Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community

Could you present the history and context of Rural Studio, the architectural program you direct?

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.

Mockbee was a very well-known Southern architect, but as an educator, he quickly got frustrated with the ivory tower of the academy. He didn’t feel that the education at the time was particularly relevant, and he challenged it by basically dragging the Studio’s students out into this little rural community where he tried to identify places and things that could be done to help. It was very much a critique of the isolation of the academy and part of his own feeling that architects needed to become more relevant, that they were somehow the playthings of the rich and the famous, and that the work that they were getting was the bread crumbs that fell off the table. 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.

Rural Studio’s mantra is “Educating citizen architects”. Could you expand on your vision of the “citizen architect” ?

The way we’ve been operating has changed considerably since Mockbee’s time. We started out with small projects for people and communities that were falling below the radar of the social services, but, around the year 2000, locals started to come to us and challenge us into getting involved in larger community projects. None of this was planned and it came about very organically. At that point, we had been operating in Hale County for seven years and had bucked the trend of conventional academics who tend to go somewhere, conduct some research, and then leave. We truly took root in Newbern as we’ve been operating in the same place for the last twenty-eight years now, trying to understand it, to become a neighbor, to be relevant, and to learn from our mistakes.

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 the 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 ? I think first about society and the greater good, and always say to my students in Hale County that being in a capacity to make a mark on this planet is an incredible privilege. We don’t see digging a hole and building as a privilege anymore, but we should. My students are all relatively privileged middle-class kids from a variety of generally suburban upbringings, but I tell them to listen and learn, to try to leave the place just a little bit better than they found it. When you come to this place, you are borrowing it, you have no right to tell people how they should live their lives. Come and observe, try to contribute just a little bit. And I think that’s what architects have to do in society— be angry, and be aspirational.

In practical terms, how do you involve the community in your projects and your program ?

I would like to think it’s symbiotic. We are not an ivory tower. The buildings that we occupy in our little village would otherwise be unoccupied, and I think the most straightforward way of describing our relationship is that we simply tried to become a neighbor and a resource, and that the local people respect us and trust us for this reason. We haven’t gone away; we take responsibility for the things that we’ve done. If we do well, we don’t hear about it, but if we screw up, they know where to complain. Another thing is that there’s very little money locally for the maintenance of buildings, so, particularly with the public buildings, every few years, we go and give them a little bit of tender loving care. We stay involved, in other words. It’s about living here and listening. We are not a helicopter program, I live half a mile up the road from the studio, and I consider myself as a member of this community, and so I have aspirations for this place and I try to listen to the aspirations of others.

And then the projects that we do come from within. We’re not sitting here trying to think of projects. If people have ideas, we hope that they’ll come to us and share them, and then we’ll critique them and say maybe that’s not the right place to do that, but we could try it over there. I’m a state employee, so I don’t have to be chasing projects, but I can advise people whether or not an idea is worth pursuing. So we are members of the community and activists in the community. Time is key here. We’re not expecting to do things very quickly and are not focused on changing the world, but simply taking incremental baby steps, changing people’s opinions and aspirations.The list of your community projects is very impressive. For instance, I read that your fire station was the first new community building to have been erected in a century, which says a lot about the area and the issues you have to face…

The list of your community projects is very impressive. For instance, I read that your fire station was the first new community building to have been erected in a century, which says a lot about the area and the issues you have to face.

This is a classic example. Locally, there had been a lot of house fires, but the trucks from other areas couldn’t get here fast enough, so buildings were burning down and the consequence was that insurance rates were on the increase. In response, people got together and formed a volunteer fire department, and I became part of that. But we needed to provide buildings because the prerequisite for getting grants for the fire trucks was to make sure that they didn’t freeze. I then suggested the Studio help residents aspire to a new public building in Newbern that could celebrate this community coming together. You have to remember that this area was one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement, so people have long memories concerning buildings. This can be both a good and a bad thing—the fact is that the embedded memory in these places is important. What is nice about it is that, unlike in an anonymous city that transforms itself very quickly, here, it’s a very slow and evolving process. But the downside is that the collective memory isn’t only positive, there is also a negative memory of who owned the building or what it represented. So to have a new building representing a new organization felt very aspirational to us. We built it and the mayor and the townspeople were all involved with it and very excited. Ultimately the volunteer fire department was probably one of the most successful organizations that I have ever been involved in.

Looking to the more individual side of the community, could you tell us about your 20K House program ?

We started the 20K Project in 2004, but it is important to first understand the evolution of the Studio. Rural Studio was created in 1993 by a very charismatic founder who died shockingly and dramatically—almost overnight—in 2001, and we sincerely didn’t know whether the program was going to be able to survive. We just kept on going, but a few years later I realized that we were here to stay, so we started to get our heads around thinking about the bigger issues that we were addressing. We weren’t going from one project to another anymore, but 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. It was as simple as that.

Speaking of schools, would you also describe Rural Studio as a pedagogical experiment ? Could you describe your teaching method ?

We are a very small program for students from third and fifth years of architecture school. For the third-years, we have a big team of 10-15 students here for a single semester, and we try to help them build a small house. They take one of the previous 20K Homes and try to take the research forward. For the fifth-years, we typically have 12 students, and they will be broken down into teams of four, which we found out was best. We are two professors, even if we both hate the term professor, because it implies that we have something to profess, whereas we’re here to learn with the students, and then we have a couple of building assistants who work with us on each project.

Our program is small and nimble, so we can be agile. I think the Studio is adapted to the challenges of the time. I’ve lived here in the middle of nowhere for the last twenty- one years, though I initially was supposed to stay here for only three months. In a sense, I got snakebit by this process, the opportunity, the energy. There’s a very can-do quality to the place. 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 think the process of working in teams is hugely important, as it gets ego out of the picture and gets rid of that goal being about the individual. I find projects and then choreograph them to some degree. Each year, we try to have a small, medium, and large project—for instance maybe a house and a small community building and then maybe a park project that’s multi-year, to make it interesting and challenging across the pedagogic range. First and foremost, it’s encouraging : there’s something at stake with these projects. It’s a remarkably rigorous process because the students know that at the end of the day, this is going to be a shelter for somebody. So you don’t want to screw it up; you don’t want it to leak. The joy of our situation is that every time we draw something, we’re thinking about whether or not we can do it and put it together. So that is both staging an organization and prioritization.

If we spend money here, we can’t spend money there. So it’s a remarkable teaching situation, and because of its rural isolation, there’s nothing else to do. We normally have visitors from all over the US and all over the world, but with COVID-19 that has stopped, by necessity, because it’s a fragile community. The isolation is tough, but things are very focused, and I think the students also enjoy it from that point of view. Apart from social media, there’s nothing to distract them. It’s all about how we can do this to the very best.

The original program was known for its work with recycled materials, but you explained that you slightly shifted your attention. Could you tell us what you are currently experimenting with ? New ways of building ? New materials ?

When we started to be asked to do community projects, we had to cut the amount of improvisation. You cannot build a firehouse just from a model, and you cannot build it with tin cans and chewing gum. You have to have more responsibility to draw it and take control of it. As a builder, you can change the building as you’re going along if you have the opportunity to do so, but you still have to walk into it with an idea and a strategy, not to improvise from scratch. For all its good intentions, some of the original Rural Studio program buildings were very sloppily put together. Now the younger students learn in a more incremental way. This was an issue of self-preservation but also of respecting the opportunity. We could not have improvised the firehouse, just with all due respect to ourselves and our community. We need to have some control and an understanding of what the finished product would be and the implications of it.

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. I started to get really concerned with 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.

You are getting much more scientific, but it’s interesting that you work on passive systems rather than pure technology. Are you not a believer in smart systems?

At the simplest level, we are very skeptical of mechanical systems doing a job if there is a natural way to do it. Just using the natural effects of heating and cooling, the movement of air… if you can do it that way, why should you have to plug something in? Why should you have to use a technology that might break? In our rural setting, we don’t have any computer-controlled cutting machines such as CNC routers for instance, because, until now, we’ve always been suspicious that we would not be able to maintain it. 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.

So, at the end of the day, more than experimentation in itself, it is fair to say that you are mostly interested in having an ethical approach and being in relation with the community ?

I wish I could tell you I had a big vision. What I would like to do is keep going the way we are right now and being curious, being a neighbor, continuing to build relationships. One of my frustrations in the world at the moment is that there’s not more of a symbiotic relationship between the urban condition and the rural condition, rather than this understanding of rural areas as essentially being an extraction place for cities.

The other thing is that, particularly in the United States, rurality isn’t broken. Over the last hundred years, the population in the rural areas has remained at sixty million. Everybody says it’s declining, but it’s just that urban population has increased. All that rural folks want is good housing and access to the things that urban folks have. For instance, I’m at the mercy of poor Internet connectivity, meaning that I can’t live here and communicate in the same way as urban folks can. There really is a need for somebody to invest to help with that issue of communication.

This area, the Black Belt, the Appalachians, or more broadly, the colonies, are what I call extraction landscapes. The history of these places is to take away. And that has had an incredible impact on the people that live here. There is endemic poverty because resources have been taken away and nothing has been put back. By 2050, the obesity rate around here is projected to rise to ninety percent due to poor education and poor diet. We live in a rural area with all this beautiful landscape around us, yet all the food that is produced here goes somewhere else. You cannot buy locally-available fresh vegetables here, which is absolutely insane and short- sighted. We need to all do something about it, for society. This is not about urban versus rural, this is about getting everybody talking to each other and caring about each other.