The Rural Studio, an outreach program of Auburn University, designs innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's Hale County by using "junk" such as car windshields, carpet tiles, baled cardboard, and old license plates. The article theorizes this particular architecture in terms of Critical Regionalism, developed by Tzonis/Lefaivre and Frampton, and by reflecting on aesthetic problems of junk architecture. Further, the article evaluates the achievements of the Rural Studio by discussing cultural problems arising through participatory design as well as third world architecture and the cultural and social obstacles that architects and architecture students need to overcome. As students become members of the community, patterns of third world architecture are transgressed. I conclude by saying that no vernacular architecture should be politically instrumentalized; architecture like that of the Rural Studio can only thrive within a self-sufficient niche--that is, within the space of an absolute vernacular, disconnected from the context of globalization. (Contains 17 notes.)