Would you live in a house made out of hay?  In Alabama, a group of professors and architecture students has been devising inspiring ways to reuse materials in homes and community buildings since 1993.  The project is called Rural Studio, and was founded by Auburn University professors Samuel Mockbee and Dennis K. Ruth to give students practical experience in the field.  Each year the group implements designs for four or five modest (but innovative) buildings in rural Alabama.

Hale County, where the studio operates to the west of the University’s main campus, is one of the state’s poorer regions, with a significant proportion of its residents living below the poverty line.  The Rural Studio aims to provide affordable yet well-constructed buildings for people in this community and impart lessons of social responsibility and fairness on its student participants, who leave school to live near the studio.  To cut costs, many projects utilize found materials such as broken concrete, road signs, hay barrels, and salvaged wood.

The Yancy Tire Chapel, for example, features walls made from 900 recycled tires, which were filled with dirt and tied together before being coated in stucco and topped with a roof of salvaged pine from a nearby house.  The open-air chapel is built into a bluff overlooking a natural wetland landscape.

Another building, the Butterfly House, was built for Anderson and Ora Lee Harris in 1996 and is now occupied by the couple’s daughter.  The placement of windows and walls in the house was carefully calculated so the interior may be heated and cooled passively, without use of mechanical power.  Its roof is angled to collect water into a tank that may be used for laundry, and some of the siding was salvaged from a razed church.

Click here to see all nineteen years’ worth of projects!