Last summer, I was invited to attend a wedding in a small, rural, Midwestern city, and not following the directions to the church correctly, I lost my way. In desperation, I hailed an old country gentleman in a pick-up truck, and after I explained to him my dilemma, he offered to show me the way. We went from the prosperous side of town, with its neat ranch style homes with impeccably manicured lawns, past railroad tracks to a side of town decidedly less prosperous. The vista before me was unsettling: homes that looked like dilapidated shacks with dirt roads, instead of driveways and a pervasive, grinding poverty. This scene can probably be repeated in many cities across the country, and it seems an inevitable result of economic forces at work, and so the question, “What can I do to help?” seems like a futile gesture.
Enter Samuel Mockbee. A modernist architect who has served in professorships at fine Ivy League colleges such as Yale, he also takes his gospel of “democratic architecture” seriously. Using students of architecture from the undergraduate program of Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, he started the Rural Studio.
This is a program that works with the social service agencies of Hale County, Alabama, to build homes and public buildings, using unconventional and recycled building materials. A retrospective of Mr. Mockbee and his students’ building designs are currently being shown at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.
Hale County, Alabama, is one of the poorest counties in the country with 1,700 families living in substandard housing, so there are plenty of potential clients for the Rural Studio. The clients are called by the local social services agencies, and Mockbee and three groups of his undergraduates do the interviewing. Because the students build all the structures themselves and also use very “humble” building materials, they can usually turn in budgets under $20,000 per building.
Several architectural models of the Rural Studio’s finished buildings are on display. It’s amazing how much the quality of life was improved for the clients, using the modernist aesthetic with a creative use of recycled building materials.
One project, which really made an impression on me was the home for Shepard and Anita Bryant. They were living in a shack without running water and were the first clients of the Rural Studio. The Bryants were grandparents, raising their three grandchildren, and they requested separate living quarters for them. The completed building was composed of bales of hay, wrapped in plastic and then covered in stucco, and bedrooms were created for each of the grandchildren by designing barrel shaped niches in the rear of the building. Also designed was a big front porch, so the family could gather and relax outside the house. The building was constructed at a cost of only $15,000 that was defrayed by the university and private support.
Other projects completed were for a chapel, a school, a playground, a smokehouse, and re-design of a baseball backstop. From the pictures and the models in the exhibit, it looks as if a good portion of Hale County has been refurbished.
This exhibit of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio extends through November 4. The retrospective should be seen by architects and social workers alike, for it shows how a determined team of architects can turn a modernist style into an egalitarian social benefit.