Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings in a style Mockbee describes as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture."".

For two decades the students of Auburn University's Rural Studio have designed and built remarkable houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama's Hale County, one of the poorest in the nation. Our critically acclaimed bestseller Rural Studio (2002) showed how salvaged lumber, bricks, discarded tires, hay-and-waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, carpet tiles, and old license plates were transformed into inexpensive buildings that were also models of sustainable architecture. Rural Studio at Twenty chronicles the evolution of the legendary program, founded by (MacArthur Genius Grant and AIA Gold Medal winner) Samuel Mockbee, and showcases an impressive portfolio of projects. Part monograph, part handbook, and part manifesto, Rural Studio at Twenty is a must-read for any architect, community advocate, professor, or student as a model for engaging place through design.

In 1992, Samuel Mockbee launched the Rural Studio to create homes and community buildings for the poor while offering hands-on architecture training for coming generations. This new book explains the changes the studio has undergone since his death.176 pp.

The architect and teacher Samuel Mockbee, founder of Auburn University's Rural Studio, was an idealist who put into action one of the boldest programs in contemporary architecture. Mockbee led his students in the design and construction of homes, community centers and other essential structures in Hale County, Alabama--one of the poorest counties in the United States. Mockbee believed that architecture could play a determining role in combating the brutalities of poverty. He inspired students to create vanguard designs and utilize an array of innovative, cost-effective building materials that included scraps of carpet baled into rectangular building blocks. This combination of ingenuity and enterprise informed the unique character of Mockbee's undertaking. "Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio" appraises Mockbee's unique contribution, assessing how he believed that architecture, practiced as a community-oriented undertaking, could transform the social environment.

The work of Samuel Mockbee and Coleman Coker "offers many lessons for projects of all scales and locations. It is an architecture that both celebrates and transcends its regional influences". -- Progressive Architecture

Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at USC’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment. He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain. Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.

While most attention is given to the booming mega-cities in China and the associated problems of over-population, the rural areas in China are being largely ignored. Yet, a sustainable development of the rural areas is precisely that, which will be decisive for China’s future. Through its rapid development into an industrial country, China now needs to tackle far-reaching problems such as increasing population, growing income gap between the poor and the rich, rural exodus, decreased agricultural production, and environmental pollution. Rural Urban Framework is a work group at the University of Hong Kong that not only researches the far-reaching changes of the last thirty years in China’s rural areas, but has also realized concrete projects aimed at improving supply and infrastructure on site. In this publication, the authors present for the first time the results of their research as well as their built projects in the Chinese backlands, and question whether China’s only future model lies in cities.

For America’s rural and suburban areas, new challenges demand new solutions. Author Randall Arendt meets them in an entirely new edition of Rural by Design. When this planning classic first appeared 20 years ago, it showed how creative, practical land-use planning can preserve open space and keep community character intact. The second edition shifts the focus toward infilling neighborhoods, strengthening town centers, and moving development closer to schools, shops, and jobs. New chapters cover form-based codes, visioning, sustainability, low-impact development, green infrastructure, and more, while 70 case studies show how these ideas play out in the real world. Readers —rural or not—will find practical advice about planning for the way we live now.

A home of one’s own has always been a cornerstone of the American dream, fulfilling like nothing else the desire for comfort, financial security, independence, and with a little luck, even a touch of distinctive character, or even beauty. But what we have come to regard as almost a national birthright has recently begun to elude more and more prospective homebuyers. Where housing is concerned, affordable and well-crafted rarely exist together. Or do they? For years, founding editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine and noted architecture and design critic Karrie Jacobs had been confronting this question both professionally and personally. Finally, she decided to see for herself whether it was possible to build the home of her own dreams for a reasonable sum. The Perfect $100,000 House is the story of that quest, a search that takes her from a two-week crash course in housebuilding in Vermont to a road trip of some 14,000 miles. In the course of her journey Jacobs encounters a group of intrepid and visionary architects and builders working to revolutionize the way Americans thinks about homes, about construction techniques, and about the very idea of community. By her trip’s end Jacobs, has not only had a practical and sobering education in the economics, aesthetics, and politics of homebuilding, but has been spurred to challenge her own deeply held beliefs about what constitutes an ideal home. The Perfect $100,000 House is a compelling and inspiring demonstration that we can live in homes that are sensible, modest, and beautiful.

A survey of community design centers highlighting ten national programs, such as the Rural Studio and Studio 804 at Kansas State. Includes recommendations for strengthening these initiatives. The work demonstrates that exemplary design is a significant component of effective community development. Since the late 1990s, the National Endowment for the Arts, under the direction of Mark Robbins, has been promoting design excellence through an ambitious series of symposia, best-case design studies, and prototype projects. The results of these programs are now documented in a new series of publications, each focusing on design in the public realm and the potential for innovative architecture, landscape architecture, and planning.