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MOST TOURS OF Rural Studio buildings bypass the Shiles House, located about nine miles west of Newbern. It suffers from overeagerness by its student-architects, who lavished on it an overabundance of ideas, forms, materials, and finishes. The problem with all second-year projects, Freear says, is that the students are like sixteen independent orchestra conductors, and they all want to do something different. Students chose Tracy Shiles and her two boys as clients in 2001, the last time a...
Info
IN 1996, WILLIAM MORRISETTE donated an 1830s Gothic-revival manse called Chantilly to the Rural Studio and had the house hauled nearly fifteen miles from Greensboro to Newbern. Chantilly remains a renovation waiting to happen, but its formerly flat, scruffy backyard has been transformed into a welcoming amphitheater. In 2000, thesis students Lee Cooper and Trinity Davis shaped the earth to create a hill sloping down to a flat area where they placed a concrete stage and a metal armature for a...
Building A Pavilion
THE FIRST TIME our team Nathan Orrison, Anthony Tindill, Mary Beth Maness, and I explored our thesis site, we crept out onto a flooding landscape caused by a change in course by the winding Cahaba River. This was the old Perry Lakes Park, which was created in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration and closed in the 1970s. Left behind was a place that had been untouched by the people of Perry County for over thirty years. The lake had deeply rooted cypress trees and water tupelos...
Text by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean photographs by Timothy Hursley
Princeton Architectural Press, New York Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657. Visit our web site at www.papress.com. 2005 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has...
Rural Studio Reacts To Its Loss
THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2001-02 was highly emotional. On December 30, 2001, a soul-chilling day in Jackson, Mississippi, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio's founding heart and guiding spirit, died of leukemia. Three days later, students and faculty gathered for his funeral ninety miles east of Jackson in Meridian, the city of his birth and childhood. That January, they came together at Auburn University to honor his talent and humanity. In March, New York's Max Protetch Gallery held a memorial, and in...
Edward Daniel
MAYOR OF MARION, ALABAMA, 1996-CLIENT, 2001-04 Edward Daniel has compared Perry Lakes Park to Walden Pond. What excited me most about this facility is that it's in Perry County, which was considered a third world country, he told me in January 2004. At the time he was serving his second term as mayor of Marion, the county seat, and was a member of the governing board of Perry Lakes Park. The board has served as the Rural Studio's client on a three-year project for the park that was two-thirds...
Contents
18 RURAL STUDIO REACTS TO ITS LOSS 54 UNDER ANDREW FREEAR, THE PACE INTENSIFIES 82 PERSONALIZED PROJECTS BOTH BIG AND SMALL 104 Perry Lakes Park Facilities 114 Newbern Little League Baseball Field 124 Thomaston Rural Heritage Center 132 EVER-CHANGING, THE RURAL STUDIO REMAINS A MOVING TARGET 134 Avery Organic Vegetable Stand 146 Utility Now Bicycle Street Sweepers 160 Experiencing the Rural Studio Interviews with Students, a Teacher, and a Client
Introduction
THE RURAL STUDIO in southwest Alabama has been called Redneck Taliesin, but the comparison is superficial. True, Samuel Mockbee and Frank Lloyd Wright, both founders of famed design build programs, were charismatic teachers who pried open the minds of their students with evocative stories and practical lessons instead of dry theory. Wright spoke of Taliesin as having simply shaken itself out of my sleeve. Mockbee's told his Rural Studio students, Screw the theory choose the more beautiful. But...
Julie
SECOND-YEAR STUDENT, 1999-2000 FIFTH-YEAR STUDENT, 2002-03 When I met Julie Hay, she was seventeen feet off the ground and bent over one of the steel arches of the recently completed Newbern Little League Baseball Field, her thesis project. After she finished mending a piece of catfish netting that spans the backstop's arches, she stepped onto the arm of a backhoe, was lowered back to earth, and joined me for a talk. It was five months after her graduation. Bad weather had delayed her project,...
Mari Michael Glassell
Mari Michael Glassell grew up in the small resort community of Gulf Shores, Alabama. I've never experienced the kind of poverty I'm experiencing in Hale County, she told me in late 2003 during a break from her work on the Patrick House. What impressed her most about the people she met in Newbern was that they have so much heart. I've talked to a lot of people, especially to the domino gang, the Patricks. I played dominos with them. Often, people just sit on their porches and wave to us as we...
B
Mockbee's last design, called Lucy's House, was built with a tornado shelter as a family room, a tower, and walls of surplus carpet tiles. Mockbee's last design, called Lucy's House, was built with a tornado shelter as a family room, a tower, and walls of surplus carpet tiles. Community Affairs. In addition, Mockbee's last design, called Lucy's House, was reinterpreted and built by outreach students. With surplus carpet tiles forming its exterior walls, Lucy's House is in Mason's Bend, the...
Another Dimension Of Sambo
MY FAMILY AND I were excited to be at the National Building Museum to accept the 2004 aia Gold Medal Award for Sambo on March 3, 2004. Sambo would have been honored to share the podium with I. M. Pei, who most deservedly won the aia's Twenty-five Year Award for his East Building of the National Gallery of Art, and with Lake Flato, who were given the aia Firm Award. Sambo worked a long, long time to achieve all that he did. He decided that he wanted to be an architect when he was six years old....
Jay Sanders
SECOND-YEAR STUDENT, 1997-98 FIFTH-YEAR STUDENT, 2000-01 CLERK OF WORKS, 2001-02 SECOND-YEAR INSTRUCTOR, 2002-04 The high point of Jay Sanders's two-year teaching career was getting to know Music Man, a.k.a., Jimmy Lee Matthews, for whom Sanders and his students built a house. His friendship with Music Man, Sanders told me, was my first serious relationship with someone living in poverty. When they met, Music Man was living in a rusty trailer without running water or heat. Here was someone...
Carol Mockbee
Carol Mockbee, the youngest of Sambo and Jackie Mockbee's three daughters and older sister to their son Julius was twenty years old when her father died. As a child, she says, I never thought about the fact that my father was an artist and was cool and that he was doing great things for other people. In high school I began to catch on a little. A lot of people in town thought he was weird he was this big mountain man with a beard, outside in the summers doing art. I never thought it was weird....
