Archinect - News

Fairy Tale Architecture: Little Red Riding Hood

2018-12-20T11:08:00-05:00

Just as ‘girl, wolf, woods’ signals Little Red Riding Hood, ‘gable, lintel, square cutout, arc’ signals Robert Venturi’s Mother’s House.⠀

In the second installment of our holiday series on fairy tale architecture, Mary English and Xavier Vendrell of Rural Studio present a playful take on Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Robert Venturi's Mother's House.

"The story has three elements: Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf, and the house. The image of Little Red Riding Hood is iconic; any image of a wolf is iconic; so the house needed to be an iconic house," they explain. "It had to be a house that anyone would recognize as a house. In a way, the Venturi house is a house that a kid can draw, with the roof form and the chimney. And any adult will understand it is a house, but it’s something more, and obviously an architect or a designer will have another level of reading."

Student-led Rural Studio continues to prove the value of socially engaged architecture

2014-12-12T19:29:00-05:00

Rural Studio, Auburn University's off-campus undergraduate program in Newbern, Alabama, continues to gain recognition for their student-led design/build projects that assist the communities in one of the South's most under-served regions. Rural Studio has won several awards from 1995 until most recently as the 2015 recipient of the AIA's Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. Named after the civil rights-era Urban League leader, the annual Whitney M. Young Jr. Award is given to an architect or architecturally related organization whose work greatly contributes toward progressive social advocacy and responsibility.

Established in 1993 by D.K. Ruth and Samuel Mockbee, the student-led Rural Studio has completed parks, museums, a fire station, Boys and Girls Clubs, parks, and homes throughout western Alabama -- a region where 40 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. One of Rural Studio's projects that has attracted attention in recent years is the 20K House Product Line, which is ...

The lovely heart of Hale County

2014-01-20T00:25:00-05:00

André and Barbara weren't skeptical of the general notion of a catalyst for profound change. They just found Walmart a lot more convincing than design microenterprises...Maybe those of us interested in design as a spark for social change could use a reality check

In the February 2014 issue Rob Walker reflects on the lessons of two trips taken to Hale County, Alabama. The piece questions the real, long-term effects of the architectural / social design efforts of groups like Auburn University's Rural Studio or the "design blitz" program Project M. Includes series of B&W photos by Adrian Gaut.

ALL HALE, a film set against the backdrop of the Rural Studio in Hale County Alabama

2012-08-21T20:13:00-04:00

Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul. - Samuel Mockbee Tensions run high when a young female architect moves to a small but uniquely-built rural town and unwittingly falls in love with the son of the man responsible for the town’s misfortune.

Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design

2012-01-16T15:56:00-05:00

In the last decade, much has been written about architecture for the greater good, and it would seem that the field, as a whole, is invested in bringing design to underserved communities. Yet all of this talk — at conferences, in the press, at universities — has focused hardly at all on how to put together a career in social design.

On Places, Virginia Tech graduate Will Holman gives an honest report of his experiences volunteering, studying and working at Arcosanti, Rural Studio, and Youth Build. Does the architecture profession need to do more to support young architects who take this path?

A Real House on a Very Tight Budget

2011-07-17T00:37:07-04:00

Six years ago, the Rural Studio, a program based in western Alabama and run by Auburn University's architecture school, launched the $20K House Project, with the goal of producing a model home for $20,000.