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| Mockbee in his painting studio in Newbern in summer of 2001 seated before "The Childern of Eutaw Pose Before Their Acient Cabins," 1992. Photo © Timothy Hursley. |
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By Andrea Oppenheimer Dean
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Click images to see them larger.
All images © Timothy Hurlsey
unless otherwise noted. |
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Christ Community Church, Clinton, Miss., Goodman and Mockbee, 1979 (above, photo © Tom Joynt). Presidential Hills Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Miss., Goodman and Mockbee, 1980 (below, photo © Tom Joynt). |
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Tractor shed at Flautt House, Greenwood, Miss., Mockbee Coker Howorth Architects, 1988 (above.) McGee Church, McGee, Miss., Mockbee Coker Howorth Architects, 1989 (below.) |
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Cook House, Oxford, Miss., Mockbee Coker Howorth Architects, 1991 (above.) Barton House, Mockbee Coker Howorth Architects, Madison County, Miss., 1991 (below). |
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Bryant (Hay Bale) House, Mason�s Bend, Ala., Rural Studio, 1994 (above). Yancey Chapel, Sawyerville, Hale County, Ala., Rural Studio, 1995 (below). |
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Harris (Butterfly) House, Mason�s Bend, Ala., Rural Studio, 1997 (above). Mason�s Bend Community Center, Mason�s Bend, Ala., Rural Studio, 2000 (below). |
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Architect Samuel Mockbee was convinced that "everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul" and that architects should lead in procuring social and environmental change. But he believed they had lost their moral compass. The profession needed reform, he believed, and education was the place to start. "If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities," he said. He wanted to get students away from the academic classroom into what he called the classroom of the community.
Mockbee’s ideas and his aesthetic evolved while he was in private practice, first in a partnership he formed with Thomas Goodman in 1977, then with Coleman Coker in 1983. He described his architecture as contemporary Modernism grounded in Southern culture and drew inspiration from such vernacular sources as overhanging galvanized roofs, rusting metal trailers, dogtrot forms, and porches. "I’m drawn to anything that has a quirkiness to it, a mystery to it," Mockbee said. His designs tended toward asymmetry and idiosyncrasy, as seen, for example, in his Madison County, Mississippi, Barton House (a 1992 Record Houses Award winner) and his Oxford, Mississippi, Cook House (a 1995 AIA National Honor Award winner).
By the early 1980s, convinced that addressing problems and trying to correct them is "the role an artist or architect should play," Mockbee sought opportunities to follow Leon Battista Alberti’s injunction that the architect must "choose between fortune and virtue." In 1982, he helped a Catholic nun move and renovate condemned houses in Madison County, Mississippi, and then built his first "charity house" there for $7,000, using donated and salvaged materials and volunteer labor—a model for the Rural Studio. In 1987, his firm won a 1982 P/A Award for three prototype dogtrot-type charity houses but was unable to get a construction grant to build them. Hoping to convey to possible patrons the reality of poor people ("like you and me, only poor"), Mockbee painted strong portraits in oil of some of his indigent clients. The final piece for the Rural Studio fell into place in 1990 when Mockbee visited Clemson University’s architecture program in Genoa, Italy.
In 1992, Mockbee, together with Auburn architecture professor D.K. Ruth, founded the Rural Studio, which Mockbee directed until his death in late 2001. But instead of planting Auburn’s study-abroad program in a foreign country, they rooted it in the hollows and flat fields of Alabama’s second-poorest county, Hale. Mockbee was drawn there partly because of the poverty: The residents obviously needed help, and coming to Hale would force students to test their abstract notions about poverty by "crossing over into that other world, smelling it, feeling it, experiencing it," he said. He was also attracted by the isolation, which, combined with Mockbee’s prohibition of television, would concentrate students’ minds on their building projects. Students would also be exposed to the region’s architectural history, read its literary giants, and absorb Mockbee’s lectures on responsibility, fairness, and decency.
Each semester, the Rural Studio brought about 15 second-year students to Hale County to help design and build a house. Fifth-year students stayed for a year, working on a community building, their thesis project. Two years before Mockbee’s death, the studio launched an outreach program, accepting a handful of students from other universities and other disciplines to undertake a variety of design and social-work assignments.
Mockbee’s Rural Studio represented a vision of architecture that embraced not only practical architectural education and social welfare but also the use of salvaged, recycled, and curious materials and an aesthetics of place. "I want to be over the edge, environmentally, aesthetically, and technically," Mockbee said. His students used hay bales to build walls for the studio’s first house, worn-out tires for the walls of a chapel, salvaged Chevy Caprice windshields for the roof of a community center, and waste corrugated cardboard for a one-room dwelling. Transmuting ordinary materials into extraordinary objects, the studio’s buildings were obvious relatives of those Mockbee designed for his private clients. For his work at the Rural Studio, Sambo Mockbee was awarded the National Building Museum’s first Apgar Award for Excellence in 1998, and in 2000, he won a MacArthur "genius" grant.
The influence of the Rural Studio is hard to quantify. Daniel Friedman, FAIA, dean of the University of Illinois, Chicago’s architecture program, says it has changed architectural education. Bill Carpenter, author of Learning by Building: Design and Construction in Architectural Education, observes that in 1992 there were eight or 10 university-based design-build programs, while today there are 30 or 40.
After a founder’s death, ventures like the Rural Studio rarely flourish. Much of Taliesin’s vitality and creativity, for instance, died with Wright. I am pleased to report, however, that Mockbee’s baby thrives, a tribute to his ideas. The studio isn’t quite the same and isn’t without criticism, including from within. "I suspect Sambo would just think it was different and regret being dead and not being there," David Buege, a professor of architecture at Mississippi State University and a friend of Mockbee’s, told me. Mockbee understood change and welcomed it. He created the studio as a moving target.
There was almost no transition period, Buege recalls, and there was never a doubt about who should succeed Mockbee. At the time of Mockbee’s death, 34-year-old Andrew Freear, a native of Yorkshire, England, and a product of London’s Architectural Association, taught the fifth-year program. "Sambo and I were good together," Freear says. "I was a sort of utilitarian socialist and he was the artist who said make it pretty." Continued...
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