Educating Citizen Architects: for a meaningful architecture

Ecuating citizen architects…

Rural Studio is a program of the School of Architecture at Auburn University that is located three hours away from the university, in the small rural town of Newbern, in Hale County, Alabama. Newbern is located in what is called the Black Belt region of the state, and it’s been very much an extraction landscape, where a lot is taken away and little is given back, resulting in relatively high poverty rates and the usual kind of insecurities relating to food, health, and housing. I’ve been active here for the past twenty years, taking charge of the program after Samuel Mockbee, who started it with his colleague, D.K. Ruth, in 1993.

His mantra was that architects had to be more proactive and more engaged. The Studio was born out of this frustration with both the academy and the profession. He felt that students should have a more hands-on experience, not only in terms of making, but also in engaging with people. He was particularly interested in looking at the poverty of housing in Hale County. Mockbee was always something of a renegade, and, without calling him a socialist, he really passionately believed in socialism. He was also deeply convinced that architects should serve but also delight, which is why people and places are the basis of what we do. Problems are probably very similar everywhere, but we like to imagine that they can be addressed locally, whether it’s in the city or in the rural area, as that is what gives places their distinctive character.

As I hope the name suggests, the “citizen architect”, aspires to something greater for society. It is interesting in the sense that, in the United States, society itself is all about the individual— individuals get a job, earn money, buy things, and this is supposed to make them happy. There isn’t much about bringing to society, being a citizen, and contributing to a greater good. I happen to have been brought up and educated in the England of the 1970s, and was the lucky recipient of the high-quality social services that emerged in post-war Britain, with this idea that everyone should benefit from a good education, good health, housing, and equality of opportunity. In the United States, things are quite different, and though even Europe has started to move away from that, I nevertheless remain driven by these aspirations. Mockbee himself would always say that he didn’t send his children to university just to better themselves, but to better society. I was lucky enough to have benefited from a good, tax-paid education system where, if you were smart enough, you could go and be part of that supported system that was about raising society and its aspirations, and not just the individual. At Rural Studio, we share the same belief regarding the role of architects and what we can provide in society. Architects are aspirational, first and foremost, so, through our work on individual buildings and the agglomeration of buildings, how can we aspire to a better environment and the greater good ?

…committed towards a community…

We started to get our heads around thinking about the bigger issues that we were addressing and started to think about endemic issues that cities and small communities are facing everywhere, wondering what was particular about this place. We came to the conclusion that the poverty of housing was key in the county.

We had been building what we call “charity homes” since 1993, but they were quite idiosyncratic; they somehow tried to reinvent the wheel every year, which was really frustrating for me. I then started to think in terms of opportunities: we are in a place where people need housing, so why not use this location as a way to build knowledge and learn from the previous year? Every year, we have a fresh batch of aspirational students coming in, and we have a group of people in need of good housing that’s affordable, durable, and with affordable upkeep. Couldn’t we then have a go at this and think of them as models that could go out beyond the Studio, and on top of that help the local economy ? Let’s imagine houses that could be built in the community, by the community, and for the community. To achieve that, the money must stay in the local economy, so the materials must be purchased at the local hardware store and local people must be employed.

The 20K Project is very much a non-client-specific house. The early charity homes were much more focused on the client, but now what we hope is that people like these homes enough that they’re proud of them and that they’ll personalize them themselves. We’d love for people to take them over and give them their own identity, so we try to give them a little piece that they can take ownership of themselves without it being a huge maintenance problem.

For any systems that we use out here, we always have to consider if we can fix it if it breaks. We use septic tanks for sewage for instance, because we know at least the locals can maintain them. The question of maintenance and upkeep is fundamental. I’m all for technology, but I’m also all for the human being, and I’d rather build a house that the occupant is engaged with, and has to open the windows, and understands how to keep it cool and how to keep it warm, than having a machine or technology take over. What you do yourself, and start to understand, you can fine-tune. When technology is in charge, you become a passive consumer of that information and don’t engage with it. Something else is taking control when we should be in control of our own destiny. A technology isn’t smart if users become stupid.

…and experimenting new construction techniques

We had a reputation at the beginning of being great recyclers, and I think that has evolved just because the agenda and our understanding of the place has evolved. One of the great things is that we all work in teams, so it is all collaborative; we negotiate with each other. There isn’t a central voice. We always say that the teams can go into the ditch, but they can’t go off the cliff. They can make a mess, but we get them back on the road. We want them to take ownership of the projects and be invested in them, so they’re given a huge amount of responsibility from budgets to design to scheduling. It really is learning by doing.

I started focusing on the layers that are put into buildings. I call it the “layer cake”—each of those layers is very specific and does a specific job, and you don’t even really know where it comes from, ultimately harming the planet. Nevertheless, we are being told that we should have it that way. We started to go round and round our buildings, adding more and more layers. I took exception to this state of affairs and so we started looking for alternatives, solid timber buildings, for example. We started out with the town hall, stacking logs on top of each other, and realizing that the setup had some thermal mass and made for a very temperate building. We then established a relationship with McGill University and a brilliant scientist, Salmaan Craig, to study the broader implications of using timber.

Salmaan recently had us looking at what we’re calling a “breathing wall,” where you deliberately drill holes in a wall for the ventilation system. The way buildings are set up, we always find ourselves fighting against thermal loss, but in this case, we’re actually accepting that heat will be lost through the wall. Salmaan’s theory is that if you drill some holes in the wall and position them in the appropriate place, when hot air rises from the inside heat source, if you draw cool air in, that air being drawn in through the wall can actually capture some of the heat that’s been lost, acting as a large heat exchanger. This is very interesting from the perspective of heating, cooling, and comfort. So we’re getting into that; we’re getting much more scientific.

Somehow all of our projects are research projects, even if I don’t like using the term research, because it implies that my neighbors are like lab rats. In the academic world, it can be understood as research because we’re trying to build a body of knowledge. As architects, we’re also trying to bring knowledge to the table, because I think the world of architecture at the moment is too beholden to product manufacturers who just tell us what is important. I think architects need to bring questions and provocations to the table, to challenge, and be critical.