Rural Studio Newbern, Alabama

Rural Studio, an innovative design-build, hands-on architectural teaching organization has its rural “campus” and several building projects here in Newbern.  Other building projects are located throughout Hale county, with some of the more well known projects located in the nearby community of Mason’s Bend. This is where the late Samuel Mockbee started Rural Studio, as an architecture workshop for graduate students at Auburn University, practicing an "architecture of decency," building creatively and inexpensively in this poor area of the rural south. Since 1993, Rural Studio students have designed and built over 150 projects, including houses and other structures using unconventional, inexpensive, and recycled materials, employed in an innovative manner.