Archinect - News

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...

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 ...