Also this issue: DAG Would ! An upcoming planning forum is designed to help shape the city’s future. -Daniel Kelley

May 1- 7, 2003

cityspace

Sweet Home

by Daniel Brook

Last Wednesday, the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) convened its annual meeting and focused on, of all things, the architecture of rural Alabama. The meeting featured a screening of The Rural Studio, a documentary about an Auburn University architecture program in which students design and construct innovative buildings for impoverished Alabama communities. The film, which was produced by Alabama PBS, told the story of Professor Sam Mockbee and his students. Working in the "Black Belt" of southern Alabama, students built structures for donation to the community. The works included a wheelchair-accessible home built for a disabled woman, a community chapel and a farmer’s market for the tiny boarded-up downtown of Thomaston, Ala., where the nearest supermarket is 10 miles down the road. The students’ designs use local materials, like walls made of local red clay, and have a distinctly avant-garde aesthetic with their off-center roofs. Call it "Alabama modernism."

The Auburn program has gained national acclaim, even making it onto Oprah, and Mockbee himself won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship shortly before he died in 2001.

Beth Miller of the AIA's Community Design Collaborative, a program in which architects donate their skills for community projects, said she wanted Philadelphia architects to see the work of the Rural Studio and Professor Mockbee. Even though backwoods Alabama would seem to have very few similarities to Philadelphia, Miller said she thought the concept that architecture "is more than a building, it's a social art form," was universal.

Here in Philadelphia, the Community Design Collaborative has donated services to cash-strapped nonprofits like the Minority Arts Resource Council and the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation.

Architecture students from local colleges were invited to the screening. Miller notes that Temple and Penn State have urban studio programs that mirror Mockbee's program in a city setting.

Miller hopes inviting the students will have another benefit: "It introduces them to the Collaborative and they think, ŒThis is a pretty cool thing. Maybe I'll stay here in Philadelphia.' Then we're getting our next generation of volunteers."