Field of dreams: this inventively conceived baseball field creates a new social focus in a rural hamlet.

Despite Sambo Mockbee's death at the end of 2001, the Rural Studio that he established at Auburn University's College of Architecture, Design and Construction continues to thrive under the direction of Andrew Freear. Its premise will be familiar to many AR readers--every semester, groups of students elect to live and work off campus in impoverished parts of western Alabama, producing architecture that challenges convention in terms of methods, materials, and forms. Paucity of budgets is more than compensated for by a richness of invention and imagination.

The latest project is for a Little League field in Newbern, a microscopic rural hamlet consisting of just six buildings. Within this small but tight-knit community, baseball and its attendant activities provide a strong social focus. A small tract of farmland has been the site of regional baseball games for the last 100 years and students from Rural Studio previously undertook a series of site improvements to the main baseball field (AR June 2002). Here it is the turn of the Little League (the children's version of the adult game) to benefit from a similar programme. Concerned about the welfare of local children, residents and parents felt that many of the problems associated with the area's dire socioeconomic conditions could be alleviated by involvement in sport.

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The new Little League field is carved out of a piece of sloping ground on property donated by the estate of Robert Walthall, a philanthropic local. Sculpting and massing of the terrain was carried out using the latest methods for excavating catfish ponds, another instance of inventive appropriation of local skills and technology. Semicircular metal hoops anchored to the ground form the framework for a protective enclosure for spectators, who sit on tiers made of concrete slabs. Sheathed in lightweight netting (actually discarded catfish nets), the hooped structure warps and snakes around the field. Typical of the Rural Studio capacity to elevate and transform everyday materials, the netting billows lightly like a low slung aviary, pulled and teased into sharp tensile peaks. Detailing is necessarily simple and economical, yet the entire construction has a lyrical quality that defies its hardscrabble origins.

Since the remote rural site had no electricity or water, everything had to be built using hand or gas powered tools by a quartet of students who quickly picked up a range of building skills. As well as scavenging materials--for instance, the lights were donated by Techline Sports Lighting owned by an Auburn University alumnus--students also sourced funding from the Baseball Tomorrow Fund, the philanthropic arm of Major League Baseball, and the Major League Players' Association in New York.

In common with its larger cousin, the new Little League field is immensely popular, with an agenda that goes well beyond the simple provision of sports facilities. It also shows the capacity of architecture (and architects) to transcend social and economic disadvantage and play a meaningful role in wider community development. At the end of last year, Sambo Mockbee was posthumously awarded the 2004 AIA Gold Medal in recognition of his considerable achievements; happily, his mission continues.

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