The In Crowd

First post of the New Year. Happy 2006 to all my regular visitors and everyone else who has ended up here at The In Crowd. The updating of content has been irregular at the best of times in the nine months since I began posting on this site but hopefully fly enough to keep folks coming back.

 

So first up for the New Year is an article I spotted via Boing Boing on a Western Alabama architectural collective The Rural Studio who did some surprisingly bold and interesting design work like the Antioch Baptist Church pictured above. Read on:

 

"40 buildings [were] conceived and built by the Rural Studio, an ever-changing troupe of architecture students who bring their tools, tenacity and talent to impoverished western Alabama. The 13-year-old program, under the auspices of Auburn University, is sometimes called the "redneck Taliesin."

 

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of Taliesin, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio's founder, was a larger-than-life figure. Born in Mississippi, Mr. Mockbee established the Rural Studio in dirt-poor Hale County, Ala., a place where trailers teetering on cinderblocks and disintegrating barns were two of the most common building types.

 

Many of the Rural Studio buildings recall the work of Frank Gehry (who built a house in the 1980's with angled chain link fence and corrugated metal), with an added layer of down-home informality." (click here to read more)