The best measure of the greatness of architecture is the extent to which it touches the hearts, minds, and spirits of the people who use it. Good work in architecture can move people, just as good work in music, visual arts, writing, or drama does. How is it possible to recognize architecture that touches and moves people? Generally, the places that move people most deeply are the places they love the most. The Most-Loved Places are the ones they go furthest to see, or the places they go most often, or the ones they pay the most to buy into if given the opportunity. The Most-Loved Places are the ones that sit most indelibly in some corner of the mind like an old friend. As one old man put it when describing a long-loved town of his youth: "That's the one place I absolutely must go back to before I die." Tragically, the greatest losses along the Gulf Coast during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were often the places and the buildings that had endured the longest and were loved the most. Because of this, we are doubly responsible to renew the Gulf Coast with places and buildings that are at least as good as what was lost, but hopefully better. Otherwise, the region will forever bear the burden of the sorrow of knowing that the storm took away something precious and our own actions left us with something less. How can we renew the Gulf Coast with places that are at least as good or better than what was lost? Certainly not by looking to what had recently been built, because the things that made the Gulf Coast unique had been slowly but steadily eroded for thirty years or more by bland, soulless buildings that could just as easily have been in Montana. And the Gulf Coast is not unique in this regard, because the monster of placeless sprawl has been eating up great places all over America. So what do we do? If you want to match or exceed something, you should study that thing that you plan to match or exceed. In this case, that means studying the architecture of the Most-Loved Places in the region. The plans in this book have been designed by doing exactly that: studying the things that have proven over time to resonate most strongly with people along the Gulf Coast. By using plans like these, we may be able to re-start living traditions similar to those that originally made the Gulf Coast what it once was.