Two days at the Rural Studio: part one (edited)

It’s Thursday evening, in the quiet town of Greensboro, Alabama. I’m sitting on the steps of a small detached house on a shady street. Across from me is the town’s football field, and from time to time cars come by, perhaps on their way to or from the town’s supermarket, the Piggly Wiggly.

Sitting in the shade of a low hanging tree in front of me is my little red hire car. Together we have now racked up almost four hundred miles, criss-crossing Hale, Perry and neighbouring counties of Alabama. I have had two days to explore the heartland of the Rural Studio, and to visit some of the projects that have helped bring the school its world wide fame. It has been a wholly enjoyable little trip, giving me the chance to see some of the buildings that I have admired for years, and to get a taste of how the school works.

On Wednesday morning, I returned to Newbern to talk some more with Ann and Brenda, the two admin staff at the Rural Studio. I work out a plan for my explorations, and talk a bit with them about where I have come from and why I’m here. Without sounding too gushy, this is something of a pilgrimage for me, or at least a holiday which is built around a visit to the Newbern. Most of the newly arrived students (term began here less than a fortnight ago) are away at the main university campus in Auburn, putting together an exhibition on the work of the Rural Studio. The place is not entirely deserted, however, as there remain a number of ‘leftover’ students, who have yet to complete the building projects that were started in the previous academic year. One project is on site, creating a small courtyard garden in Greensboro’s small hospital. The other is creating a dog pound for the city of Greensboro that will be built on a plot of land adjacent to the county jail. That project has yet to go on site, but a full size prototype of the structure is being constructed behind another house owned by the university in Newbern.

I drive up the street and find a few of the students at work on the building, a beautifully light arch structure that is composed of interlocking timber pieces. The modular structure can be built to create a long, free standing and self supporting building. It reminds me instantly of a similar wood construction that was built at the Weald and Downland Museum in England. The mock-up is about to lifted off it’s supporting structure and placed onto delicate steel struts that will support the weight of the roof. If all goes well with this next step, the team of four students tell me they hope to begin on site this week.

I stop off once again at the Newbern Mercantile store to borrow the key to one of Newbern’s most notable recent projects. Directly opposite the store and the school’s studio space is the Newbern Volunteer Fire Hall. The remarkably simple structure is executed in timber and black steel. The bulk of the skin of the building is a translucent plastic material that may reappear on the dog pound later this summer. The building is not particularly large (it has room for two fire tenders parked end to end), it has the sophistication and quality of finish of a building that had twice the budget. It’s hard to believe that a group of architecture students designed and built this facility. Sensitive and mature use of materials, such as in the choice of timber for the interior ceiling or the slats that surround the washrooms and kitchen space is balanced with delicate touches of entertainment: the stair to the upstairs meeting space is constructed with two slices of the same oversize steel stair section, offset by a couple of inches to create and stepped staircase. Everywhere I look, the finish is near perfect: junctions and joints are tight, and the cleaness of the design is complimented by a very thorough construction.

From Newbern, it’s a drive of half an hour to Mason’s Bend. You probably won’t find Mason’s Bend on any map except the one the Rural Studio distributes. It’s a small community of dilapidated trailers and shacks at the end of narrow lane, which in turn is at the end of a minor county road. Hidden in a thick forrest, Mason’s Bend could be the Alabama that America forgot. A black community living well below the poverty line in substandard housing, often without proper facilities.

Except Mason’s Bend has become one of the Rural Studio’s landmark sites. In this small community there are a half dozen projects, built in the last decade or so by students of Auburn. All but one are houses, and one of them (the Green House) was officially handed over to its new occupant less than a week ago.

Above: the Haybale House, with it’s large overhanging roof providing shade to the thick walled structure behind.

The famous Carpet House, so called because the exterior wall nearest the camera in this shot is constructed with layer upon overlapping layer of surplus carpet tiles. The large, overhanging roof provides shade to the large windows (this image was taken around midday, when the temperature was hovering around the mid thirties).

The name of the Butterfly House needs no explanation… as with many Rural Studio domestic projects, a spacious screened-in outside porch is included, providing a blissful space that is both indoors and outdoors, catching even the gentlest of breezes and shading occupants from the intense midday sun.

Completed this summer, this (above) is the Green House, a home built for the daughter of a Mason’s Bend resident who moved into her own new Rural Studio house last year. The two houses face each other across a small raised garden. As I stand taking photographs of the two homes, a car pulls up and I am introduced to the mother who will soon have her daughter living directly across from her. She introduces herself and invites me to look around inside. The back door is open, and step around. Once again, the finish of the house is incredible. Two light, spacious bedrooms feature floor to ceiling windows, and share a masonry wall with the other internal space, a large kitchen/living room. Above the kitchen is a tower, which will carry warm air up and out of the interior.

The two houses, with the Green House to the rear. Expect to seem them in a trendy architectural magazine near you soon, and expect to do a double take when you read that they’re both in rural Alabama, not California.

I drive back to Greensboro for lunch, in the strangely deserted Smokehouse Restaurant. When my lunch comes, the large oval plate is similarly deserted, with a burger at one end a toddler’s handful of fries at the other end. Perhaps that’s why there are so few people here. Near-by, some of the ‘leftover’ students are working on the courtyard garden of Greensboro’s small hospital. I drive by and find the students arranging some plants which will soon be growing up and over a structure of steel and wire to create a shady terrace. Raised beds are faced in broken chunks of marble, bought very cheaply from a stonemason that specialises in making headstones for graves.

I chat with the students about the project. It will doubtless be a calm and attractive courtyard when it’s finished, but there is an honest sense of admission amongst the people working on the project that the end is a long way off. Several months have already passed since the end of the academic year in which this project began, and less than a quarter of the garden is complete. As it’s nearing the end of the day, two of the students jump at the opportunity to leave the site and show me one of the studio’s more interesting recent and unpublished projects.

This one of the prototypes of the ‘20k house’, a home which could theoretically built by a developer for less than $20,000 (about £10,700) using readily available materials and construction techniques. I’m introduced to the man who has recently moved into this, the most recent evolution of the project. Each year, a new group of students takes on the brief and produces a prototype. The house is a simple timber framed structure, with a single large room inside. There’s a small kitchen counter and a bathtub and toilet to the rear. A white curtain separates the front and back of the single room.

At the rear the roof continues over a screened in stoop. The same timber frame that supports the walls of the house (which are clad in inexpensive corrugated stainless steel) emerges here. Walking out onto the back porch makes you realise that this house actually has another room here: a pracitcal outdoor space that catches the breeze and is useable for most of the year in the warm Alabama climate. The building is beautiful because it is so simple. The implications of the 20k project are great: in the wake of last year’s hurricane season, the importance of cheap and rapidly built low-income housing is more relevant than ever before. Later on in my trip, I was to see thousands of caravans in New Orleans, as authorities desperately tried to find a solution to a massive housing crisis in the city that was flooded after Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps the solution to those made homeless by future hurricanes can be found right here, in Greensboro, Alabama.

My day ends in Newbern, where I meet up once more with the students who have been working on the dog pound prototype structure.

During the day, the arch framework of the building was successfully rolled into position and lifted down onto the steel pins that connect it to the concrete strip foundations. The supporting structure that had held the arch together during its construction was lowered on its hydraulic base, and rolled back to let the structure stand freely.

These pins are causing some concern, since they seem to be experiencing too much stress in their lower joints. It’s not a major problem, however, and one of the students explains to me how the next struts will be made from two pieces of steel welded together, rather than a single piece folded in two points.

I’m privileged to have actually seen some progress in one of the Studio’s live projects. As the sun sets towards the west, I also get to glimpse some of the satisfaction that Rural Studio students experience when a building begins to take shape. While the hospital garden project seemed to be dragging down the other group of students, it was encouraging to see the flip side, and the rewards that come when a good day on site comes together. This prototype structure in the yard of the student residence will be extended and finished to make a barn for one of the Rural Studio’s trucks. Work will begin on the foundations of the actual Dog Pound tomorrow.

Welcome to the Rural Studio

When Andrew Freear, current director of the Rural Studio of the Auburn University School of Architecture, spoke at the University of Sheffield a few years ago, he described the small village of Newbern as a ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ kind of place. I don’t think that’s quite fair, but it is true to say that if you were to sneeze at 70km/h, you would certainly miss most of it. The sign at the edge of town that reads ‘Newbern Town Limits’ seems to be an overstatement. Stretched out along a single dead straight road, Newbern is definitely more like a village, or even a hamlet. Only a few buildings, mostly built for long failed commercial purposes, are brave enough to sit right on the main road. A couple of homes are dotted alongside the road, ranging from overgrown trailers to attractive, turn of the century whitewashed colonial-style houses that sit back from the road, in the middle of lush, green lawns.

I arrive in Newbern just after four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. I recognise the town immediately from the photographs, slides, magazines and the books. This quiet corner of rural Alabama is of immense importance to some of the ideas that have emerged in my interest in becoming an architect. If there is any one school of architecture in the world that I envy, I can say that it is most the school that is based here. For fourteen years, Auburn University has allowed one, and then two years of its architecture syllabus to be taught here. Founded by the late Sam Mockbee, and subsequently lead by the Englishman Andrew Freear, the school brings architecture students out from their warm, secure and safe studio environment and drops them into the real world. Each year, the undergraduate, postgraduate and a third group of ‘outreach’ students undertake real life building projects here in rural Alabama. There is always a real client, a real budget, and a very real timescale (although the last two have been known to be stretched).

I find the studio’s red barn (an old building on Newbern’s main street) to be locked, but the husband and wife who operate the adjacent mercantile store direct me further down the road to Morisette House, which is the administrative heart of the Rural Studio. I introduce myself to Anne, one of the secretarial staff, and get given a warm welcome and a map of the studio’s projects. In an area of no more than one hundred square kilometres, Alabama has a concentration of note worthy contemporary architecture that could rival virtually every other state in the country. I’m too tired to begin exploring straightaway, so I head back to Greensboro to find a motel for the night. There is only one motel, so it’s a fairly easy choice to make. At $35 a night, I don’t expect much from the room, which means I’m not too disappointed with what I find. On the recommendation of the Rural Studio staff, I sample the peak of Greensboro’s culinary sophistication, a recently opened Mexican restaurant in the town. I eat well, and return to collapse on my king sized bed. Cable television only serves to put me to sleep quickly. I will begin my explorations tomorrow.

From the Crescent to a Cobalt

The conductor has been leaning out of the open door for a few minutes as the train approaches Tuscaloosa station. As the train creaks to a halt, he kicks a lever and folds down the steps from the vestibule to the pavement. I say thank you to my coach attendant and pass her a tip (“just enough for a Daiquiri”), before stepping down onto the platform at Tuscaloosa station. “Platform” is an vague description, because the Crescent is almost three times longer than the station at Tuscaloosa, and I am actually stepping off the train into a busy main road that crosses the railway tracks. A menacing pick-up track is bubbling away in front of me, waiting for this inconsiderate mode of public transport to get out of its way.

Very few people get off here, and even fewer get on. I walk to the payphone outside the station, and by the time I have lifted the receiver the train has already thundered away to cover the last six hours it takes to reach New Orleans from here. I call the rental agency, and wait for my car. Sitting in the shade of the attractive old railway station, I am sweating like an Englishman in Alabama. It is both hotter and more humid than anywhere I can remember having visited. Even a friendly man who is waiting for a ride himself (and who gives the confident appearance of a local) agrees with me when he says it’s hot.

Caught in the triangle between the railway tracks and two roads that cross the tracks at either end of the platform, Tuscaloosa railway station is in a quiet corner of Tuscaloosa. I watch cars and trucks rattle over the level crossings, attempting to spot the rental car that will be coming to pick me up. After ten minutes, my ride arrives. An employee from the Enterprise car rental agency has come to pick me up in a suitable vehicle: a gigantic double cab pick-up truck that he drives right onto the station platform. It’s almost as big as a train, and I board it in much the same manner. My driver is amused to hear that I am in Alabama for a holiday: most of their business providing hire cars is to people who have theirs in the garage for repairs. And judging by the number of people in the office when we arrive, either American cars aren’t very reliable, or there are a lot of road accidents in Alabama. It seems the world and his wife needs a replacement car while theirs is in for repairs.

Paperwork is passed about, customers are apologised to, and car keys are lost, found and dropped. It has taken one car returned without its fuel cap (and therefore unavailable for rental) for everything to fall apart. I take the time to stretch my legs, refill my bottle of water from the cooler and make conversation with a gentleman sat behind me. He looks at my large backpack and asks me if I’m going hiking. “Not exactly…” I reply.

The delay isn’t too long, and every employee of Enterprise is apologetic. I sign the paperwork, agree with the rental agent that I have indeed got an incredible rate (about $150, or £75, for a week’s rental), and take the keys to my next mode of transport. After the imposing stainless steel Amtrak Crescent, my journey continues in a cheap Chevrolet Cobalt sedan. I remembered to ask for directions to Greensboro and Newbern, but still manage to do a quick tour of Tuscaloosa’s suburban strip malls and ring roads. I pass the Enterprise office ten minutes after leaving it, but don’t make the same mistake again. I’m soon on route 69 south, and am less than one hour away from the small town that I’ve read so much about.

Snapshot: the ‘Crescent’ in Tuscaloosa

Train 19: breakfast, lunch and Tuscaloosa

My overnight train ride from Washington DC began its second day somewhere around Gainesville, Georgia. Having avoided the overprice and over microwaved evening meal that Amtrak offers in its restaurant car, I gave breakfast a go. The plates are cheaper, and Amtrak’s policy of sitting you with other diners always makes for interesting early morning conversations. My dining companion this morning did not sleep too well, having been unable to get the thermostat in his sleeping compartment respond to his desired temperature. This is the great joy of being a coach class passenger on Amtrak. Having not spent the additional accommodation fare for a ‘roomette’ ($111 for Washington to Tuscaloosa) I can enjoy some early morning schadenfraude while listening to the disappointments of passengers from the sleeping car. I am not going to make a good travel writer, because I have forgotten the name of this friendly gentleman already. But he is returning to Baton Rouge from Lynchburg, Virginia, where he has just deposited his son at college and where he and his wife are considering moving to. We talk about the differences in house prices, climates and cultures, both between Louisiana and Virginia, and between the USA and Great Britain. Can the average price of a house in Great Britain really be around £200,000 (about USD$400,000)?

The scenery has changed overnight. The train is creaking around twists and turns along a single track, occasionally passing freight trains that have had the rare dignity to pause for us in sidings. I am finding it hard to be a polite participant in the breakfast conversation: outside our window are deep forests of tall green trees that have been draped in the fast and dense growing kudzu, which my breakfast companion tells me is a plant first introduced from Africa. I have never seen this ivy-like plant before: it seems intent on world domination, spreading itself across forest floors, up tree trunks and down drooping branches. In many of the small valleys that we cross or pass alongside, it appears to be the only plant visible.

We are slightly late through Atlanta. To our left I can see the grand shimmering skyline of this big city. It’s a good view, because as with many cities outside the north-eastern states, Atlanta’s Amtrak station is a depressingly hovel of a place, out in the suburbs. It’s smaller and less well equipped than many commuter rail stations I have been to. I walk up and down the platform a bit, and help Tabitha unload some rubbish sacks from one of the coach cars. It’s only just nine o’clock in the morning, but it’s already hot and humid. I normally say that I like to step off the train ‘to get some air’. Here, I decide to get back on to get some cooler air conditioned air.

I read, and doze my way through the morning. We’re scheduled to arrive at Tuscaloosa at 13h11 (or as Amtrak call it, 111P, because Americans don’t seem to like the twenty-four hour clock). I conservatively add an hour to that, and spend the rest of the morning watching the green plant life and red soil of the scenery go by. When we pass through a town, we usually get treated to a view of the ugly, industrial side of it. Not having had the time to bring a snack for lunch on board with me, I find myself back in the dining car after just five hours for lunch: a Caesar salad and the same dining companion. There only seems to be a half dozen passengers who frequent the dining car. We are all men, and probably all rush too quickly to announce how much we prefer taking the train to other forms of transport.

Birmingham is the last stop before Tuscaloosa, and it reminds me of Birmingham back home in England. It is grey, ugly and has a lot of rail yards (apologies to residents of both Birminghams, I will return one day to make up for that dismissive statement). I go back to my coach seat to gather my belongings together and to wait for the next stop. By now, I have followed Paul Theroux as far as Guatemala City, and having read his account of travel on Guatemalan railways, Amtrak feels like the Orient Express. Less than twenty minutes from Tuscaloosa, we come to a halt. After a few moments, the conductor announces that this is to allow the north bound Crescent to pass us in the opposite direction. We wait in a rocky cutting for a while, watching the same rocks, stones and trees outside our windows for about ten minutes. There is a roaring crescendo of sound to our right, and a flash of silver, blue and red flies past, carrying a few hundred passengers back towards Washington and New York City.

We creep forward, and Tuscaloosa soon emerges on either side of our train.