Author: Natalie Butts-Ball

Last year Rural Studio was awarded an inaugural Creed Grant through the Auburn Alumni Association. This support is helping to deliver a new housing prototype that brings the Auburn Creed to life through design, research, and service. The Cost-Effective, Resilient, Energy-Efficient, Equitable, and Durable (CREED) House is a high-performance housing project that directly addresses pressing housing challenges faced by many overburdened and underserved working communities across the Southeast and beyond. The CREED House is under construction and being built for our neighbor, Mark.

At its core, the CREED House is a student-led research and development effort grounded in hands-on education and meaningful client engagement. Through the design and construction of this prototype, students are exploring innovative approaches to affordability, energy efficiency, resilience, safety, and healthful living. The project demonstrates how thoughtful architecture can respond to climate risks while remaining accessible to the people who need housing the most.

Funding is supporting a number of upgrades to Mark’s new home that significantly increase both resilience and life safety. These include a FEMA-engineered storm shelter, a wired emergency power generator, and construction to meet the 2025 FORTIFIED Home Gold Standard. Together, these systems are designed to protect both the homeowner and the building during high-wind events while also supporting faster recovery in their aftermath.

Students have been working diligently to build Mark’s Home. A new group of 3rd-year architecture students moves to Rural Studio each semester and picks up where the last group left off. The first group worked with Mark to determine the best location for the house on his property and prepared the site for construction. The next group finalized the floor plan, developed the foundation details, and completed the excavation and pouring of the footings. Another group of students worked to lay the foundation, install plumbing, and pour the slab with the help of local contractors.

The foundation is a critical component of the FORTIFIED Home Gold Standard. A professional engineer designed the continuous load path, and it was the students’ responsibility to install and secure the connectors that tie the foundation to the walls and ultimately to the roof—ensuring the house performs as a single, unified structure under stress.

FORTIFIED Home Gold Standard

Meeting the FORTIFIED Home Gold Standard has shaped nearly every aspect of the home’s design and construction. This voluntary standard focuses on strengthening the most vulnerable parts of a house—particularly the roof—to better withstand high winds and severe weather.

For Mark’s Home, this has meant carefully detailing the roof assembly with multiple layers of protection. A generous donation of ZIP System wall and roof sheathing from Huber made it possible to incorporate a continuous air and moisture barrier, which is essential to the system’s performance. The roof sheathing has been nailed at four inches on center along each truss, dramatically increasing its resistance to uplift forces during storms.

Although no house can be completely storm proof, the goal of the FORTIFIED standard is durability and recoverability. Building to this standard reduces the likelihood of catastrophic failure and slows water intrusion if damage does occur; these measures help ensure that homeowners can return to their homes more quickly and with fewer losses after a storm.

FEMA Safe Room

One of the most important life-safety features supported by the grant is a FEMA-engineered safe room integrated directly into the home. In a region where tornadoes and severe storms are a real and recurring threat, this space provides a place of refuge designed to withstand extreme wind events and flying debris.

Unlike a typical interior room, the safe room is constructed with reinforced CMU walls (thanks to Alabama Concrete Industries Association and Oldcastle Brick), a hardened concrete roof system, and a dedicated structural design that meets FEMA guidelines. Its placement within the house ensures that Mark can access it quickly and safely when severe weather approaches.

This addition reflects a broader commitment of the CREED House to not only protect property, but to prioritize human safety above all else.

Emergency Power and Resilience

The home will also include a wired-in emergency generator with integrated circuits, allowing essential systems to remain operational during power outages. In rural areas, where outages can last for extended periods after storms, maintaining power is critical for safety, comfort, and health.

The system is designed to automatically support key functions such as refrigeration, lighting, and operation of select outlets, reducing disruption to daily life and enabling Mark to remain in his home even when surrounding infrastructure is compromised. This layer of resilience ensures that the house continues to serve its purpose not just in ideal conditions, but when it is needed most.

Designing for Life, Now and in the Future

Beyond resilience and performance, the design of Mark’s Home is deeply rooted in supporting his daily life, interests, and long-term needs. The layout reflects an understanding of how he lives now, while also anticipating how those needs may evolve over time.

The home is organized to provide ease of movement, clear circulation, and strong connections between interior and exterior spaces. Spaces for hobbies and day-to-day activities are intentionally integrated, allowing Mark to continue the routines and passions that define his lifestyle. At the same time, the design incorporates strategies for aging in place, including accessible entry points, a single-story layout, and rooms sized to accommodate future mobility needs.

Natural light, views to the landscape, and a sense of openness contribute to a home that is not only functional, but uplifting—supporting both physical and emotional well-being.

Construction Progress

This semester’s progress included final touches on the safe room, window and door installation, and erection of the roof structure over the house and workshop.

Overall, the roof has been the most complex component of the house, and the students who built it worked tirelessly to complete it. As we move into summer this year, 2026, the roof sheathing is complete, a FORTIFIED Roofing Contractor is ready to install the final roofing system, the interior walls are in place and ready for the electrician, and the house is prepared for the next group of students to continue construction in the fall.

With each semester, Mark’s Home continues to take shape—not just as a building, but as a living demonstration of how the Auburn Creed can be expressed through architecture that serves, protects, and endures.

When do we celebrate students, serve a hearty soup lunch, and roast the students? Why, Soup Roast, of course!

Soup Roast has long been a tradition at Rural Studio, and it’s not really a roast but a deep critique that pushes our 5th-year students’ projects forward. It’s also as a recognition of both 3rd-year and 5th-year student accomplishments. Director and Wiatt Professor Andrew Freear sets the tone of the celebration with his opening remarks.

We have so much to applaud and to achieve at the end of each Fall Soup Roast that in 2022, we added a second day to the event. Parents of our 3rd-year students come to mark the conclusion of this class’s studio semester, but professional visitors—largely consulting architects—also join us. On the first day, they critique the 5th-years’ work and give a presentation on special topics; then, the next day, they lead workshops and charrette with these students (engage in a rapid discussions, sketch, critique, “rinse and repeat” cycle).

The critique falls at a critical time on the 5th-years’ project timelines. The larger group of eight has been building two new Pods (self-contained living spaces for students) that test how to design and build structures that are insulated on the outside rather than in between the studs. These pods are being used as mini versions of the structural solutions for the students two main projects for the year.

In mid- to late October, the group divided into two teams of four, with one team taking on the project of Jessica’s Home in Newbern and the other, the First Congregational Church Hall in Marion. The teams are still working on the Pods together, and the Jessica’s Home team is exploring how to best use cross-laminated timber, while the Hall team is using glue-laminated timber, a.k.a. glulam. (They presented this work at our temporary Whelan St. studio space in nearby Greensboro.) The teams have had time to gel, but they are still early in the design process, so the consultants’ and faculty’s feedback is formative and tough.

Around Soup Roast, the 3rd-year students are wrapping up their semester-long design-build work at the Studio. They don’t complete a home in a single semester; instead, they either begin a project or complete a new phase, with each semester’s cohort contributing until the project is done. Our current 3rd-year project is Mark’s Home, begun in Fall 2024. The Mark’s Home team presented their work and showcased it on-site. From among them, Summer Sescila presented the Honors component of her Rural Studio work, which entailed continuing to collect data for the Thermal Mass and Buoyancy Ventilation Research Project for our colleague Salmaan Craig and Remy Fortin at UCLA.

A favorite of parents is the informal exhibition of 3rd-year students’ work in our Morrisette-campus classes, which are led by faculty members Dick Hudgens and Steve Long. Each introduced the work: Dick Hudgens talked about the sketchbooks from his intensive history course, a course that has students study, sketch, and render in watercolor elements of regional historical architecture, and Steve Long talked about the chair reproductions that students created in Woodshop after extensive research into the original chair design history and architectural/design context. These smaller, fully completed projects appeal to our sense of craftsmanship and elegance and our appreciation of artfully completed work at a smaller scale.

Most of our Rural Studio cohort from the Front Porch Initiative drove in from Auburn’s main campus to attend: Associate Director Rusty Smith, Betsy Farrell Garcia, Mackenzie Stagg, Laurel Holloway, and Tim Tamulonis. This year’s visiting consultants included our regulars Joe Burns, structural engineer and Managing Principal at Thornton Tomasetti, and Kim Clements and Joe Schneider, who co-own and are the creative directors of JAS Design Build. Our consultants also included regulars Jake LaBarre, Associate with the Miller Hull Partnership and faculty with the University of Washington Neighborhood Design Build studio, and Jim Adamson, Partner at Jersey Devil design/build, who each prepared a short lecture for us. Sandy Bishop, Executive Director of Lopez Community Land Trust, attended as our newest visiting professional and also treated us to a lecture.

We cannot thank everyone enough for their generous support, both those who came out to Newbern to work with students and those who support behind the scenes. Rural Studio wouldn’t be here—students wouldn’t be here—without you!