The Rural Studio of Auburn University designs and builds one community project every year in Hale County, deep in the Alabama, one of the poorest regions of the USA, where 40 percent of the inhabitants live far below the poverty line. Home to four extended families, it epitomizes the shaming and disregarded depths of rural deprivation in the American South. Most of the 150 inhabitants live in decaying trailers or very basic houses, and there are no indigenous community facilities.

Designed and built by a team of fifth year students, the new building is a bold, vigorous and optimistic presence that attempts to mitigate the grim, grinding impoverishment of its surroundings. Rural Studio projects require students to be resourceful and use ingenious building techniques to construct their projects with whatever materials can be found, recycled or donated in an adaptive design-and-build process. Mason’s Bend Community Center is on a dusty, unpaved road lined with shanties and caravans.

The site lies at the property lines of the three founding families meet. Through intense discussions with the community, the students evolved a program for the building. Gaining trust and fostering a sense of mutual respect was, as in all Rural Studio projects, a crucial aspect of the design development. The outcome is a boldly sculptural pavilion that frames views of the landscape and provides an intimate communal gathering place. A grant of $20,000 was obtained from the Potero Nuevo Fund in San Francisco to build a simple structure that could function variously. Mason’s Bend Community Center houses a transportation stop for a number of county-funded mobile library and a traveling health center, an outdoor area for community gathering, meeting hall and playground, and a small chapel for the local prayer group.

Because of the extremely extemporized nature of the project, there were no conventional architectural drawings. However the student designers were intimately involved with sourcing cheap materials and the process of construction. Students cut down cypress trees and milled them into planks to make the laminated beams. The monumental rammed-earth walls are made of rammed earth containing local clay, cement, and a small amount of water. The walls are capped by a rusting metal drip edge that compliments the color of the dirt road. A local firm donated scrap metal for the tubular steel members which were sanded to remove rust and painted black.

The alternative rammed-earth is worked by community members alongside students in the construction process. The 80 cascading glass panels in the roof are, in fact, 1980’s GMC-sedan-car windscreens recycled from a scrapyard in Chicago. Both aluminum and glass are bolted to a light weight metal frame. Mr. Harris, owner of the Butterfly House, donated the land for the center and now tends to its beautiful garden. The result is an inventive building, low to the ground yet light and airy, blending perfectly with its setting and providing the Mason’s Bend Community Center with a much needed resource.

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