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Created: January 12, 2003
Latest Update: January 12, 2003
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Backup of Sam Mockbee, Dream BuilderSam Mockbee, Dream Builder
Let us now praise a visionary architect who borrowed from the earth and built for the poor.
By Karen HouppertShortly before press time, innovative architect and Auburn University professor Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee, 57, died of complications from leukemia. This article, completed just before his death, when his career was at its height, is a portrait of an idealist, whose Rural Studio—a hands-on architectural program serving one of the nation's poorest rural counties—endures as his legacy.
HALE COUNTY, ALABAMA, IS A LANDSCAPE OF LUSH GREEN HILLS AND RED CLAY ROADS PUNCTUATED WITH SQUARE CATFISH PONDS, DILAPIDATED SHACKS AND FLIES SO BIG THEY THUMP CAR WINDSHIELDS LIKE SOFTBALLS. It has a population of 16,870, eight doctors, two dentists, two newspapers and 1,690 mobile homes. The median household income is $16,716. One thousand four hundred families live in sub-standard housing, and 31.6 percent of the inhabitants live below the poverty line.
Down a pitted clay road, nestled on a curve in the Black Warrior River, sits the century-old African-American settlement of Mason's Bend. In this remote village, barefoot children spill out of listing tar-paper shacks, one family calls a school bus home and running water can be a novelty. In 1941, writing of this very county in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee portrayed a cluster of sharecropper shacks as "bare to the brightness, all with the color in the sunlight and frail look of the tissue of hornets' nests." He could have been describing Mason's Bend today—if it weren't for Samuel Mockbee's intermittent architectural splendors. 'The materials are unorthodox; the effect is often stunning.'
"I believe an architect needs to pay attention to what's outside his back door and to what he's inspired by," Mockbee told me, in his Mississippi drawl, about six months before he died. "Well, outside my back door, I saw folks living in some pretty rough places." Take the Bryants. Until Mockbee came along in 1993, Alberta and Shepard Bryant lived without heat or hot water in a house with dirt floors, tar-paper walls and a leaky roof. The Rural Studio took the elderly couple on as its first client.
Shooing away the chickens, Shepard Bryant greeted us on his new home's spacious porch, lined with bright yellow pillars, that seems a breezy extension of the family living room. "We're just glad to get it, glad to get it, glad to get it," said Bryant, still seemingly perplexed by his good fortune. The interior was cool and dark. Alberta Bryant sat in a wheelchair beneath a fading picture of Martin Luther King Jr., her prosthetic leg in a calico slipper, propped on a chair, and her eyes trained on the TV. She motioned for Shepard to turn down Judge Judy and exclaimed that getting this house was like "winning the lottery." It cost $16,500 to build.
Mockbee conceived of Rural Studio in 1992 with Dennis K. Ruth, then department head of architecture at Auburn University in Alabama. They formed the program a year later, with a $250,000 start-up grant from the Alabama Power Foundation and several smaller donations. Today, architecture students in the program spend a semester or more 140 miles from Auburn, at the satellite campus in Hale County, where they design and construct innovative community projects and houses from recycled, salvaged and donated material.
Few inhabitants of Hale County bat an eye at the sight of Professor Mockbee's architecture students and the unconventional structures they have scattered across the landscape. And while they haven't remedied the poverty in the area, the Rural Studio's work is making an indelible mark in Mason's Bend.
Most of the students live and work communally in a farmhouse that is surrounded by a collection of eclectic dorms. These were built by students as experiments, using found materials, including compressed cardboard, carpet bales, rammed earth and clay. During their first semester in Hale County, they interview prospective clients who are recommended by local social-service organizations, design a house according to the client's needs, procure supplies and donations and begin building. The following semester, a new group picks up where the previous one left off. By the end of the school year, they have completed a house.
"This wasn't just lines on paper, but something substantial that I could walk in and out of," said Jeremy Bagents, a recent graduate. "Never in a million years would I think that I could really build a tangible thing like that for someone." Fifth-year architecture students can also opt to return and do community-based thesis projects. "Think about it," said another recent graduate, "I could go someplace and I could say, 'Here, you need a house? I can build a house right here with my own two hands.'" 'Some houses are made of the very soil and substance of western Alabama, with walls of rammed earth rising out of the selfsame ground.'
And Rural Studio has done it for a song—typically spending $10,000 to $30,000 to build an entire structure. Because the university pays only for teaching salaries, Mockbee and his students have had to solicit donations of money and materials to construct their projects. In the nine years since the Studio's founding, pupils have built five houses, two playgrounds, three community centers, a chapel and a public market—out of hay, clay, slate, corrugated tin, license plates, recycled piping and salvaged oak. The materials are unorthodox; the effect is often stunning.
For Mockbee, the Auburn program was a dream come true. For 14 years, he was a partner in the Mississippi-based firm of Mockbee/Coker Architects, where he designed everything from private homes to sound studios. In the mid-80s, he began designing low-income housing. Charismatic and far savvier than he and his twang would have you think, Mockbee comfortably moved between two worlds—the impoverished families that Rural Studio caters to and the wealthy benefactors who funded his work. He was a recipient of a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2000, as well as other prestigious awards, and his work was featured at this year's Whitney Biennial.
In February 2001, Mockbee appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to talk up his program and receive a $100,000 "Use Your Life Award" from her Angel Network (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, actor and philanthropist Paul Newman and Oprah viewers donate funds to be awarded to worthy organizations and initiatives). He also hobnobbed as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley and gathered press and praise for his work everywhere from The Architectural Record and Time to Nightline.
While some locals sniff that Mockbee was a publicity hound, most commend his ability to parlay press into dollars. He was "out here trying to raise money to keep the program going," said Hale County District Judge William A. Ryan, who chairs a local community-development group. And Mockbee happened "to be very good at getting the word out."
Mockbee, who in 1998 spent almost a year away from his beloved project battling leukemia, worked as though he'd faced his own mortality—and wanted to outrun it. Indeed, he managed to raise $2 million in grants, in-kind contributions and property for the program over the past nine years, an achievement Mockbee brought about by working nonstop at full throttle. Careening from one construction site to another, he acknowledged, "When I came out here, I said, 'I'll come for a year. Maybe, I'll stay two.'" He chuckled. "And here I be, eight years later."
Which meant that his wife, teenage son and three grown daughters, living three hours away in Mississippi, saw him only on weekends, holidays and summer breaks. Was that a difficult sacrifice? Mockbee brushed off the notion: "It's just decisions you make in order to pursue your life without damaging your personal life," he said, stumbling to describe how he squeezed in time for his family. "If you want or, at least, want to try to make a difference in this world, you've gotta commit. And you can't commit halfway. You can't serve two masters."
Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, former executive editor of Architecture magazine, and co-author with Timothy Hursley of Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency, thinks Mockbee was a trailblazer. "There's a lot of interest in architecture now regarding using 'natural' material or things that are going to be good for the environment," she says. "But what Sambo and the Rural Studio did was use stuff that would otherwise end up in the town dump."
While some critics charge that Mockbee simply seized on the latest trend of using recycled materials for sheer effect, Dean disagrees, insisting that he was both pragmatic and unique. "There are very few architects who combine that artistic talent with a social commitment and an environmental focus like Mockbee." And, while the quintessentially modern Rural Studio buildings seem as though they'd grate in this traditional landscape, they are instead artful reflections of the regional aesthetic. 'The goal is not only to have a warm, dry house, but to have a warm dry house with a spirit to it.'
Some, like the house this year's students are building for a single mother of six, are made of the very soil and substance of western Alabama, with walls of rammed earth—a blend of indigenous red clay, cement and water—rising out of the selfsame ground. In defense of his choice of quirky building materials, Mockbee often invoked Mark Twain, one of his literary heroes, saying Twain set out to write "literature," but in realizing his vision, drew on a goodly dose of playful mockery. "Likewise, we set out to build architecture...and often use recycled materials in a humorous way."
But the aesthetic explorations are only part of the equation. Mockbee hoped to change architectural pedagogy—and the world—one student at a time. The Rural Studio was his way of addressing two major problems with architectural education: the failure to give students vital hands-on building experience and the failure to broaden their notion of the architect's role in society.
"Here, students see that architecture is more than just designing beautiful buildings on paper," Mockbee said. His curriculum included all the standard architectural criteria: aesthetics, physical comfort, interviewing clients to determine their needs, making budgets and dealing with technical and legal hurdles. "Most of these kids are from affluent or middle-class families. They think they've seen poverty, but they've only driven by it and smelled its perfume," he insisted. "When they shake their client's hand, and work with him month after month, they then realize this is a real person. The abstraction is taken out of poverty."
Mockbee strongly believed these encounters across race and class could be the first step in changing attitudes and maybe even policies. It is what compelled him to sit up and take notice.
"There was the Civil Rights movement springing up in my own backyard," Mockbee said of the summer of 1964. "But in my very narrow, sophomoric world, I was more concerned with how Auburn was going to do that year in football than with any Civil Rights movement." Two years later, he joined the Army. "I had never been in an integrated community before," he said. It had a profound effect. "I had grown up in a world that was fairly narrow and privileged and one that was willing to justify injustice in the name of false values. So I started to question the hypocrisy around me."
Mockbee believed his students, too, would begin to challenge the status quo and, by word and deed, show that this work is a legitimate avenue of inquiry for architects. "It's real easy to say, 'Why don't they pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go move to Birmingham and get a job?'" he said. But over the course of a semester, students discover that roots and family matter to their indigent clients and that poverty can be blameless.
Mockbee wanted his students to wonder, "Does the architect have a role in addressing political or economic inequities, or transportation issues, or environmental issues? Because I think we do."
n some respects, Mockbee's contribution was modest. After all, there are others who build houses for the poor—Habitat for Humanity and Bryan Bell's Design Corps—and who make a bigger dent in the homeless problem. Habitat, which typically works with a blueprint for identical houses with vinyl siding, has built more than 110,000 houses worldwide. Mockbee's mission was different. As he liked to say: "The goal is not only to have a warm, dry house, but to have a warm dry house with a spirit to it." He said he'd live in any house the Rural Studio has built: "What we build are shelters for the soul as well as homes for the bodies."
Auburn University plans to keep the project alive: "Sambo's greatest wish, and perhaps his greatest achievement, was that the Studio will continue beyond him." Rural Studio co-director Dennis K. Ruth continues to carry out its mission.
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