critique of the Rural Studio
I was contacted by George Dodds and Gabrielle Esperdy of JAE to do a review of the Rural Studio. This was a difficult assignment. I have visited Mason’s Bend on several occasions and enjoyed their hospitality (including this time in 2002). I wanted to offer a thoughtful critique of the complex work being done in Hale County, connecting it to larger theoretical issues and questions. My hope for this article was for it to serve as a tool in the arsenal of design-build practices in architecture schools. I want to give special thanks to Anne Sledge Bailey for her generous help in facilitating information as well as access to The Greensboro Watchman.
The pedagogy of the Rural Studio is structured on an asymmetrical social contract hidden behind an organic vision of design practices. Dialogues are established from a position of disciplinary power that claims vast networks of justification and validation. Architecture is the formidable negotiating table on which the Rural Studio comes to talk to the community. Gift economies are based on dynamic two-way relationships. How does the community reciprocate? How does it acknowledge and build its relation to the Rural Studio? By people accepting the gift of architecture. Official Rural Studio photographer Timothy Hursley’s now iconic images, published in Andrea Oppenheimer Dean’s two books on Rural Studio and also available on the Rural Studio website, underscore this receiving mode. People sit enjoying their gift, staging their lives in architecture. Architecture, however, sets clear limits to appropriation and transformation, revealing transgressions with a brutality unknown in vernacular practices. The unease with which the furniture of ‘‘the poor’’ inhabit these houses clearly manifests the difficulty of ownership.This is especially poignant in the Lucy (Carpet) House (2002) where the naked concrete clashes with the plush couch in the family room or the baroque wooden dresser/vanity collides with the jagged geometry of the bedroom tower.
“‘Ye Shall Receive:’ The Rural Studio and the Gift of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 62, 4 (May, 2009):123-26.