Rural Beats Urban

   The New York Times, April 18, 1996, pp. C1, C6.


   From Humble Sources, Earthly Elegance Springs

   By Sydney LeBlanc

      For students, the need to be hands-on, to build from
      scratch, is an inherent passion -- the reason they say
      they are pursuing this profession. And yet in most
      schools, architectural education has been going in the
      opposite direction, becoming progressively theoretical
      and abstract rather than practical, for at least a
      decade.

      "What the Rural Studio is doing really speaks to the
      students' desire to build something," said George
      Gintole, an associate professor of architecture at the
      University of Texas at Arlington. "With all the work
      that needs to be done in rural areas, this is a worthy
      attempt to repair what architectural schools have left
      out. It also constructs an invaluable bridge between the
      school and practice."

      Ruard Veltman, 25, a recent Auburn graduate, agrees.
      "Fancy architectural theories don't cut much ice with
      us," he said. "It's easy to look good on paper. We'd
      rather do something useful for someone."


   Mason's Bend, Ala.

   The Bryants had lived for 50 years in this hamlet in
   western Alabama in a leaky shed of worn-out boards and
   rusty tin patched with tar paper, with no indoor plumbing.
   This is where they raised six children and are helping to
   raise three grandchildren. Mr. Bryant once tried to build
   the family a better house, but it collapsed when he added
   the roof.

   Salvation came in the form of a farsighted band of
   architecture students from Auburn University, who built
   Shephard and Alberta Bryant, both in their 70's, their
   first real house -- its sense of place as deeply rooted as
   the Southern pines and dogwoods that surround it.

   Their 850-square-foot home has a deep front porch with
   bright yellow columns that recalls the local grand
   mansions. The sun-visor roof of corrugated clear acrylic
   adds a modern lightness to the facade and makes the porch
   a light-filled outdoor living space. And when the Bryants'
   grandchildren visit, there are sleeping niches tucked into
   a wall, like those in ship's cabins, to delight in.

   "But I tell you, the first time it rained we all held our
   breath," Mrs. Bryant said.

   Her worry was more than any new homeowner's might have
   been: the main building material was hay.

   Unconventional materials have become something of a
   hallmark for the Rural Studio, as the students of the
   architect Samuel Mockbee are called. They design and
   construct houses for some of the rural people in Hale
   County, Alabama, for whom hiring an architect would be out
   of the question. With practically no money to build with,
   the students rely on hay, old automobile tires, broken-up
   concrete curbing -- cheap and plentiful, all.

   "We are doing this in the exact place where James Agee and
   Walker Evans lived in the 1930's when they documented the
   miserable truth of the sharecroppers' lives in 'Let Us Now
   Praise Famous Men,' " Mr. Mockbee, 51, said recently. "It's
   not much different now. The needs are so great."

   And this is true for the students as well, for whom the
   need to be hands-on, to build from scratch, is an inherent
   passion -- the reason they say they are pursuing this
   profession. And yet in most schools, architectural
   education has been going in the opposite direction,
   becoming progressively theoretical and abstract rather than
   practical, for at least a decade.

   "What the Rural Studio is doing really speaks to the
   students' desire to build something," said George Gintole,
   an associate professor of architecture at the University of
   Texas at Arlington. "With all the work that needs to be
   done in rural areas, this is a worthy attempt to repair
   what architectural schools have left out. It also
   constructs an invaluable bridge between the school and
   practice."

   Ruard Veltman, 25, a recent Auburn graduate, agrees. "Fancy
   architectural theories don't cut much ice with us," he
   said. "It's easy to look good on paper. We'd rather do
   something useful for someone."

   Mr. Veltman is one of about 90 students who have gone to
   Greensboro, Ala., for three months at a stretch "looking
   for something that is real," said D. K. Ruth, an
   architecture professor at Auburn. They live in an abandoned
   antebellum house set off by ancient magnolia trees three
   stories tall. Since the start of the program in 1993, the
   students have built two houses and a chapel on an old dairy
   farm, from design to hauling stones to the sites
   themselves. Students are currently renovating a building
   for a social service agency in Greensboro, where Rural
   Studio is based, and another team will start a new project
   in the fall.

   "Our goal is to help people get what they think they need,
   not what we think they need," said Mr. Mockbee, a
   distinguished architect from the firm Mockbee Coker, as
   well as a teacher. In his houses, especially, Mr. Mockbee
   is careful to make sure that the intangibles of Southern
   life -- a sense of place, a respect for tradition -- are as
   real as boards and bricks. "We can easily envision people
   on their porches rocking in the late afternoon," he said.

   While the Bryants were delighted by the prospect of having
   a real house to live in, they were shocked to learn that
   the students would be building it out of hay. The team
   chose the rnaterial in part because it was easy to handle
   and would also act as a natural insulator. But they
   reassured the Bryants that the bales would be plastered
   over with stucco. It would look just like a "real" house
   when it was done.

   Mrs. Bryant said the idea was a novel one to her. "But we
   sure didn't want to hurt their feelings -- they were so
   nice," she recalled. "We said, 'Y'all go ahead.' Lord
   knows, anything would be better than what we had."

   Mr. Bryant's survival skills have turned him into an
   accomplished fisherman, hunter and gardener. But as the
   couple advanced in age, their lifelong resiliency seemed
   threatened. Their needs were basic: indoor plumbing, places
   to sleep, a bathroom, a level floor, a front porch and a
   septic tank. Beyond this, Mr. Bryant wished for an outside
   smokehouse for his fish and game.

   Reports of the Bryants' new house spread like wildfire
   through the back roads of their community. Suddenly, a
   chorus of newly minted architecture critics rose up to poke
   fun. "The cows are going to eat your house," some said.
   "Flowers and weeds will grow out of your walls," said
   others.

   (Actually, building with straw or hay goes back to the
   beginnings of agricultural settlement. Recently, there has
   been a revival of sorts, and there is even a national
   clearinghouse the Straw Bale Construction Association in
   Santa Fe, N.M.)

   "We worked without a blueprint," said Thomas Tretheway, a
   student. "We designed the house as we went along -- I mean,
   literally, as we were building it."

   Between late October and the end of December, 1993, the
   fall-semester students finished 95 percent of the hay
   house. The spring-semester students completed it in June
   1994.

   The main room has a hearth with a wood-burning potbelly
   stove that heats tne whole house in winter. High on the
   side walls, stained glass panels with geometric designs
   lend a Frank Lloyd Wright finesse.

   It cost $16,500 to build the Bryant house, a sum covered by
   grants and gifts from local merchants. The hay cost only
   $350: the rest of the budget covered leveling the site,
   pouring the foundation, lumber for framing and the roof as
   well as the kitchen, bathroom and septic tank.

   With the main house completed, the dream of the smokehouse
   still lingered. Scott Stafford, 25, another student, took
   it upon himself to build it from broken-up concrete curbing
   and parts of an old silo that was being demolished. He
   spent all of $40 to create the 5-by-8-foot structure. The
   roof, cut from sheets of tin, has a beautiful twist; it
   follows the lines of the curved, sawed-off timbers from an
   old Quonset hut that support it. The tiny smokehouse sits
   in the Bryants' front yard and has the earthy elegance
   associated with LeCorbusier's chapel at Ronchamp in France.
   But the walls are dotted with colorful soft-drink bottles
   set in mortar between pieces of broken concrete. "When I
   turn on the light in there," Mr. Bryant said, "my
   smokehouse lights up like a little town."

   Mrs. Bryant said, "Those students made us such a beautiful
   home, so cool in the summer and warm in the winter."

   When the students came back to the Rural Studio in the fall
   of 1994, three of them -- Mr. Veltman, Mr. Tretheway and
   Steven Durden -- were so impressed by the chapel-like
   quality of the Bryant smokehouse that they decided to
   design and build a chapel themselves. They had in mind a
   structure that would be beautiful and spiritually
   uplifting, yet somewhat mystifying. The owners of an estate
   in nearby Sawyerville offered them a wooded part of their
   property to build on.

   "Having decided to do this chapel, and having gotten this
   gorgeous place to build it, we had to find something we
   could build it with," Mr. Veltman said. "We had no money at
   all."

   A most unusual answer came to them: build the chapel with
   one thousand used automobile tires donated by a man under
   court order to clear his land. The team scavenged rusted
   I-beams from the Alabama Transportation Department, big
   trusses, pine from a 100-year-old house, sheets of tin from
   an old barn, and river slate.

   The chapel, an open-air structure has the feel of a small
   cathedral. The corrugated tin roof is sharply pitched and
   open down the middle. The tire walls were covered in stucco
   and painted an earthy red-brown creating an unusual bubble
   effect that looks convincingly solid, like fieldstones.

   The soothing atmosphere of the chapel belies the
   circumstances of its construction. "We finished the chapel
   in a panic," said Jon Tate who helped with the project. "We
   were down to our last piece of wood. We had to make it
   work."

   An "outdoor sculpture" of old tires is heaped on the
   grounds, a celebration of the chapel's construction.

   Back in Greensboro, the rest of the class was busy
   designing and building a house for Dorothy and Larnie
   Wilson. The Wilsons, who own a country restaurant, secured
   a $27,000 bank loan to buy the materials.

   Their new house, just completed, has a two-story "tower"
   and a deeply overhanging tin roof. And here, found
   materials have created a serendipitous luxury: one facade
   is covered wlth mahogany someone donated.

   For Mr. Mockbee, the students' work has yielded worthwhile
   surprises.

   "I found early on that if I gave strict directions, the
   results were predictable," he said. "And when I turned them
   loose, they unleashed a whole new world of possibilities."

   [Seven photos] Symbols of the South shaped the home
   architecture students built Alberta Bryant (in chair), from
   its deep porch to its sun-visor roof. Humble materials
   included hay and curbstones (smokehouse, top right).

   Left, Shephard Bryant at his smokehouse: Bottles brighten
   curbstone walls, road signs "pave" ceiling. Above, the
   house, designed to instill a sense of belonging. Inset,
   living room with cozy sleeping niches, rear.

   The uplifting design of an outdoor chapel built by students
   (left) belies its castoff materials, which include rubber
   tires at the base. The architect Samuel Mockbee (standing
   below) with some of the students from his Rural Studio.

   [End]


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