FOR thousands of Mississippi Gulf Coast residents, rebuilding their broken homes after Hurricane Katrina may come down to a character issue.
After living in tents and trailers, and negotiating the riddles of insurance and federal aid, many homeowners in the coming months will face questions of how exactly to reassemble houses of a certain historic vintage, like shotgun houses and Creole cottages. They are about to get some free design advice, whether they ask for it or not.
Next week, the Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, which was organized by the Mississippi governor, Haley Barbour, will begin giving away free copies of "A Pattern Book for Gulf Coast Neighborhoods."
The 72-page pattern book details the basic features of traditional houses and, starting with a letter from Governor Barbour himself, strongly urges people to replicate them as closely as possible as they rebuild.
The book is a result of planning efforts in the region by a politically well-connected group of designers known as the Congress for New Urbanism, which advocates old-fashioned ways of building houses, neighborhoods and towns. Since its founding in 1993, the group, which has about 2,000 members, has courted controversy for rejecting contemporary architectural ideas in favor of historicism, an approach critics have derided as a form of nostalgia.
David Buege, an architecture professor at Mississippi State University, said he is dismayed by the dominance of New Urbanist maxims in official efforts to rebuild. "It troubles me that we have no credible proponents for urban forms that will have a longer useful life and that will be more deeply satisfying than New Urbanism," he said.
Marlon Blackwell, an architect and professor at the University of Arkansas, objected to what he called the New Urbanists' singular focus on historicist designs as they try to rebuild the region. "It uses historicism as a way to validate a kind of moralistic take on architecture," Mr. Blackwell said. "I see it as a bit of a scourge."
The pattern book resulted from elaborate planning workshops held by the commission in October to help reconstruct streets, houses and public buildings in 11 towns that were destroyed along the coast. Detailed proposals are scheduled for public review beginning Nov. 30.
With a first printing of 21,000 copies, the commission intends to offer the book at strategic locations like Home Depot stores and building supply centers in an effort to "rebuild the Coast in a time-honored way," as Governor Barbour writes in the foreword. In the coming months, the book may also be inserted in local newspapers.
The cost of the book, like the commission's budget, is paid for by donations from the Knight Foundation and Jim Barksdale, the former chief executive of Netscape, who now serves as chairman of the governor's commission.
The pattern book, and the new plans for towns, are "just the beginning," Mr. Barksdale said. "Everything for the first mile inland was shut down and destroyed, so it's going to take us a long time. House building will be our largest industry, with 50,000 units to replace."
The book bears the Mississippi state seal, but does not set out rules or regulations with the force of law. Rather, it describes "appropriate" and "acceptable" ways to rebuild houses in a traditional mode - down to window details. Yet even preservation advocates expect the pattern book's design ideals to clash with the realities of rebuilding.
David Preziosi, director of the Mississippi Heritage Trust, in Jackson, which is trying to save historic sites, said: "You can give people ideas and suggestions, but it's all going to come down to what it's going to cost."
For homeowners, following the pattern book's specifications could add "from zero percent to 20 percent" to rebuilding costs, said Rob Robinson, its principal author and an architect at Urban Design Associates, a Pittsburgh firm. In October, Mr. Robinson was one of about 200 designers from around the nation who mobilized throughout the Mississippi coastal towns, from Waveland in the west to Pascagoula in the east, to begin an orderly planning effort for reconstruction.
Mr. Robinson said the book is written for the thousands of people whose damaged properties will most likely not fall under a large reconstruction effort coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"We did it to sort of aim at the average guy who's not part of any of the big policy deals," he said. "For all the people who are left on their own to rebuild and make do with what they have."
Given the urgency of rebuilding and the delays homeowners have experienced in filing insurance claims, Mr. Robinson said, most design decisions about rebuilding are likely to be made "at the Home Depot window."
Mr. Robinson said he has anticipated criticism of the effort as stuck in the past. Critics insist that building in traditional ways is "a Disney idea," he said, "rather than a language, like cooking, that is part of a cultural heritage."
Among homeowners who survived the hurricane, however, once federal officials finally determine where they can and cannot build according to new flood maps, the first concern will probably be forestalling future losses, rather than the prescriptions of a pattern book.
Allison Rouse, 29, an architecture intern who lost the Victorian house that her great-grandfather built in Gulfport in 1907, said that she expects that most people in the region will not spend a great deal extra to revive the ornamental details of their old houses. "People love to pinch pennies down here," Mrs. Rouse said. "They love quick and dirty construction over quality, and that's just the way things are."
Mrs. Rouse added that as she begins to design a new house herself, she does not plan a verbatim reproduction of her former house. "I'm going out of the box," she said. "I'm hoping to make a statement. It's going to be a fortress, because I don't ever want it to wash away again."