rsworkshops

Workshop Season in Newbern

The brand-new 5th-year class arrived in Newbern last month and got straight to work with this year’s lineup of Fall Workshops. We dove into two new projects, the 18×18 House and the Rural Studio Bathhouse.

Our first workshop visitor, friend, and consultant, Kiel Moe, is one of the new Professors of Practice specializing in mass timber at Auburn University School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning (APLA). Kiel helped us get our bearings on different types of mass timber, what it can do, and how we might use it to build a new bathhouse for the Pods, our dormitories on site at the Morrisette campus.

Two more APLA faculty, Assistant Professor Emily Knox and Associate Professor David Hill, joined us from Auburn, to dive into all things landscape architecture. They pushed us to think differently about what a “building” is and asked us to consider the broader site, with dirt and vegetation as space makers.

Next, we were put to the test by Cheryl Noel and Ravi Ricker, who visited from Chicago, Illinois, to help us specifically with this year’s house project. The house will only be 18 feet square, so we dug into the building code to understand what stairs can do for such a small house. Cheryl and Ravi asked us to mark out full-scale mock-ups of some of our best plan ideas, and afterwards we explored each one to see what the spaces might feel like.

Architect John Forney came from Birmingham, AL, to turn all preconceptions on their heads. He worked with us to really break apart the bathhouse project and think about how it may be situated across the Morrisette campus. John also challenged us to flip our 18’ x 18’ houses upside-down and see what switching the first- and second-floor program might do.

Our final visitors came all the way from Seattle, Washington! Kim Clements, Joe Schneider, and Jake LaBarre got into the details with us, drawing and sketching rapid-fire to round out our workshops. They helped us start to imagine what our projects might look like and how much space they’ll really take up by mocking up heights and imagining the vertical spaces.

Now we’re ready to get to work! Stay tuned for the next post when we introduce the teams and more details about the new projects!

Workshop Season in Newbern

The fall semester is here, which means we have twelve new 5th-year students in Hale County.

We’re excited to share the three new 5th-year projects on the boards: Emergency housing built for a local nonprofit, C.H.O.I.C.E.; a new home exploring attic trusses; and the continuation of the Moundville Archaeological Park Community Pavilion.

As always, the semester kicked off with a week of “Neckdown” projects before leading us into the workshop season and project selection! Starting with a visit from Birmingham’s own, architect, John Forney, we did a deep dive on adaptability by studying the Myers’ Home. Anderson Inge, from the Anderson Inge Building Workshop in London, kept up the momentum when we worked in groups to explore the many possibilities that Moundville’s existing structure might offer: each group developed cladding strategies for the existing trusses using design strategies like framed openings and provocative material scale.

Chicagoan Dan Wheeler, of Wheeler Kearns Architects, led us through a warm and breezy morning of sketching exercises, including a foray into portraiture that taught us we should stick to our day jobs! Cheryl Noel and Ravi Ricker, from Wrap Architecture in Chicago, IL, visited next to pivot us back to all things code. They encouraged us to be mindful of code throughout our design process so that it doesn’t come back to bite us down the road. We also used their visit to demystify stair dimensions, a crucial component of one of our project options. Rounding out the workshops was a visit from Jake LaBarre from Neighborhood Design Build Studio and BuildingWork and Kim Clements and Joe Schneider from JAS Design Build in Seattle, WA, the perfect trio to help us diagram our way through our potential projects.

We ended this workshop season with the daunting, exciting, and mysterious challenge of team selection. After six weeks of workshops and a long night of discussion, we are happy to announce Rural Studio’s three newest teams!

Meet the new 5th-year teams

Emergency shelter in partnership with C.H.O.I.C.E.: AC Priest (Saltillo, MS), Davis Benfer (Jacksonville, FL), Hailey Osborne (Ashburn, VA), Yi Xuan (Raymond) Teo (Singapore)

Moundville Community Pavilion: Brenton Smith (Dothan, AL), Caitlyn Biffle (Rogersville, AL), Jackie Rosborough (IL), Collin Brown (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada)

Client home: Adam Davis (Spanish Fort, AL), Daniel Burton (Prattville, AL), Lauren Lovell (Hoover, AL), Laurel Holloway (Huntsville, AL)

Stay tuned to the project blogs to learn more about each project this year!

Workshop #6 Jake LaBarre

With his extensive background in construction and carpentry, Jake LaBarre has been teaching students how buildings come together and how to detail them since 2011, even acting as 3rd-Year Visiting Assistant Professor at Rural Studio for a year. Jake lives in Seattle, teaching a design-build studio at the University of Washington, and he currently works at Building Work.

The Detailing and Construction workshop, taught by Jake LaBarre, taught students how to begin detailing buildings. The intent of the workshop was for students to gain a better understanding of constructability through the examination of the order of operations in detailing. In order to achieve this, the workshop examined past Rural Studio projects to learn why and how they were detailed. In order for students to even think about creating their own details, they first needed to understand how other buildings were detailed and why those decisions were made.

This workshop acted as a complement and follow-up to the earlier Contemporary Structures, by Emily McGlohn. Firstly, it provided a better working understanding on typical components used in building assemblies. More importantly, Jake stressed the importance of not relying only on flat two-dimensional drawings of wall sections using three-dimensional drawings but to use three-dimensional drawings as well. This became clear to students when they constructed drawings of axons for the same buildings they had previously drawn sections for in the Contemporary Structures workshop. Students realized just how much information was not included when just shown in section. By drawing out how materials come together, the kinds of fasteners that were used, and the three-dimensional thicknesses added another layer of information about how the buildings were constructed.

Students gained the confidence to know where to start detailing. It became clear that before beginning any project that they should first do thorough precedent research. With so many details out there—even just in the catalog of Rural Studio projects where previous students spent a great deal of time figuring out the detailing—so there is no need to start from scratch.

Workshop #2: Drawing & Seeing with Frank Harmon and Dan Wheeler

The Drawing and Seeing workshop, by Frank Harmon and Dan Wheeler, taught the importance of drawing in the architectural process. They did not teach an ideal way of drawing, but rather to pay attention to what one looks at and how to use drawing as a way to see. The goal from the workshop was not to become more technical or precise sketchers by drawing what one thinks something ought to look like, but to become better at capturing and communicating the essence and context of the beautiful things and places that surround each of us.

Frank Harmon is a professor at NC State and, for years, has been coming to Newbern to help teach a new generation of architects how to see the world and recognize the common beauty around us through sketching. Before beginning his own firm, Frank Harmon Architect, in Raleigh, North Carolina, he worked in New York and London. Follow his beautiful blog of thoughts and drawings called Native Places here.

Dan Wheeler has been bringing his infectious enthusiasm to Rural Studio since 2001. Since then, he has been teaching students the process of drawing and to appreciate the wonderful differences in how each person draws. Dan co-founded Wheeler Kearns Architects in Chicago and also teaches at UIC School of Architecture.

Going into the workshop, many students considered themselves poor sketchers and were shy about showing their “bad” work to others. This workshop gave students confidence in their abilities to depict their surroundings and visually describe their ideas to others using a variety of mediums. It was a thoroughly enjoyable process of making drawings without focusing so much on making them “perfect.” Nobody sees the world the same, so nobody sketches the same. Throughout the workshop, each student noticed something different in the same thing, be it light, shadow, color, nature, or the context. These differences allowed students to gain valuable insight into how each person sees the world slightly differently.

The intended outcome was to learn how to use hand-drawing as a larger part of the design process, especially while working toward thesis projects at Rural Studio.

Workshop #1 Graphics & Documentation with Danny Wicke and Tom Harris

Each September, 5th-year and master’s students participate in roughly four weeks of workshops led by consultants with expertise in subjects like landscape, sketching, structural engineering, building codes & ordnances, geotechnical and environmental engineering, as well as artists and graphic designers. This process is directed toward students gaining familiarity with the year’s projects, with consultants exploring important questions related to their field. Students also divide into charette teams to share the newly acquired knowledge amongst each other and thereby get to know one another better. The workshop process culminates with students choosing the project and designing the team they will be working both on and with for the rest of their time in the program.

How do you begin when you have no idea where to start? You just do. For the next few weeks, 5th-year and master’s students will document each workshop. At the completion of the workshops, the students will create a book of their experiences and lessons learned. The Graphics and Documentation workshop, with RS alumnus, Danny Wicke, and architectural photographer, Tom Harris, differs from any other because these lessons inform how the students work over the entirety of their book-making process. It sets the stage for how the next seven workshops will go as they create a framework for the entire process. Over the course of three days, Danny and Tom taught them about documentation, communication, presentation, and relation(ships). The students began the process of creating a book and working as a team.

The goals of the workshop were to emphasize the importance of documentation, discuss strategies for documenting work successfully, develop a structure to document upcoming workshops, produce a book that documents the workshop series, and build upon previous versions of the book.

Creating a book is more than generating words on a page. A good book tells a story. This workshop provided the basic framework of storytelling and how crafting a narrative with mindful design and documentation can make or break a book’s success. Book design and documentation act in unison, representing the narrative in a captivating way. When deciding how to design and layout a book, many decisions will overlap, making it crucial to have a general direction and overview of the book’s content from beginning to end. Some more technical design considerations include setting a baseline or regular grid layout, typography and font hierarchy, page margins, column count, paper medium, furniture, gutter space, book cover, and size.

Documentation should be mindful and not an afterthought to fill pages. The objective is to go beyond “just capturing” a moment by introducing an artistic voice that is represented through multiple mediums. Successful documentation is interactive and should captivate the audience. This workshop stressed the importance of elevating mediums (i.e. photography, montages, graphics, drawings, etc.) to intrigues the reader and further convey the story instead of acting to fill dead space. It is important to have a regimented game plan to record moments before they happen. This can be through the lens of a skilled photographer who is always considering light, angles, and exposure, or it is direction given to all team members to snap an individual moment that can later be used for a montage.

As the first workshop, the goal is to communicate direction prior to successive workshops in order to fully capture their significance and maintain cohesion between text and imagery.