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Home of Auburn’s first architecture dean has been restored and repurposed for student use

2019-09-24T10:00:00-04:00

A historic home designed by the first dean of the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture (SAPLA) has been restored for use by students and professors.

The home, a Dutch Colonial Revival-style residence listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was recently purchased by Auburn engineering alumn Walt Woltosz and his wife Ginger. The Woltoszes purchased the home, according to the SAPLA website, as a gameday house, but decided to donate the structure to the university when they discovered that it had in fact been designed by SAPLA’s first dean, Frederick Child Biggin.

Biggin designed the house in 1927 when SAPLA was known as the School of Architecture and Applied Arts and Auburn University was the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. According to a historic district landmark designation report, Biggin was a graduate of Lehigh and Cornell universities, and came to the college in 1916. He would go on to head the school for 27 years, “institutin...

The artful repurposing of industrial wastelands

2019-05-22T14:31:00-04:00

What should we do with industrial sites after they have fulfilled their original purpose? Considering the fact that so many of the now disused sites are so close to city centers, the answer to this question can determine the quality of city life for many places around the world.

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. Photographer unknown.

In Germany, the answer has frequently been to artfully transform these sites into places of public use. Take Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a former coal and steel production plant that ceased operations in 1985 and was reopened in 2002 as a public park. According to its designers, Latz+Partner, the intention of Duisburg Nord was "to integrate, shape, develop and interlink the existing patterns that were formed by its previous industrial use, and to find a new interpretation with a new syntax. The existing fragments were to be interlaced into a new “landscape”.

Stairway to Heaven, by sculptor Herman Prigann. Photographer unknown.

In Gelsenkirchen, the Herman...

Jennifer Bonner's award-winning Office Stack reimagines the perception of mid-rise office design

2019-02-27T13:51:00-05:00

A growing household name within the profession and in academia, Jennifer Bonner's whimsical and highly technical design approach has enabled her to create and re-work traditional design methods. Her creative practice, MALL, is a compilation of playful approaches to "ordinary architecture." The name itself is an acronym with its own flexible meaning, similar to Bonner's design process. By focusing on everyday materials and familiar architecture motifs, the Alabama native architect seeks to perceive and portray architecture through whimsical discourse.

Best Sandwiches by Jennifer Bonner, MALL. Image by Adam DeTour

Office Stacks - Picnic Model by Jennifer Bonner, MALL. Image by Adam DeTour

Recently a winner of the 2019 Progressive Architecture Award, Bonner used her original project study, Best Sandwiches to help create her award-winning project Office Stack. The architectural stack may seem like a conventional building process. However, Bonner allows for each layer of the structure to ...

Lynching memorial heralded as greatest 21st Century American architectural achievement

2018-08-30T15:19:00-04:00

These conjoined entities are the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the latter more commonly identified as a memorial to the victims of lynching. They are both extraordinary, though it is the second that behooves a pilgrimage. To my mind, it is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public this past April, is the first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching and racial prejudice in the US. The design, a collaborative effort between MASS Design Group and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), was recently acclaimed by architecture critic Mark Lamster as "the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century."

National Memorial for Peace and Justice by MASS Design Group, located in Montgomery, AL. Image: Equal Justice Initiative.

An investigation by the EJI documented over 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Lamster upholds the memorial's design for its ability to convey the devastating reality of this number in a physically powerful experience.

America's long overdue memorial to the victims of lynchings opens in Alabama today

2018-04-26T14:01:00-04:00

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

In a week that began with Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a new chapter of American history has begun today with the official opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a place so central to the crimes and injustice of white supremacy in the South. The memorial commemorates and dignifies the more than 4,400 black men, women, and children who were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

Image: Equal Justice Initiative

"The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given," Campbell Robertson writes for the New York Times. "But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings."

Why Build a Lynching Memorial? Video via Equal Justice Initiative on YouTube.

The memorial aims to educate for a more informed dialogue and includes a section with material on volunteer opportuni...

The Alabama memorial dedicated to African-American lynchings

2018-04-09T20:52:00-04:00

Uneven, rusted steel is meant to echo the many shades and skin tones of those African-Americans lynched.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which Oprah Winfrey
visited, opens to the public on April 26, 2018. She talked with criminal
defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is behind the project.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Montgomery, Alabama plans a memorial to the 4,000+ victims of lynchings throughout the U.S.

2017-08-21T18:08:00-04:00

Slated to open in 2018, the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama will seek to tell the truth. Six acres of land owned by the Equal Justice Initiative—the legal services nonprofit Stevenson founded in 1989—will memorialize the more than 4,000 victims of what Stevenson calls racial terror lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. A nearby museum will tell the history of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration as a single narrative.

Designed by MASS Design Group—which has previously worked on the Kigali Genocide Memorial—the memorial stems from a comprehensive report on lynchings released in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative. The memorial will feature six-foot columns, each representing counties where lynchings took place. For each column, a duplicate will be placed in the surrounding courtyard and eventually relocated to their respective counties as they directly confront their part in this history.

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.

State of Alabama Bans Sustainable Development

2012-06-13T15:07:00-04:00

The folks in Alabama have just passed a law that says quite clearly that they don’t want anything to do with sustainability. Though they might not have any problem with clean air and water and all that, it seems to be the planning for it that is the problem. Because planning, after all, is apparently what communists do.

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.