Woodshed - Rural Studio

ANDREW FREEAR (Director): In contrast to the rest of the other architects that are in the exhibit, we are not a practice of architecture, we’re a programme of a school of architecture at Auburn University and we take the students away from the university campus to West Alabama and that programme allows students to design and build public projects from charity homes, community centres, fire stations to parks.

Architects shouldn’t just be the playthings of the rich, architects I suggest can have the bigger vision for society, that the environment that we live in is so important in shaping who we are and the way we think. We believe that architects can play a bigger role in the way the world is. Over the last three years we’ve been looking at a material. It’s the thinnings out of a managed forest and what we’re looking at trying to do is to imagine building with this material.

We’d hoped that you would find it short and then pitched side so you weren’t quite sure what was the other side but it was also about making a tall narrow space against that wall.

We are deliberately trying to make a piece that celebrates one material, that it does delight just because it is this notion of taking one material and rigorously exploring that one material, figuring out how to connect it, how to make a habitable space with it.

It’s a very simple almost primitive form. It’s a mono pitch shed and we’re trying to do that mono pitch shed really well, not tricked out, not with fancy gizmos, there’s a statement in there somehow.