;

- an energy-efficient affordable home designed by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple for actor Brad Pitt's Make It Right project; and

- the Reinventing the Crescent design for a 6-mile open space development along the Mississippi River from Jackson Avenue to the Holy Cross levee, also designed by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

Winning designs were chosen out of a record 73 submissions from across the state, said Melissa Urcan, AIA New Orleans executive director.

"To see just a portion of these incredible projects realized in the next 10 years would be amazing," said Urcan.

The winning designs share a common environmental consciousness, said Richard Fullerton, an architect at Ledbetter Fullerton Architects and president of the New Orleans AIA chapter.

"Glass is glass. Stone is stone," Fullerton said. "Materials are expressed within the design and pervading everything is a sense of sustainability and environmental consideration. "

Reinventing the Crescent, which won the Master Planning and Urban Design category of the competition, is expected to be the city's largest contiguous waterfront park when complete in 2016. Rather than tearing down relics of the waterfront's industrial past and building new, the designers adapted some old structures to new uses.

Along the riverfront in the Marigny, the old Mandeville Wharf shed will be converted into a performance venue, according to the EDR plan.

"We want the riverfront to tell our story, to reflect this authentic place," said Sean Cummings, executive director of the New Orleans Building Corp., which has secured more than $62 million in city funding to develop the riverfront. NOBC recently released a bid for a landscape design firm to implement the first phase of the EDR plan, which was created with input from a team of internationally recognized architects, including Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Hargreaves Associates and TEN Arquitectos.

The riverfront design includes several parcels to be bid for development through a competitive public process, said Cummings.

Riverfront project architects wanted to ensure the design guaranteed the public easy access to the river, said Steve Dumez, director of design at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

"The idea was to develop a space where people could connect with the city and feel the presence the river at any point in the 6-mile swath," said Dumez, who also worked on the Make It Right home commissioned by Pitt for the Lower Ninth Ward to be a model of affordable, green design.

The same charge for affordable sustainable design directed architect Wayne Troyer in his award-winning Rebuild Center at St. Joseph Church on Tulane Avenue.

The landscaped $736,000 community resource center consists of six trailers, connected by canopies and transparent polycarbonate screens, organized around a courtyard.

Troyer compares the structure to a "Zen fishing camp. "

"It has a serenity," he said.

The temporary structure could end up as a long-term addition, said Troyer, who is working with St. Josephs on a stand-alone medical facility expected to open at the center this summer.

"The rebuild center was expected to (be needed) another five years," he said. "But with the way New Orleans is coming around, it could be much longer. "

Fullerton said the wining entries exhibited modernism at a time when many are concerned about the number of buildings from 1950s and '60s targeted for demolition because of damages from Katrina.

"There are modern buildings in Lakeview, on Canal Street and elsewhere in the city that are under the gun and those buildings, though currently unprotected, are as valuable as the double shotguns and Victorian mansions that we treasure," said Fullerton.

Fullerton and others say a post-Katrina style has yet to emerge for the city but the need to rebuild whetted the city's long love affair with its buildings.

"We are a city of architectural diversity and people love that diversity and sense that as 'New Orleans,'" said Dumez. "What is being designed now is a contemporary design for the city as it is now. ... and there is room for a new interpretation of New Orleans. "

The award-winning Lowerline Street duplex, with its corrugated metal façade and asymmetrical profile, signals New Orleanians are already prepared for changing the city face.

Natalie Mitchell, a Tulane University law student, moved into the Bild Design duplex in June after months of admiring it from afar. It rises above the surrounding Uptown neighborhood of shotguns and Creole cottages like three asymmetrically placed cargo boxes.

The building's incongruous silhouette attracted her.

"The first time we saw the house we were moving into another apartment down the street. My boyfriend is an architect so he noticed it right away and was like, 'What is going on there?'" said Mitchell, whose third-floor bedroom is connected via a sliding glass door to a balcony overlooking the river. "It was rented then but we kept looking at it. The second we saw it come up for rent on Craig's list, we called. We knew it was special and we knew we were going to live there. "

Bild is working on three modern homes, including two in Lakeview and the other in Gentilly.

"We live in a city where nostalgia is precious and that is sometimes limiting," said Byron Mouton, the firm's founder and a professor of architecture at Tulane. "Now that is being tested a little bit. "