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AR: What do you mean by dishonesty in architecture?

SM: There’s a gluttonous affluence around, stage-set design that’s way beyond the appropriateness for the client, the program, and it’s all because a client or a developer has the money to build it. Alberti talked about choosing between fortune and virtue. The profession is becoming more a part of the corporate world while corporations (citizens of no place or anyplace) are more and more resembling nation-states. Every piece of architecture should express some moral. If it has moral merit, it deserves the title of ‘architecture.’ For me, the professional challenge, whether I am an architect in the rural American South or the American West, is how to avoid becoming so stunned by the power of modern technology and economic affluence that I lose focus on the fact that people and place matter.

These small projects designed by students at the Rural Studio remind us of what it means to have an American architecture without pretense. They remind us that we can be awed by the simple as much as by the complex, and if we pay attention, they will offer us a simple glimpse into what is essential to the future of American architecture…its honesty.

Masons Bend - Hale County, Alabama Continued from previous page On a triangular patch of land, next to the dirt road that serves as the hamlet’s arterial, stands a dramatic sculpture of glass and aluminum, cypress and steel, and rust-red earth. This is the Masons Bend Community Center, designed and built as a thesis project by a team of fifth-year students at Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The cost was approximately $20,000. The building is processional in outline, gathering the community within arms of rammed earth, funneling them through a slender entrance sheltered by a fold of aluminum, and delivering them into a space that leads the eye through a fish-scale-glass membrane to the sky and trees beyond. The centrally located site, where the property lines of three founding families meet, was originally occupied by an engineless school bus that had served as a dwelling, so the team used a similar footprint for the community center. A generic gathering place with no mechanical systems fit the budget. The community center represents an expansion of the initial program of the Rural Studio, which began to build houses for the poor of Hale County in 1993, under the direction of Auburn professors Samuel Mockbee and Dennis K. Ruth. — Christine Kreyling Photography by Timothy Hursley

AR: You say you’ve been cursed and blessed to be a Southerner. How so?

SM: I grew up in a segregated South, in a very humanly warm environment, and had a wonderful education. But looking back on it, I know it was probably at the expense of the black community. I realize some of the things I’d been taught are wrong. The blessed part is that as an artist or an architect I have the opportunity to address wrongs and try to
correct them.

AR: So the Rural Studio is your way to redress wrongs?

SM: We’re excluding a whole army of people who’ve been excluded forever. These people down here are left over from Reconstruction; we need to reinstitute Reconstruction. W.E.B. Dubois said it 100 years ago: Reconstruction was prematurely stopped. He said that would be the big challenge of the 20th century; now we’re in the 21st and we still have the problem and we’re still ignoring it and they’re still invisible.

AR: What about the profession? What’s happened to its social conscience?

SM: Everyone’s too busy trying to make a living. We have to be more than a house pet to the rich; we need to get out of that role.

AR: Have your students had any problems learning to work with poor clients?

SM: No. However, most of our students come from affluent families. For the most part, they haven’t experienced this sort of poverty. They’ve seen it, but they haven’t crossed over into that world, smelled it, felt it, experienced it. They come with abstract opinions that are fairly quickly reconsidered once they meet the families and realize that they’re really no different from other American families. It’s good to see these white middle-class students working hard all day trying to win the respect of people they wouldn’t even acknowledge on the street before.

AR: How important is the building process as an educational tool?

SM: It’s valuable but not totally necessary. What’s important is that students understand the process. It’s the same regardless of whether they’re building a little bitty studio for a basket weaver or a large building. We do preliminary sketches, schematic designs, and foundation designs and then we go out and start digging the foundations. Everything then happens on-site. It’s how architects worked 100 years ago.

What’s important is that for young architects this experience takes it out of the theoretical and makes it real. They start to understand the power that architecture has and the responsibility they have to the creative process and how that manifests itself in something physical. That’s what architecture is. It’s not paper architecture. No one loves to draw and paint more than I do. But it’s important that students learn that drawing on paper and building models is not architecture.

AR: This is the Rural Studio’s eighth year, and it has built more than 13
projects. Why haven’t other schools adapted the model for their own use?

SM: I don’t think the 100-plus architecture schools across the country realize how alike each program is, how interchangeable their curricula and faculty are. I’ve spoken at most of them. The faculty are usually all dressed in black. They all seem to say the same things. It’s all become redundant and very stale, unimaginative. What’s ironic is that you hear professors talk about how out of the box we need to be, how risk-taking is part of being an architect, yet the faculty is often guilty of sitting on their hands. If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community or to challenge the status quo into making responsible environmental and social-structural changes now and in the future, it will take the “subversive leadership” of academics and practitioners to keep reminding the students of architecture that theory and practice are not only interwoven with one’s culture but have a responsibility for shaping the environment, breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo.

The Rural Studio is not an easy curriculum to run. It’s a 24/7 obligation. During the week, I’m in Newbern living with students in a house built in 1890. If you’re going to do this you gotta pack your bags, kiss your wife good-bye, and go to war. If you’re not willing to do that, at least get out of the way and let the rest of us march on through.

AR: It’s unusual to really integrate teaching with practice as you’ve done.

SM: I’m not an academician, but I am an educator. I’m an architect and I’m also a painter. It’s all part of the creative act. That is my passion—to be responsible to the creative process. I enjoy certain technical ability, natural ability, and I get to use it. It’s what all architects have and want to use. We’re living the myth. I was willing to take that jump in the dark, as I like to say, and it’s not going to be fatal.