Since 2005, in addition to the traditional charity homes and community projects that the Rural Studio has designed and built, we have been ardently working to bridge the barriers between the income-earning poor and their accessibility to existing affordable federal housing programs. The goal of the $20k House project is relatively straightforward, yet has profound implications: provide a replicable housing model that is creative, affordable, durable, energy efficient, diverse in housing type, and that can be purchased by a prospective rural homeowner for $20,000, including…

Architecture is not merely “problem solving,” rather, it serves purposes; it has specific goals and agendas and is always on target. Architecture stands in opposition to….

In their most recent assignment, the students are asked to pair up into teams of two and construct a span between two of the blocks in the Dudley Hall Courtyard. The span bridges approximately 4 feet. Using only drinking straws and straight sewing pins, the span is to be beautiful and successfully hold up the weight of a single clay brick.…

Pattern is all around us. Whether embedded within every speck of the cosmos, or simply a derivative of our subconscious desire to understand the chaos of experience, suffice it to say that a system of order(s) binds all things together. From the immediate relationships of locality emerges the tapestry of a tightly coupled existence…. To begin the current project the students were all given a standard “pattern map” that consisted of a square inscribed with a complex system of orthogonal lines, angles and radial arcs derived from…

Ana and I met today to talk about the next part of the assignment for the students. We want to continue the tile project, but move briefly into the digital realm and use some of their mad Photoshop skills we have been hearing so much about. Photoshop has several tools that make creating tiling patterns easy – the one we are going to use is the “Offset” Filter. This technique is really handy for making textures for backgrounds, or for 3-D models and the like. In a…