She just wanted her scattered brood reunited in a high-and-dry home on its old block in New Orleans' flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward.

Rogers, a single mother of seven, knew picking the right house would be the most momentous decision of her 45 years, so she took her mother and sister along for counsel. They spent hours poring over renderings and floor plans that 13 of the world's top architects had prepared for Pitt's Make It Right Foundation.

When they compared notes, the women agreed that an edgy update on the traditional shotgun house by Philadelphia's KieranTimberlake Associates worked best. It was a daring choice, but made for a most prosaic reason: This house had the most space.

Rogers' practical decision will surely give no comfort to

the design world's opposing camps, which have traded verbal spitballs over the form the new Gulf Coast architecture should take, modern or traditional.

Nor is she likely to appease New Orleans' planning gurus, who question the wisdom of rebuilding low-lying areas such as the Ninth Ward. Her sole focus is getting her family out of its $2,000-a-month New Orleans rental and back to the property she owns at 1714 Tennessee St.

When Pitt conceived Make It Right last year, he saw it as a marriage of social responsibility and design - a way to redress the neglect of New Orleans' storied African American Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina while showcasing cutting-edge architecture. But avant-garde designers will be chagrined to learn that most participating residents have gravitated to familiar-looking styles with peaked roofs and pastel exteriors.

Rogers is one of the few to opt for KieranTimberlake's less conventional, asymmetrical concept. But that's because she liked the way the designers fit three bedrooms plus a studio apartment into the drum-tight footprint of a typical New Orleans cottage.

"It has a nice high porch and a trellis," Rogers swooned. "And it's going to be a green house, and that will save me a lot of money on electricity."

The fact that KieranTimberlake won this year's gold medal from the American Institute of Architects, and that New York's Museum of Modern Art will feature its work in an exhibition this summer, held little sway for Rogers.

So much for architectural star power.

For James Timberlake, Rogers' enthusiasm is the next best thing. He feels validated that his firm remained faithful to its design philosophy and still appealed to local tastes. It helps that it cleverly offered residents both a flat roof - a hallmark of modernism - and a peaked one, in the form of an angled sunscreen over the roof deck.

"We went into the project feeling a contemporary house could represent history without being a pastiche," Timberlake explained. "We've interpreted traditional elements," like a lacy balcony railing.

From the start, it has been clear that the real supernova of the effort is Pitt, who is almost as famous for being an "architectural junkie" as for his relationship with Angelina Jolie. On his Web site, he speaks passionately about the "great injustice" of America's response to Katrina.

"Make It Right is not about a handout, but it's about a hand up," Pitt says.

Thanks to his high-wattage name, Pitt's organization has raised money for 81 houses since the project went public in December. Construction of the first batch is due to start next month, and residents could move in by August. Pitt hopes to complete 150 homes in a compact four-street section of the Ninth Ward and eventually bring prices down to $150,000.

Yet the project's quick success hasn't prevented architects and planners from second-guessing the enterprise - or questioning their ability to solve real-world problems.

Can architects come up with a house design that will help heal a wounded city? Are big-thinking urban planners up to the task of responding to a disaster of Katrina's magnitude? And which should come first: the housing or the planning?

"I think the focus has been too much on architecture," argued John Beckman of Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), the Philadelphia firm that fashioned New Orleans' first major recovery plan after the storm.