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Designing Shared Rural Environments: Defining Public Spaces beyond Urban Metrics

October 13, 2024

Rural environments are often difficult to define in administrative and professional contexts and carry notable biases and complexities. Population and density thresholds are the most common determinants for drawing administrative boundaries, yet other factors, such as infrastructure, employment, and services, contribute to the characterization of rural environments. In the United States, the Census Bureau defines rurality, not by its characteristics or resources, but by absences, as "any population, housing, or territory not in an urban area." For the design and planning community, it is important to define the future of rural environments, not through the metrics of urban resources or infrastructure, but to design a new framework for flexibility, adaptation, and health.

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These Alabama Architecture Students are Designing and Building Low-Cost Homes for Rural America

July 18, 2018

Rural Studio, a student-centered design/build program at Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, has announced a collaboration with the mortgage loan company Fannie Mae to support the school’s 20K Initiative. This initiative continues to contribute to the development of "beautiful, healthy and resilient houses that afford financially vulnerable homeowners the ability to live in dignity, security and well within their means."

As a means to address the shortage of affordable housing in the U.S., the research produced from this collaboration with Fannie Mae is being shared with educational institutions industry groups. Auburn University is also providing funding for the initiative through a grant to "further strengthen the collaboration with Fannie Mae, as well as support the development of additional stakeholder collaborations."

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Architecture's Evolving Role: How Community-Engaged Design Can Encourage Social Change

March 28, 2018

The role of the architect—and even architecture itself—in society today is changing. A lack of interest in critical social issues from a profession that holds such high responsibility within a community is a problem that should no longer be avoided.

In an exhibit currently on show at the Center for Architecture and Design in Seattle titled "In the Public Interest," Garrett Nelli Assoc. AIA challenges the profession of architecture to establish a focus on more community-engaged design. With the help of the 2017 AIA Seattle Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship, Nelli traveled to Los Angeles, rural Alabama, Haiti, Italy and New Orleans, all the while analyzing how the built environment has the ability to influence social change.

Read on for an edited interview with Nelli about his research and how you can begin to implement elements into your design practice to help promote social change in your own communities.

AIA Honors Rural Studio with 2015 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award

December 12, 2014

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced Rural Studio as winner of the 2015 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, recognizing the Newbern, Alabama–based design/build program for its student-led projects that have catered to one of the South’s poorest and most underserved regions.

“Rural Studio’s projects prove that an authentic conversation with the residents, no matter how unconventional the client, can yield ambitious architecture,” stated the AIA in their official press release.

Twenty Years Later, What Rural Studio Continues to Teach Us About Good Design

May 13, 2014

Hale County, Alabama is a place full of architects, and often high profile ones. The likes of Todd Williams and Billie Tsien have ventured there, as have Peter Gluck and Xavier Vendrell, all to converge upon Auburn University’s Rural Studio. Despite the influx of designers, it is a place where an ensemble of all black will mark you as an outsider. I learned this during my year as an Outreach student there, and was reminded recently when I ventured south for the Studio’s 20th Anniversary celebration. While the most recent graduates took the stage, I watched the ceremony from the bed of a pick-up truck, indulging in corn-coated, deep-fried catfish, and reflected on what the organization represents to the architecture world.

Since its founding in 1993 by D.K. Ruth and Samuel Mockbee, the Studio has built more than 150 projects and educated over 600 students. Those first years evoke images of stacked tires coated with concrete and car windshields pinned up like shingles over a modest chapel. In the past two decades, leadership has passed from Mockbee and Ruth to the current director, Andrew Freear, and the palette has evolved to feature more conventional materials, but the Studio remains faithful to its founding principal: all people deserve good design. Now that it is officially a twenty-something, what can Rural Studio teach us about good design?

Rural Studio Celebrates 20th Anniversary with Eight 20K Houses

September 01, 2013

Auburn University's Rural Studio, an undergraduate program that focuses on designing well-built, low-cost housing for the poor across three counties of Alabama, will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this 2013-14 academic year. Since 1993, Rural Studio has been recycling, reusing, remaking and using local materials while maintaining the belief that both rich and poor deserve good design. In honor of 20 successful years of helping Alabama's rural poor, Rural Studio will, for the first time, design eight 20K Houses in one year- and they need your help.

Loft House / Ryan Stephenson, Joey Fante, Kait Caldwell, Aimee O'Carroll

June 17, 2009

“Learn by doing” sounds like something very obvious when it comes to education in most fields, and specially in architecture schools.

I have taught at schools that embrace it in different ways, either by doing a collective small project during the semester, or building a complete project over the development of the final graduate project. This last method was inspired by the work of the good ol’ Rural Studio.

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