Like so many Boy Scout troops, which meet in church basements or their Scoutmaster's living room, Greensboro, Alabama's Scout Troop 13 and Cub Pack 13 had no place to call home. For years, they had been gathering in the extension office of the Alabama Fish Farming Center, which provides technical advice on catfish production and sits on the edge of Greensboro's 40-acre Lions Park. Over time, the Scouts had labored to clean the park, “bushhogging” (clearing undergrowth) and maintaining trails. In a way, they had become its unofficial stewards. They were in good company: Auburn University's Rural Studio design-build program had been working there on a multiphase restoration since 2006, creating playing fields, restrooms, landscaping, a playground, and a skate park. “From day one, we knew there was a need to help the Scouts with a headquarters that could give them an identity,” says Rural Studio director Andrew Freear. “But we were struggling to understand where to put another object building—we did not want it floating in the park.”
“From the get-go, we knew we wanted a wood building,” says Elizabeth Whitlock, one of the four-person student team. After studying the Scout-hut archetype, the students set out to find a new way to use timber that would still achieve the desired simplicity. For years, the studio had been experimenting with thinnings—small-diameter trees that are harvested to prevent them from competing with larger, more valuable ones. Seen as refuse, thinnings are chipped or pulped, used as fence posts or firewood. They are cheap, but dimensionally unstable. The more you manipulate the wood, the more you weaken it and add cost, notes Freear. “We tried to touch the thinnings as little as possible, using them as dead weight.”
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