Site-specific in the middle of nowhere

What is life like after Rural Studio? A Visiting at Auburn University, Giacomo “Piraz” Pirazzoli describes a method centred on an attentive rereading of local conditions, a dialogue with clients and the available technology and materials – all in continuity with the surrounding social fabric.

I shall refer readers to www.ruralstudio.org and the excellent Rural Studio at Twenty curated by Andrew Freear and Elena Barthel (Princeton, 2014) to avoid repeating what is already known about this special design & build studio founded in 1993 by D.K. Ruth and “Sambo” Mockbee as an educational process on the Auburn University campus at Newbern, Alabama.

Having been under the direction of Andrew Freear since 2001, Rural Studio is a handful of appropriate and pertinent social-action maniacs who work on a daily basis in the human and physical Black Belt fabric of this extremely poor region in the States.

There are two training paths: one is a Bachelor course run by Elena and the other is a Master course conducted by Andrew, plus an Outreach for external students. Elena and Andrew – also partners in real life, evoking the Smithsons and Venturi and Scott-Brown – work with people as solid as they are authoritative, such as Xavier Vendrell, a former promise of Catalan architecture, at present a professor in Chicago.

Since there is little point in reasoning about architecture without having a perception of it, I spent two days travelling on three connecting flights and a couple of hours in a car from North Carolina to Alabama, through the horizontal southern landscape. I went via Greensboro – the acclaimed capital of the catfish – and saw a first Rural Studio's work along the road: the Farmers Market (2011). I, finally, arrived in Newbern where I recognized the Fire Station (2004) beside the Town Hall (2011) and, opposite, the famed operations centre of Rural Studio, the Red Barn; close-by, the new library to open in a few days. Three hundred metres on, I came across the Morrisette House (from 2010), the farm with a solar greenhouse and other facilities under construction. There to greet me was Elena Barthel, at work with students and assistants welding and installing doors and windows. Unfortunately, I could not dive in and give them a hand right away for bureaucratic and insurance reasons, and so struggled to enter the collective work ritual.

Much has been written about the ethical commitment of Rural Studio, which works with the local community as a practical unit of its academy. After a critical session with Elena's students – along with Margaret Fletcher and William T. Dooley, who drove down in two and a half hours from Auburn – my presence in loco raises new questions.

Firstly, the alternative sense of the operation. Once a brilliant part of traditional British training, design & build courses are now in the programmes of global universities and held primarily in extreme locations in Africa and India, true “elsewheres”. Often, they are organized in collaboration with NGOs and international bodies, or are part of programmes generously funded by ministries and the universities themselves. If we were to analyse some of the products of such courses in energy terms – take the case of a certain multi-award-winning school with natural ventilation etc. – we would reach the conclusion that the school, albeit inspired by sustainability principles and the use of local materials, had an overall cost (if we include plane tickets, board & lodging, transport and all else) of at least three times the sum it would have cost if constructed with slightly less global labour and designers. That is to say, they could have built three schools for the same sum.

Since cost matters here in Alabama, they act differently from the outset and in continuity with the local social fabric, within a radius of a few miles. Without adopting a hyper-local or “folk” approach, they design and build normal architecture that is neither arrogant nor self-narrative. There is no Rural Studio brand (or style) but a case by case concept based on a careful rereading of the local conditions, a dialogue with the clients and the available technology and materials. This puts the notion of sustainability at the very core of the constructions as too in the plural-production ethos, simple but never banal. This fosters an architect-citizen who is part of the community and works on behalf of the group – in a peculiar manner that seems not to resemble that of Dudok in Hilversum or that of De Carlo in Urbino.

With this purpose, students and professors interact without the personalistic Western desire to study and then go and build a skyscraper that is taller or more twisted than the one beside it in some rich “elsewhere” and put their name on it as the superego of the archistars – knowing servants of hyper luxury and, therefore, of inequality – demands. This attitude is revolutionary compared with the figure of the architect leader on which dominant thought is still based, and not only in the West.

Architecturally speaking, the results are also poetic – like the structures in Perry Lakes Park (2002-2005), a fascinating natural site, and like Lions Park (2006-) in Greensboro where children play between the ground and a cloud, both made out of salvaged drums, in an inventive lightness that is perhaps comparable only with the work of Lina Bo Bardi. Then there is the renovation of the Safe House Black History Museum (2010) in a building where Martin Luther King took refuge two weeks before being assassinated.

The 20K $ Houses (2005-) are more than a reality-check exercise, they are a challenge that was met and the stakes raised. Many 20K $ Houses have been built and are inhabited by the families who committed to this adventure, often bringing different cultures and a scarcity of material wealth.

My impression – in this expanded village of 120 residents, far away from cinemas, theatres and other urban things – is that they are a handful of happy resisters. Well before the New Year’s Eve Party, former students who have graduated arrive to lend an enthusiastic hand and I try to understand what life is like after Rural Studio and whether this design & build course works in terms of what they encounter on the outside. Whether, for example, the quest for simplicity in that joint or detail helped them in their lives afterwards. The question attracts mixed but consistent answers from former students who – having perhaps spent less time on theoretical speculation – work with some significance as regards being in the world.

I notice that everyone in the town knows Rural Studio and greets Elena, having seen her frequently on the construction sites with her students – and not on television.

Site-specific in the middle of nowhere

What is life like after Rural Studio? A Visiting at Auburn University, Giacomo “Piraz” Pirazzoli describes a method centred on an attentive rereading of local conditions, a dialogue with clients and the available technology and materials – all in continuity with the surrounding social fabric.

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