By Lucy Wang

High-quality design and affordability don’t have to be mutually exclusive—just ask the architecture students at Auburn University’s Rural Studio, a “social justice architecture” program that has been designing sustainable and low-cost homes for the rural poor in an initiative called the 20K Project. Now, after a decade of design/build experience, Rural Studio is hoping to take their affordable designs to mass production, starting with its first two dwellings built out-of-state at the bucolic New Urban village of Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia.