designbuild

Getting Detailed

July 30, 2025

The “Diners,” a.k.a. the Dining House team, have been refining their design palette. The team has used the boiling hot Hale County summer in part to let the design detailing simmering. And they’re preparing for an exciting, eventful start to the upcoming semester.

Let’s take a closer look at what the team has been whipping up this summer!

Eager to zest up the day-to-day design process, the team started June with a small mock-up on concrete. They let thoughts and drawings marinate in the studio while they considered how leftover wood from the mill could create interesting textures for the concrete piers. Accordingly, the group created a set of four 12” x 14” wood forms to experiment with wood textures. Then, a few days later, they broke the samples free from the forms and took notes on their samples. The team learned a lot even from blending the batter-like concrete mixture, and they now understand the textures they might use.

Removing Wood Textures from Concrete Sample

Getting back into the Studio, the team further developed structural details in preparation for a meeting with Joe Burns, our engineering consultant.

The drawings helped define how some of the architectural components would come together: the column-to-pier and rafter-to-column connections, as well as the ridge tie connection. The engineer clarified these details with specifics like bolt sizes and dimensions of metal connectors. One goal behind the “structural bent” design—the transverse rigid frame—is creating a simple visual palette with milled lob lobby pine and minimal metal work.

With more context on the structural bent, the group also has been resolving some spatial proportions in the north and south rooms, as well as studying window details with insulated glass panels stored in the Studio’s barn. Overall, the team has been focusing the recipe on responding to the specific ingredients at their disposal. With the help of Jake LaBarre, the team mocked up the Dining House’s space under the Fabrication Pavilion to test its floor-plan dimensions and heights. And the team reduced the size of the glass connections on the insulated panels with the help of Dan Wheeler.

Now with more details reaching al dente, the team can focus on refining the site drainage, plumbing, and electrical plans, and on finishing the foundation drawings, leading them, hopefully, to a groundbreaking very, VERY soon.

Speaking of finishing drawings…take a look at the latest renderings of the Dining House!

Digital Rendering of Interior Perspective of Dining House

Digital Rendering of West Elevation of the Dining House

We hope you’ll tune in soon to see what the team cooks up next month!

Tags: designbuild, dininghouse, rs5thyears, Structure

Let’s Commence!

May 28, 2025

Annnnnd they’re back!

The last time you checked in with the Dining House team, the students had begun to refine design decisions centered around site placement, thermal comfort, and material palettes. Since then, the “Diners” have been working tirelessly, preparing for the renowned Pig Roast, final Executive Review, and graduation (they said, “Somehow we made it”)!

In the last weeks of the school year, the Diners explored the appropriate structure of and thermal comfort levels for the Dining House. The team has been hard at work milling lumber from Rural Studio’s campus, so they believe that showcasing this lumber as part of the structural system of the Dining House would be an exciting statement of the ethos of the project. Currently, the Diners are exploring creating a “structural bent” system (a transverse rigid frame) made out of the milled and salvaged lumber from the Rural Studio’s “pile of stuff” located in the barns across Newbern. The structural bent would support the roof, creating the superstructure over the Dining House, much like a pole barn.

Underneath this superstructure two insulated cores would hold “hunker down” spaces, containing comfortable areas during the peaks of winter and summer, complying with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code. These “hunker down” spaces would cap the Dining House and allow for an open kitchen in the middle. This central kitchen would be opened up for light and air to augment the space. A porch would extend from the main dining room, stepping down into the western courtyard beside the Dining House. An operable wall of doors could be propped open, bridging the interior and exterior spaces 3rd-years enjoy.

As Pig Roast and the Executive Review approached, the Diners believed that a full-scale mock-up of space and structure would be a nice break from studio and give the team the hands-on tools to adjust scale and arrangement. In the days leading up to Pig Roast, the team moved to the site and constructed a full-scale mock-up of the bent system! Using 2x4s and plywood, the team built two bents that replicate the length, width, and thickness of the planned bents. The Diners, with the help of other teams, hoisted the bents into place, and clamped them to the scaffolding to test the scale of the Dining House. It was hard work, but the team had a great time building something with their own hands.

When Pig Roast had finally arrived, the group was ecstatic to show off their genius work to their friends and families. With a day full of presentations, bad jokes, and comical walk-throughs, the Diners couldn’t be happier with the progress they made, or more thankful for all the hands that have guided them along the way.

After Pig Roast, the Diners had a quick celebration and then got right back to work. A few days later, Executive Review II arrived. The team worked tirelessly again to have an effective meeting with the clients of the project. The review focused on the relationship of structure to envelope, and how to further the idea of a pavilion-like structure that protects the boxes underneath. Focusing on details and structural drawings, the Dining Team got helpful feedback and positive support for continuing the design of the Dining House.

Just a few of the great drawings and details the team is exploring!

Off to commencement!

After the team survived their final Executive Review, graduation time was here. The Diners drove back to Auburn. Celebration and reunion with old friends and classmates marked the end of one finish line, and the start of another.

The Diners finally made it to the finish line of their academic careers (so far), and they could not be happier!

Tags: designbuild, natural ventilation, reuseproject, rs5thyears

Respect your Welders!

April 16, 2025

Hello, and welcome back to the latest edition of the Rural Studio Bathhouse blog. As the semester has progressed, so has the Bathhouse, and we are thrilled to share an update!

Right after the last update, we worked on wood modules for the ceiling of the toilet pod. These modules are built the same way as the wall modules, but they will be stacked horizontally to form the ceiling plane. Now all the modules for the toilet pod are completely finished.

Picture of wood module — Look at that module.

Around the same time, we also finalized the material counts for the rest of the steel pieces of the project and sent those over to Jim Turnipseed. Jim ordered them and got them to his shop in Columbiana, Alabama, for us. Again, we are so thankful to Jim for his abundant generosity and support for our project! Not only has Jim been kind enough to provide materials, but he has also provided us with a large working space inside his shop!

During the week of Spring Break, we packed up and headed to Columbiana for a few days to check everything out.

During the first day in the shop, we looked through our drawings with Flo and Luis, the head fabricators in the shop; getting used to the shop and different machinery; and labeling all of our materials for our later convenience.

Students sort through pieces of metal — Our home in Columbiana

The rest of the week we started learning how to weld! We began with welding straight lines on plates and then welding two plates together. After getting the hang of things, we found some square tubing in the shop with dimensions similar to the materials we are using for the roof structure. We then practiced welding these pieces together. With a smaller thickness, these pieces were a little harder to weld together, and we had to speed up the welds a little to avoid burning through this material. We got the feel of it and even practiced filling in large gaps or holes that we burned into the material. Flo and Luis also taught us how to grind to clean up welds and materials.

Once we felt comfortable with welding, we worked on the trusses for the outdoor shower. We made our angled cuts on all the pieces for the three trusses. We created a surface to build the trusses on out of two of our walkway channels, and once we laid out one of the trusses, we used small pieces of angles to create a jig so that the other two trusses would match the first.

Student cuts metal tubes — Cutting angles of pieces

Students lay out pieces of truss — Cutting angles of pieces

By the end of the week, we had completely welded one truss! What a fun Spring Break!

Students pose with finished truss — Look Mom, we did it!

Our goal was to finish the outdoor shower as soon as possible but also to stay on schedule on site. With that in mind, Logan and Ashley worked in the shop, while Carla and Ambar kept going on site with modules. They fabricated the two remaining trusses, the frame for the top of the walls, the continuous tubes which the trusses sit on, and several other pieces.

Picture of frame layed out — Metal frame pieces laid out

Workers flip the frame — Metal frame pieces laid out

Next, we cleaned and painted everything, then we loaded up all the pieces and brought them back to site.

Student paints metal pieces — Painting the metal pieces

Picture of painted trusses — Painting the metal pieces

Student poses with trailer load of painted metal pieces. — Back to Newbern we go!

Once everything was on site, we unstacked the outdoor shower in the Supershed, labeled each module with its orientation and order, and moved the alignment-bracing interior jig (or Abigail as we call her) into place on the slab with the help of some of our peers.

Picture of stacked modules on site — Deconstructed outdoor shower

Students leveling bracing jig — Deconstructed outdoor shower

Following that, we got to stacking! With scaffolding around the slab, we added modules layer by layer. After placing each layer, we checked to make sure the addition was level and that the threaded rods aligned with the holes of the modules. It got a little harder to lift the modules onto the stack as we moved up, but the overall process went smoothly.

Students level layers of modules — Leveling layers

Picture of layers being stacked — Leveling layers

We were able to fully stack the outdoor shower in one day!

Picture of finished outdoor shower stack — The screen side of the shower

Picture of finished Outdoor Stack — The screen side of the shower

Now that the walls are in place, the frame and roof structure can be craned into place. We will bolt the frame to the threaded rods, compressing and strengthening the walls. And we will bolt the continuous tubes to the frame and weld the trusses to the tubes.

Picture of metal frame — Metal frame on site

Picture of metal trusses — Metal frame on site

The team also spent a few more days back in the shop learning how to stick weld, so we could do so on site. Although it was fun to learn a new technique, stick welding was much more difficult for us to pick up, and we’ve decided to leave the on-site welding to professionals for now.

Student poses with stick welder — Stick welding

We hope our next steps will all follow shortly, and we are very excited to know that the outdoor shower is nearing completion! Once this roof installation is done, we will take everything we’ve learned from the process back with us to the shop to begin fabricating the rest of the roof structure. We will also begin building the walkway frames and start on the shower pod wall modules.

picture of overall building with finished Outdoor Shower stack

This is such an exciting time in the project, and it is super rewarding to see walls going up and metal coming together. Thank you so much for following along with us and we look forward to providing another exciting update very soon!

Students pose on scaffolding — Hip Hip Hooray!

– Rural Studio Bathhouse Team

Carla, Ambar, Ashley, and Logan

Tags: designbuild, fabrication, rs5thyears, turnipseed, welding

A Surprising Interview with The Smith Park Team

April 11, 2025

*Below is an interview of the Smith Park team conducted by the Rural Studio Dining House team and edited for clarity. The speakers are listed as Dining and Park below.

Dining: Hello, how are we all doing?

Park: Great, actually. It’s been a while, but we’ve been so busy, it’s been hard to make time to write the blog.

Dining: Yeah, we get it: we’ve been the same way. Well, let’s just get right into it, the people are waiting!

Park: Sure, why not? We would hate to leave the people waiting.

Executive Review #1

Dining: Shortly after your last blog you had your first Executive Review*, a tradition around these parts. How did it go?

(*Executive Review is when the 5th-year students present their work to the school faculty, admin, and leadership for evaluation. This review determines whether the project is in the appropriate place in development and the Studio has the resources to support the project.)

Park: Well, to try to keep it short . . .

[Ahem: They didn’t.]

Park: It went well. We were pretty prepared. We showed them everything we have done, like ever. OK, well not everything, but mostly everything. Essentially, we showed some new drawings [see below] and a lot of information justifying our decisions up to this point. The response was positive. We got good feedback on the work, and eventually a decision was made to move the playground to a separate phase / another team of students.

Dining: How did that make you feel?

Park: At first it was a little . . . surprising? We knew it was a hard and complex part of the project, but we’d been trying to make the playground work for a while. When we heard it was going to be moved out of our hands, we were a little disappointed. However, when we took some time to reflect, we realized this change is best for the project: up to that point, we had talked about play being important, but we were giving it the least amount of our budget, which was limiting its potential.

Dining: That’s nice to hear. Being able to let go of something you’ve worked hard on is difficult. We get it.

Park: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it’s exciting to imagine another team of students in a few years and giving the playground their all, really letting that piece of the project become its own when it’s not stuck behind a short schedule and budget.

The team’s recent community meeting

Dining: We see that you had another meeting with the community, which would be the first time the neighborhood around the park has seen the design. How did that go?

Park: Fairly good. We had a decent turnout, and the weather was nice. We talked for about an hour and a half. The neighborhood feedback was positive and helpful. Hopefully, we got people excited.

Dining: What important takeaways did they share?

Park: Surprisingly, most of the conversation was about things we weren’t expecting. We thought it was going to be about either the playground or the trees, but the community was pretty receptive to all of that. Mostly the discussion was about our decisions on the new utilities like water and power and, specifically, how they interact with the pole barn space and the bathroom area. Anyway, it will lead us to improving the project.

a community member looking at the project

Dining House’s third set of questions looked towards the future

Dining: So, what’s next?

Park: Good question. We just started looking at our construction mock-ups.

Dining: This early?

Park: Well, Pig Roast is in about four weeks, which sounds crazy. But yeah, we have been measuring out and painting the walking trail, the basketball court, and some of our other pieces at the site. We are hoping this will allow us to really understand those spaces in real life, and then we can make changes based on those discoveries. We are excited about that.

Park: After that, we’ll probably just speed ahead toward Pig Roast and the second Executive Review. Also, we’re putting together the construction documents for the first bid package so we can get dirt moving on site, with hope of pouring concrete in the near future.

Conclusion

It seems to us that the Smith Park team is quite busy. We got some in-depth answers to our basic questions. In our opinion, the team has been working hard, and it is awesome to see them operating at such a high level. They have been in meetings with consultants, the community, and their client, and each time, they come out with a better project. We’re eager to see where the team takes the project from now until Pig Roast and even through the summer. We think next time they might actually interview us, but we don’t want to spoil anything. See you then!

– The Dining House Team

Tags: designbuild, rs5thyears, smithpark

Happy Hale-idays from Bathhouse!

December 15, 2024

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rural Studio Bathhouse blog! We hope that everyone had a good and restful Thanksgiving. We would like to share a quick update on what’s going on before we get out of Hale for a few weeks and take a much-needed winter break!

students pose on back of truck with wood modules

First up, we are very excited to share the progress we’ve made with the walls! The new and improved process of creating the modules has been going very well. With this process, we choose six boards, cut their ends off, drill the holes for the threaded rods one by one using a template, stack them, clamp them, and screw them together, board-by-board, using the jig table. The sixth board can be planed down to the thickness needed to get to the overall module height. The module is then removed from the table and cut to length.

students drill holes into boards — Drilling holes using hole template

student uses saw to cut module to length — Drilling holes using hole template

Although this is a very time-consuming process, we are very happy to share that we are nearly finished with the modules for the toilet pod which means that we are about 50% done with all the modules for the project!

Student loads module onto truck — Loading the modules

Students carry module — Loading the modules

On site, we have made progress with finishing all the groundwork. The water supply line has been put in place, and all the electrical breaker boxes have been installed and wired to the main supply.

image of electrical boxes on back of building — Breaker boxes at the toilet and shower pod

We have also had all the CMU block finished for the boot-washing station foundation at the beginning of the bathhouse and the greywater filter at the outdoor shower.

student buries water line — Water line going in!

view of finished CMU — Water line going in!

The team has filled the greywater filter with layers of sand and gravel, placing landscape fabric in between. This filter will clean any soap and shampoo from the runoff water of the outdoor shower before the water enters the infiltration trench.

Student poses with CMU block — Greywater filter CMU in progress

view of finished CMU block — Greywater filter CMU in progress

Drawing of Outdoor shower and greywater filter — The greywater filter is an extension of the outdoor shower foundation and will filter the run-off from the outdoor shower

We also have a very exciting update regarding the steel components of the project. After presenting our project to Jim Turnipseed of Turnipseed International, he has graciously offered to help support the Bathhouse by donating the materials needed for the walkway and roof structures. He has also agreed to lend space and assistance to teach the team how to weld and fabricate the walkway frames and roof trusses. We are so grateful to Jim for his incredible generosity and willingness to support the Bathhouse project and Rural Studio.

image of walkway structure model — Walkway structure model with color-coded, removable pieces

students present using model — Walkway structure model with color-coded, removable pieces

The team has decided to move forward with the construction of the walkway as the first steel components of the project. The walkway will provide a floor surface that is crucial when the team is ready to start stacking the modules in place on site. Recently, we received the first part of the walkway structure, a series of channels that will be attached to the sides of the pods and hold up the walkway frames.

Students pose with metal pieces — We got metal!

Our good friend Brad from Superior Metal Works helped us by drilling holes, cutting slots, and welding some small plates and channels to these pieces.

students load trailer with metal — Load her up!

students talk through fabrication — Load her up!

Once he was done, the team started the process of cleaning and sanding the metal. We quickly realized it would be much better to have them sandblasted if possible.

Back to Brad’s we went and got the beams professionally sandblasted and ready to be painted!

image of sandblasted metal pieces — Sand!

students pose with metal on trailer — Load her up, again!

We have spent the past couple of days painting the beams with two coats of paint. The team will install them all on site early next week (fingers crossed)! Having the walkway supports in place will allow us to double-check our measurements and update any walkway drawings, if necessary, over the break.

student paints metal — Finished painted walkway supports!

students paint metal — Finished painted walkway supports!

After winter break, we will pick back up hard on the modules for the shower pod with the goal to finish them by February. We will also be going to Turnipseed in Birmingham to start the fabrication of the walkway frames and roof structure. We are happy with the progress being made and can’t wait to send another update out in the new year!

Thank you so much for reading along and Happy Holidays from your friends in Hale!

– Rural Studio Bathhouse Team

Carla, Ambar, Ashley, and Logan

Tags: bathhouse, designbuild, modules, rs5thyears, wood