MARY ORNDORFF
News Washington correspondent

WASHINGTON - A tribute to Auburn University's Rural Studio, the student program that combines architecture and community service to combat poverty, goes on display at the National Building Museum Saturday.

Created originally for Birmingham's Museum of Art, the exhibit is now on the road and will be in the nation's capital before moving westward to Arizona in September. Like in Birmingham, the intriguing work of the architecture students is the main attraction, but it is more importantly an homage to the man who inspired them all, the late Samuel Mockbee.

"He's been a part of our solar system for some time," said Howard Decker, chief curator. Mockbee won the museum's Apgar Award for Excellence in 1999 and Decker said he's been trying to land an exhibit of his work ever since.

It opens publicly on Saturday but a preview tour Thursday drew national press. The 3,000-square-foot display combines the photography of Timothy Hursley, Walker Evans and William Christenberry; Mockbee's striking artwork; scaled models of the buildings students erected across Hale County; and samples of the designs with their unorthodox materials.

The centerpiece is a carpet bale temple, a touchable structure for displaying the models and giving museum-goers a feel for how Rural Studio work looks from the inside. Its walls are heavy pine timbers and 95 bales of discarded carpet yarn, and beaver-chewed sticks jut from the roof.

For 10 years, Rural Studio has transplanted Auburn architecture students into the high-poverty Black Belt to design and build things people need: a house, a chapel, a community center, a baseball field. Their budgets are low, their labor is cheap and their creativity, boundless.

"The most basic function of architecture is shelter, but the dignity of this shelter is above and beyond," said Chrysanthe Broikos, coordinating curator. [...]