Ocean Springs, Mississippi architect Bruce Tolar was among the early adapters of New Urbanist design and development approaches. Soon after DPZ’s Seaside on Northwest Florida’s established a model for compact, walkable communities in a resort context, Bruce joined other converts in designing and building custom homes in Rosemary Beach, Water Color, and other locations along the same 30-A coast. Then came similar work in emerging projects like Lost Rabbit and the Town of Tradition in Mississippi. 

The trajectory of Bruce’s work abruptly changed in late summer, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands in coastal Mississippi and Louisiana.

Within weeks after the storm, Andrés Duany led an international planning and design team to address recovery and rebuilding along the Mississippi coast. Bruce lent his expertise to the architecture committee that imagined a strategy for Katrina Cottages -- small-scale housing that could replace FEMA trailers in the recovery’s short term, then transition into permanent homes in resilient neighborhoods. 

Bruce organized a development team to acquire property in Ocean Springs and create Cottage Square, a model Katrina Cottage neighborhood of small-scale rentals, and by 2012, he had supervised the design, site planning and construction of some 168 rental units in five “pocket neighborhoods” in transit-oriented, infill locations along the Gulf Coast. In 2007, the Congress for the New Urbanism recognized his leadership in the Katrina Cottage movement with a Charter Award. And in 2015, he was the recipient of the New Urban Guild’s Barranco Award for his exemplification of the infusion of compassion and community service modeled by the late Mississippi architect Michael Barranco.

In the years since Katrina, Bruce has become an expert in leveraging public-private partnerships to attract for-profit developers to affordable housing projects. And his exploration of system-built approaches (including panelization, modular and manufactured housing) helped him develop strategies for coping with the rising costs of traditional on-site construction. 

In 2016, he added his cottage neighborhood expertise to that of colleagues who focus on small-scale multifamily rentals (duplexes, quads and other apartment configurations appropriate for infill locations near single-family residences). Their firm, Artifex DBD LLC, is involved in a variety of roles in a broad range of projects, including neighborhoods in Thomasville and Decatur, GA, and in Memphis, TN. 

A 1977 graduate of the Architecture School of Louisiana State University, Bruce is licensed as an architect in multiple states. In addition to his membership in the Urban Guild and CNU, Bruce is part of the Incremental Development Alliance (www.incrementaldevelopment.org) team staging “Developer Bootcamps” around the country for real estate development, construction and finance professionals interested in becoming small-scale developers in their communities.