Rural Studio

I'll be honest, I could never come up with a good reason say anything nice about Auburn. Then, Samuel Mockbee  co-founded Rural Studio at Auburn, and I must admit, it has been pretty great. Under Mockbee's guidance, the architecture students created affordable housing for some of the poorest residents of Hale County, Alabama.  After his death, Rural Studio continued to innovate and thrive.

Lately, Rural Studio has been working to take all their innovations and combine them into a simple house that is attractive, livable, and affordable.  By affordable, I don't mean $200,000, I mean a tenth of that -- a $20,000 house.

The first houses of this commercial endeavor were built at a development called Serenbe in Georgia.  The houses are used as artists residences.  There have been numerous articles about these two houses, but the best is by Adele Peters in Co-Exist.  It explains a lot of the problems such a good idea faces.

Sambo would be so proud!

Here's to working out all those problems. 

By the way I have some land...

Leftover Edith Wharton Porn

We have been sick since before Christmas!  Of course, that is no reason not to keep one's blog moving forward...or is it?

Oh well, enough about me.  In an attempt to get photos logged in to one place, we ran across some orphans that we thought we would share.

As it is the new year and everyone wants to improve themselves, we are always in a mind to have a huge area for linens, as we now tend to keep things like that sitting in a chair in the bedroom.  Alas, we have no place in our modest house to set aside a linen closet, much less a linen room.  But a girl can dream.

Several years ago, we wrote about Edith Wharton's The Mount.  Now there is a house with a room for everything.  Several years ago, we uploaded some pictures of the now vacant linen closet (and we use that term loosely, as Wharton's linen "closet" was bigger than many apartments). 

We ran across those photos last month and though you might just like to see them.

Linen Closet. The Mount. 

Nice shelves and drawers.  A place to work.  Clearly and inspiration for adding a servant's wing.

Linen Closet Shelving.  The Mount

We are really fond of this built-in construction. Would love to have these in a kitchen!  Until then, we are seriously thinking of moving the sheets out of the bedroom chair!

The Shack

The first time we saw this little cottage was in a magazine in D.C.  It was featured along with million dollar houses that had been singled out in design competitions.  The West Virginia Shack stood heads above all those McMansions. 

The shack was designed by Broadhurst Architects in D.C.  They have done a second design featuring a play on an old corn crib.  Check out more about this little gem on their site.

Moving Day

 

You know how it is.  You want to move a lamp from this table to that.  But, it is heavy, the cord gets tangled, the outlet doesn't work, you need an extension cord and on and on.  Well, the next time that happens, think about my friend, Catherine.  One of her many jobs is moving the Alexander Calder stiable, Gwenfritz, from the front of the Smithsonian to the side of the Smithsonian. 

ASIDE ABOUT THE SIDE: The "Smithsonian" is not one big thing as many tourists might believe, but a whole bunch of big things scattered from hell to breakfast. The Gwenfritz sits beside the National Museum of American History which was formerly the Museum of History and Technology which is just one part of the gigantic Smithsonian.  

ASIDE SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU ARCHITECTURE FANS:  The National Museum of American History, formerly the Museum of History and Technology was the last building designed by McKim, Mead and White.

Anyway, the Gwenfritz weighs in at 35 tons which is comprised of 75 pieces held together with 1,270 bolts.  After 50 years sitting outside, they are going to need a river of WD-40 for all those bolts!  Once disassembled, it will be cleaned, repaired, repainted, moved and re-assembled on the side of the Smithsonian which is technically the West Front.  (Pity those poor tourists who thought they were just going to one big ol' building -- now they find that the Museum of American History has four fronts.  (Clearly, telling someone to meet "in front of the Smithsonian" holds the potential of being lost forever, but I digress...)

According to Ewing Cole, this is what the site will look like upon completion.

During the dedication, a soft-spoken Calder said, “I call it the Caftolin.”   At that moment a plane flew overhead. (It was the olden days when flying over the Mall was allowed.)   Since Calder's voice was drowned out, Gwen Cafritz who paid for the sculpture, stood up and announced loud and clearly that it was called the "Gwenfritz"  and since she paid for it the name stuck.

Read more about the move here.

Paul Rudloph

 I do hate it when people just drop off the face of the earth.   Good news:  I was not abducted by aliens.   Bad news:  I was traveling and I just got lazy.   But enough about me....

Recently I was in Auburn, Alabama.  All those years of living in Alabama and I never once set foot in Auburn.  Visiting a couple of Paul Rudolph houses was among my many adventures.  

 
I was reminded of this while watching the documentary Ultrasuede:  In Search of Halston.   Halston lived in a rather famous Paul Rudolph house in the middle of Manhattan. 

 In Auburn, a Rudolph house is on the market.  Built in the late 1930's, it is a student work by Rudolph.  The house has quirky elements of what would become Rudolph's modernist style, while remaining a little brick house in Alabama. 

The other house we saw was the old Applebee house, designed for Frank Applebee, the Chair of the Art and Architecture Department.   Rudolph designed the house as a gift to Applebee, working to keep the building costs to a minimum.  Frankly, I have never been a big fan of minimalist architecture.  The Applebee house looks like a big old double-wide sitting atop concrete blocks, but what do I know.  It might look better if I had taken better photos!

Unfortunately, like much architecture, Paul Rudolph houses have faced more wrecking balls than preservation in recent years.   Photographer Chris Mottalini did a wonderful exhibition of photographs entitled, After You Left, They Took It Apart.   Ironically, the Rudolph student house was purchased to be gutted and flipped.   When the flippers girlfriend saw the inside, she immediately called the Auburn art department and the gutting turned into a careful renovation. 

Alas, the house remains on the market.

Coming Home

We have been waiting patiently for Coming Home: The Southern Vernacular House it finally see covers.
The book showcases James Lowell Strickland and Historical Concepts, the Atlanta firm founded in 1982. They have a bit of a speciality in creating community and civic projects, but they do a great deal of residential work. The title is self-explanatory: Strickland loves the Southern vernacular. It seems he has never seen a barn he didn't love...or have an idea for improving.

This book is filled with porches and foyers and sleeping areas tucked away with eloquence. No one is better at taking a series structures and linking them into a cohesive, thoughtful statement, individual and still the same.

This South Carolina compound features eclectic buildings including a residence, guest house, and carriage house sitting comfortably around an oak tree.


Zelda Fitzgerald wrote: "...it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected."

Strickland has found a way to traverse this difficulty with great style and flair. He manages to keep all the nice old things while providing a modern spin: an almost optical illusion of of a shiny, new, old penny.


When is a porch so much more? Historical Concepts was joined by the Susan Sully who wrote the text for the book. Sully is one of the best architectural writers working today. This is her third or fourth book this year, it's so hard to keep track! She authored one of last years favorites, The Home Within Us, with Bobby McAlpine. There were so many posts on Sully's The Southern Cosmopolitan, that adding another one would have been redundant.

Coming Home was well worth the wait.

Happy 100 Eero Saarinen

Today is Eero Saarinen's 100th birthday. It is also the 137th birthday of his father, Eliel Saarinen, the first President of Cranbrook.


I spent most of the week in D.C. with my friend, Harry Lowe. Harry Lowe had a long career at the National Museum of American Art before it became the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He also has quite a bit of Saarinen's furniture in his house and he went to Cranbrook. Sitting at the Saarinen table for breakfast, I asked him if Saarinen had been at Cranbrook when he was there.

The answer was no. The elder Saarinen was already dead and the younger Saarinen was out and about making tulip chairs. In Harry Lowe's remarkable sense of understatement, he did mention that he had been close to Saarinen's mother Loja.


Loja Saarinen was a weaver and textile designer. She was the director of the weaving department at Cranbrook from 1929 until her retirement in 1942. Many of the rugs at Cranbrook were designed and executed by Loja.

I spent the morning listening to Harry Lowe tell stories about the Saarinen House and his time at Cranbrook. What a lovely way to spend a morning!

In honor of the Saarinen's I am planning to sink into a Tulip chair and toss back a shot or two of Finlandia. Hyvaa syntymapaivaa!

The Home Within Us

There was a lot of talk on numerous blogs about Susan Sully's The Southern Cosmopolitan. That was not the only book that Susan Sully "wrote" this year. The other book, which hasn't been as widely blogged about is Bobby McAlpine's The Home Within Us. For me, this has been best design book of the year. I know you think I think that because Bobby McAlpine is from Alabama -- well you are wrong. There is something "indescribable" about McAlpine's work. There is, to steal the title of Flannery O'Connor's essays, a mystery and manner to McAlpine's work. It is that mystery, an unseen but always felt presence that draws me to McAlpine's work.

"To create spaces with a broad emotional spectrum, there has to be a pendulum that strikes far to the left and far to the right. A rhythm of the grand and the humble, the exhilarating and the calm, the bold and the tender must be struck at a regular rate."

"I rarely work in a single style. With intuition as my guide, I borrow freely from the entire language of architecture."

One has to hand it to Susan Sully, who allowed McAlpine's voice to flow through this book. Unlike most design books that use text to create a house, Bobby McAlpine's words create a home. Like most people, I immediately opened the book to look at the pictures, but reading the insets from McAlpine, I was constantly drawn and re-drawn to the text. The text reminds my of my first reading of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. There were times when I wanted to hold the text, in a slim volume, devoid of the glowing photos, so as not to be distracted by them.

To me, Bobby McAlpine excels in his use of juxtaposition. His small houses, fishing camps, shacks and cottages bring out his consummate sense of home. I adore the rich velvets with the raw wood; old garden urns filled with apples; broken slabs of marble.

"The cabin has such a cratelike nature that it was impossible to resist putting guilt and fine things in its presence, It was a beautiful foil for things unlike itself. And so there was a lesson somewhere for me in the pendulum's swing between rough plank walls and guilt frames, great tapestries and absolute raw floors."

If the cabin catches on fire, I am going back in to retrieve my copy of The Home Within Us.



Both Susan Sully and Bobby McAlpine have bloggy/magazine/web type things online...

Check out The Southern Cosmopolitan

and

COMMUNIQUÉ is the journal of McAlpine Tankersley Architecture and McAlpine Booth & Ferrier Interiors