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Photograph by Timothy
Hursley
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By Andrea Oppenheimer Dean
This is the eighth year that Samuel
Mockbee and his architecture students at Auburn University have
been designing and building striking houses and community buildings
for impoverished residents of Alabama’s Hale County. In
some ways, the place has changed little since James Agee and
Walker Evans went there in 1936 to document the lives of poor
white sharecroppers. The 1990 Census shows per capita income
still averaging no more than $8,164, and 1,700 families still
living in substandard houses. Most of the Rural Studio’s
clients are African-Americans, “left behind by Reconstruction,”
as Mockbee says. Many live in unheated, leaky shacks without
plumbing in Masons Bend, a little settlement of about 150 people
tucked into a bend of the Black Warrior River at the end of
a winding dirt road about 10 miles from Greensboro, the county
seat.
In addition
to being a social welfare venture, the Rural Studio—Taliesin
South, it’s been called—is also an educational experiment
and a prod to the architectural profession to act on its finest
instincts. In June, Mockbee learned he had been awarded a
MacArthur “genius grant.” Not long afterward, speaking
in the deep drawl of his region, the burly, bearded sixth-generation
Mississippian had the following conversation with contributing
editor Andrea Oppenheimer Dean:
Architectural
Record: What will you do with $500,000?
Sam Mockbee:
It’ll allow me to take care of my family and get way
out on the edge in my work and maybe do something that most
people would think I was crazy to do, follow my instincts,
let a project evolve, and concentrate on it. More than likely
it’ll be for the Rural Studio.
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Photograph
by Timothy Hursley
Masons
Bend, Hale County,
Alabama
Masons Bend is
not a trailer park. But most of the residents live in
trailers—beat up and rusty ones at that. The hamlet,
home to four extended African American families, lies
in Hale County in western Alabama, immortalized in James
Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Continue...
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AR: Any
ideas what the project might be?
SM: You
know the profession’s IDP internship development program?
It is a well-intended program, but most interns dread it.
I would like to offer architecture graduates an opportunity
to come down to the Rural Studio as intern architects, under
my stamp.
One idea is to also ask something of
the premier architects in America, the Frank Gehrys, the I.M.
Peis, the Richard Meiers, and Michael Rotondis. I’d like
to ask each to design a cottage for a family that’s living
down here in a cardboard shack. I’d take their sketch
and get four intern architects to build the house. Masons
Bend, Alabama, would become like Seaside, Florida, but I’d
be doing this for the poorest one percent of Americans.
I’d find the money to build these
houses—we build them for $30,000—and make sure the
workmanship is up to par. That’s the sort of thing I’m
thinking about.
AR: You’ve
stayed close to your Southern roots. Can you get an appropriate
design from an architect who isn’t rooted in place?
SM:
I’m not going to say that someone like Frank Gehry can’t
build something beautiful in a culture and place he doesn’t
know well. For the rest of us mere mortals, the best way to
make real architecture is by letting a building evolve out
of the culture and place.
I don’t want to be pidgeonholed
as a regionalist, yet I am, and I certainly don’t want
to get marked as a local colorist. I pay attention to my region;
I keep my eyes open. Then I see how I can take that and, using
modern technology, reinterpret certain principles that are
going to be true 200 years from now. I want the work to be
looked at as contemporary American architecture, and, in that
sense, it has to have a certain honesty to it. That’s
what’s wonderful about the really great American architecture,
its honesty.
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