Educating Citizen Architects
About
Rural Studio® is an off-campus design-build program, rooted in Hale County and part of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture of Auburn University. Our core mission is the education of our students, coupled with research on sustainable, healthful rural living through both housing and the vital systems we foster to ensure our communities thrive. We are committed to cultivating students who are both local architects and citizens of the world.

Front Porch Initiative
We are working to develop a scalable, sustainable, agile, and resilient delivery process for beautiful, well-designed, high performance affordable homes that can be titled as real property while also supporting an industry of home building in underserved rural communities.
Our Work
To date, Rural Studio has built more than 200 projects and educated more than 1,200 students in the Black Belt. Around four dozen students are invited to attend each year to participate in this context-based service-learning curriculum, where students live and work alongside our neighbors, finding solutions together. Our design-build program challenges students to consider not what can be built but rather what should be built.

Design-Learn-Build
We give architecture students a hands-on educational experience while working hand-in-hand with an under resourced population in West Alabama’s Black Belt region. The program establishes student project teams so that faculty can help them form their own communal and individual design processes. Students learn in a supportive culture that promotes problem solving, the value of listening, and the ownership of ideas.