protoslacker:

Rural Studio, the celebrated undergraduate program of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University, has been educating citizen architects since it was founded in 1993 by D.K. Ruth and the late Samuel Mockbee. Rural Studio at Twenty: Designing and Building in Hale County, Alabama by Andrew…

A wonderful article with lots of photos. I went back to college in the mid-1980’s and I was lucky to find housing in two different old, little and somewhat-dilapidated trailer homes. Both were among my favorite living spaces and cured me of any snobbery about trailer park housing.

Around that time most of the house plans I had been paying attention to were two-storey, passive solar houses; most were quite boxy. I knew that one of the patterns in  A Pattern Language a book by Sara Ishikawa, Christopher Alexander, and Murray Silverstein was Long Thin House. But my thinking of houses tended towards “boxy” until I lived in those little trailers. Afterwards with a changed perspective I appreciated American vernacular architecture more, including “the shotgun shack.”  Most of these designs are long thin houses, and they look like very nice houses to live in.

I like very much that the idea for these houses, unlike mobile homes, or manufactured houses, is they will to appreciate in value over the years.