Carlisle SynTec, Carlisle, Pa., is sponsoring the "The Rural Studio Film," an award-winning PBS documentary, which will air April 7 at 8:00 p.m. on WITF-TV.
The documentary won Best Feature Length Documentary Film at the Barcelona International Film Festival this year and is receiving rave reviews on PBS stations in major markets around the country. "The Rural Studio Film" is generating growing national interest in the education of architects and the use of the design-build environment as a core resource for community development.
"We believe that it's important to support community-based architecture like that advocated by the Auburn College of Architecture and we are glad to have the opportunity to recognize the contributions of Samuel Mockbee," said Nick Shears, Carlisle's vice president of sales and marketing. "We think that projects similar to The Rural Studio could greatly enhance the sense of community throughout Central Pennsylvania."
The documentary features the efforts of Auburn University's Rural Studio, a satellite campus where architecture students and professors design and construct buildings in some of Alabama's poorest regions. In 1993, a group of Auburn architecture professors led by Samuel Mockbee founded The Rural Studio as a way to improve community and living conditions in the poorest rural counties while providing architecture students with a practical design-build learning environment. More than a decade later it has become an internationally acclaimed program for advancing social change through the education of architects.