Click images to see them larger. All images © Timothy Hurlsey unless otherwise noted.
	Lucy’s House, Mason’s Bend, Ala. (note walls made of carpet samples), Rural Studio, designed 2001, completed in 2002 (after Mockbee’s death).
	Music Man’s House (Jimmy Lee Matthews), Greensboro, Hale County, Ala., 2002­2003 (above). Antioch Baptist Church, Perry County, Ala., Rural Studio, 2002 (below, photo © Elliott Kaufman).
	Click here to see more paintings by Sam Mockbee.

Shortly after Mockbee’s death, Auburn committed $400,000 a year to the studio, endowing it with stability for the first time, and in 2002, Freear was appointed codirector of the studio, with Bruce Lindsey, head of Auburn’s School of Architecture. Freear, however, continues a laser concentration on fifth-year projects, and during his watch the studio’s focus has shifted more emphatically from the rural house to community-oriented buildings.

At the same time, the Rural Studio’s community buildings have grown larger, more complex, more socially significant, and more numerous. During the early years, students built one house and, at most, two modest community buildings a year. In the two years following Mockbee’s death, the studio completed 17 projects.

The year Mockbee died, the studio was working on a house plus five community projects: the Antioch Baptist Church in the countryside about 25 miles northeast of Newbern, the studio’s base; a senior center in Akron, 25 miles west of Newbern; a storefront in downtown Greensboro, the county seat; and in Perry County, Hale’s neighbor to the west, the studio completed a pavilion in the newly reopened Perry Lakes Park. In addition, a group of outreach students reinterpreted and built one of Mockbee’s last designs, called Lucy’s House for its owner.

Freear has also honed the programming of buildings and has encouraged communities to find their own funding, believing that if they provide payment they are more likely to take ownership. Fifth-year students once chose their own projects, but now community leaders come to the studio seeking design and construction help. As a result, students have become more engaged with town and county leaders.

Mockbee’s expressive yet relaxed approach also lives on in the houses designed and built by the second-year program, which has changed much less than the fifth-year program. The first house completed since Mockbee’s death, Tracy Shiles’s house of 2002, suffers from an overabundance of ideas, forms, materials, and finishes, but the second, completed in 2003, for Jimmy Lee Matthews, aka Music Man, returned the studio to its roots. As with the studio’s first house for Shepard and Alberta Bryant, middle-class white students and an impoverished black client worked closely together. They bonded, and the students crossed a threshold to enter a previously feared and unfamiliar world. The students found many of the materials—timber, chicken wire, colored bottles—for the tall, narrow, house with the big tin roof on Music Man’s property. Boochie Patrick’s 1,000-square-foot, modular house of 2004 was conceived as a possible replacement for the region’s omnipresent housing form, the trailer. It has a steel frame with bays that can be enclosed with any material at hand, and, as at the Patrick’s, can be tailored to a family’s needs and the site.

The Rural Studio’s accomplishments pose questions: How can the studio balance its more ambitious, big-time buildings against a wish to remain intimate and retain its rural soul? How can it maintain Sambo Mockbee’s childlike sense of fun and adventure while laboring on more adult, multiyear, high-pressure projects?

Jay Sanders, the second-year instructor from 2002–2004, observes that "Sambo never had a master plan for this place. Maybe his legacy is that it will live on without him, without me, without Andrew, without the students that knew him. If it continues to move forward, in 10 years it may not feel anything like it does today."
For now, Freear and his gang proceed boldly. Sambo would love it.

To read Andrea Dean’s full essay on Samuel Mockbee, including the future of The Rural Studio, see our June 2004 issue.

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2004 Honor Awards index | Architecture Awards | Interiors Awards
Urban Design | 25 Year Award | Firm Award | Gold Medal Award