Youngmeyer Field Station in the Flint Hills of Kansas offers rural magnificence as an off-the-grid research facility

The roof has a clean line with a sculpted edge. (Photos by Brad Feinknopf, DeZeen)

Off the grid and set into the land of the Flint Hills of southeast Kansas, the Youngmeyer Field Station of Wichita State University stands out with its curved stone and stretching windows gracing a bluff. The station, built by Kansas studio Hutton, was designed "to integrate with the landscape and to withstand heavy winds and other natural forces, reports Jenna McKnight for DeZeen. "The building sits within the 4,700-acre Youngmeyer Ranch, an active cattle ranch and research site." Hutton explained the design: "Like the dugouts of the Midwestern frontier days, the field station is partially embedded in the earth to protect the facility from northern winds and to further the contextual camouflage."

The station houses "a laboratory, meeting space, and a garage, along with living quarters to accommodate up to six researchers. . . . The facility is not tied to public utilities. Rooftop solar panels generate electricity, and water is collected on-site." McKnight writes. "The area's plants, animals, soils and waterways are of interest to researchers, particularly given the ranch's location within Flint Hills, a region known for its important tall-grass prairie ecosystem. Once vast, this type of ecosystem has declined since the 1800s due to farming."

The building's design offers a peculiar integration into the surrounding land, as if the structure had come up from the ground. "Façades consist of four varieties of local limestone, arranged in bands that emulate the layers of sediment in the surrounding hills. One of the stone varieties, Prairie Shell, contains fossilized shells that hint at the story of the prehistoric era," McKnight writes. "To maintain a discrete profile, the team created a 'clean roof line' with a sculpted edge. . . . For added protection from both wind and wildfire, the facility is made of concrete and clad in durable and noncombustible exterior materials such as limestone and glass."

The building's meticulously designed interior brings forth a layer of delight. Station team members told McKnight, "Visitors can take a scavenger hunt around the building for fossils preserved and on display in the walls, including a perfect nautilus right by the front door." McKnight adds: "One finds earthy finishes such as wood and stone and a color palette evoking natural elements such as sediment, heads of grain and the sky. . . . The communal room, which looks to the south and east, is afforded sweeping views of the landscape through large stretches of glass. . . . The team noted that the closest neighboring property is a few miles down the road."

Auburn University architecture team makes tiny houses that are as chic as they are affordable

Co.Exist photo

Architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University's design-build program, have been working on a riddle of sorts for more than a decade: how do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want, while also providing living wage construction jobs?

After years of building prototypes, the team finished their first pilot project in the real world in January, Adele Peters of Co.Exist reports. They partnered with a commercial developer in the tiny town of Serenbe, Georgia, southwest of Atlanta, to build two one-bedroom houses, with materials that cost just $14,000 each, making their goal of a $20,000 home feasible.

Their goal was simple: to figure out how to bring the ultra-low-cost homes, called the 20K Home, to a broader market. Many cohorts of architecture students and their advisers have spent more than 100,000 hours tweaking each detail of the house to optimize both the function and the price, Peters writes. But the bigger challenge is fitting a house that's completely different than normal into the existing system of zoning and codes, how contractors do their jobs and even mortgages.

For example, the foundation of the house uses cantilevers, seesaw-like joists that help save wood and concrete and actually make the house stronger than a typical foundation would. But the design isn't in the usual guides that code officials consult, so the architects had to go back and explain how it worked. The team realized that in order to make 20K Homes accessible they would have to create a detailed guide that explained everything from how to build each piece—with Ikea-like instructions—to how to educate local officials, Peters notes.

Another hurdle has been financing. The homes in the pilot project will be owned by the community and shared with artists as part of a residency program. But in a typical case, when someone is buying the house on a limited income and can't afford to pay $20,000 upfront, banks won't finance a mortgage for such a small amount of money; a $100,000 mortgage costs a bank about as much as a $20,000 mortgage, Peters explains.

The project originally aimed for a house that would cost $20,000 in total, including construction; however, the team now believes that more money may be needed to provide a living wage for builders. They've rejected the idea of using factory-made prefabricated parts because one of the main goals is to create jobs. Still, whatever the final cost, it will be inexpensive, Peters notes. And if someone wants to construct it together themselves, it would cost less than $20,000.

Study finds that 217 rural counties are among top 25 percent of counties with most creative workers

Some of the most creative people in the U.S. are living and working in rural America. A report by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 217 rural counties are in the top 25 percent of nation's most creative class counties "when measured by the percentage of workers who are employed in creative-class professions," such as arts, architecture and engineering, Tim Marema reports for the Daily Yonder. Many have a college or a university. (USDA map; CLICK HERE for an interactive map with county data)

"The creative-class thesis holds that communities that attract and retain more workers who are in creative occupations will fare better in today’s economy," Marema writes. "ERS researchers identified creative occupations listed in the 2000 census and refined their selection criteria (the fine print of the study’s methodology and the data itself are here). Then they identified the top quarter of U.S. counties that had the largest percentage of creative-class workers." (Read more)

Grady Clay, a journalist and urbanist who appreciated rural, dies at 96

By Al Cross, director, Institute for Rural Journalism & Community Issues

The Rural Blog might not be expected to note the passing of a "noted urbanist," as one obituary headline put it, but we're also about journalism and the connections between rural and urban areas, and my friend Grady Clay, left, cared a great deal about those things as well as the urban landscape.

Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation Friends told The Courier-Journal of Louisville that Clay alerted professionals to such issues as “sprawl, historic preservation, watershed management and ecological design. These are things we deal with as second nature today, but they were pretty revolutionary stuff” when he took over as editor of Landscape Architecture.after serving as C-J real estate editor. (Read more)

"Clay was an authority on urban design," Gabe Bullard writes for Louisville's WFPL.  He was president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University; a research associate to the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, where he grew up, and lectured extensively was a visiting professor at universities in U.S. and abroad.

He was married to an architect, Judith McCandless, and was chair of the jury that chose Maya Lin's then-controversial design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and "I’m sure at some level, guided" its final design and execution, "which transformed memorial architecture and the way we commemorate events of historical significance," Alan Brake, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, told Bullard. His books included Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape.

Clay at his Louisville springhouse. (Photo by
Spcsnvsnjmc / Wikimedia Commons)

Grady Clay kept track of how journalists described the landscape, urban and rural. In 1990, when I wrote that a Kentucky bond issue would build roads in "the far reaches of the state," he was taken with the phrase. Our correspondence then is lost in the electronic ether, but we kept in touch, last seeing each other in 2008 when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Urban Communication Foundation.

In the 1990s, he recorded a series of timeless, insightful commentaries for WFPL, titled "Crossing the American Grain" and collected in a book by that title. For rural listeners I recommend No. 5, about a summer night on a Michigan beach; No. 7, about a sawmill, a cotton gin and hard work on his grandparents' farm at Walnut Grove, Ga.; No. 8, about building the Alaska Highway; and No. 10, about moving.

Oxford American's list of 'The Most Creative Teachers in the South' has strong rural flavor

The South is the nation's most rural region, in terms of population, so it shouldn't be surprising that the Oxford American's list of "The Most Creative Teachers in the South" is heavy with those at rural colleges, rural backgrounds or rural projects. Here are five examples:

David Haskell, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., "conducts biology courses structured around on-site or hands-on lessons. In his ornithology course, he distributes bird carcasses that he's collected around campus. Each student is given a different bird, ranging from owls to hummingbirds, and becomes responsible for cleaning and rebuilding the skeleton." He says, "It's like a little term paper of bone." He raises goats and rabbits and takes students to his farm.

Frank X. Walker, University of Kentucky, Lexington: A poet, he invented the word "Affrilachia" to describe the relatively little known culture of African Americans in Appalachia. It's now in Webster's. He "adopted the totemic initial 'X' in college, following the influence of leaders like Malcolm X whose quest to discover their pre-slavery heritage led them to remain 'nameless'." His teaching inspired a rally by students to protest racist expressions aimed at President Obama on campus.

Beth Glazier-McDonald of Centre College in Danville, Ky.: "A willfully lecture-based instructor in a time of low-key seminar-style pedagogy," she teaches "Biblical History and Ideas" and a course she founded, "Biblical Hebrew." The latter course challenges some Christians. "People often think that questioning the text, and questioning the deity, is anathema," she says. "So I say, 'Let's go to the text, let's see what it says about faith, about belief.'"

Sarah Hardy, Hampden-Sydney College, in the town of like name in south-central Virginia's Prince Edward County, "has the rare privilege of being the female professor of a course titled 'American Masculinity' at the all-male institution." The South Carolina native "uses her female perspective for the secondary purpose of furnishing an objective voice in the discussions of preconceived notions about traditional masculinity."

Andrew Freear, Auburn University, runs the land-grant institution's "low-income development architecture program, the Rural Studio," in which students design projects "ranging from individual houses to farmers' markets and 40-acre parks." He says, I'm there as a kind of psychiatrist, confidante, mother, father, psychoanalyst, friend, drinking buddy." (Read more)