It all began in 1993, with a smokehouse made of salvaged concrete and road signs; the following year, it was an elegant home built from hay bales. The program was co-founded by the architect Samuel “Sambo’’ Mockbee, who believed that architecture could be used with creativity and environmental sensitivity to improve the living and working conditions of one of the country’s most impoverished regions.
Hale County was memorably portrayed by photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’’ the Depression-era book of text and images. Students move here to live, design, and work on projects with the community, for periods lasting up to a year or more. Mockbee died in 2001 at 57, soon after winning a MacArthur ’’genius grant,’’ but his goal “not to have a warm, dry house, but to have a warm, dry house with a spirit to it’’ continues to be realized year in and year out.
More than 80 projects have followed the smokehouse. Recently, the focus has shifted to ambitious, multi-year projects that benefit larger portions of the community around the tiny town of Newbern, where the Rural Studio is situated, about an hour and 45 minutes from Birmingham. The newer public projects also make it easier for architecture fans to access and appreciate the designs. Travelers can tour the studio, and pick up a map to visit the people and projects that bring a striking kind of beauty and grace to this part of the rural South.
At the birding tower, students used materials from a donated fire tower and, along with the construction of walkways, a bridge, restrooms, and a swooping picnic pavilion, gave unparalleled access to a protected woodland landscape that had been closed to the public for 30 years.
“I hope that a project like this shows what you can do here. It celebrates the natural beauty of the place. If we tried to do this in Central Park, they would have said absolutely not, look at the liability,’’ Freear said, as we stood amid the swaying treetops. “But down here, they say, Why not? And the kids figured out how to do it.’’
