In Mockbee's memory: a traveling show about the late architect Samuel Mockbee and his visionary Rural Studio program comes this month to Washington's National Building Museum

Art in America, May, 2004 by Daniel Belasco

Of all the arts, architecture most directly impacts human well-being. Few contemporary architects understood this better than the late Samuel Mockbee, co-founder of the Rural Studio, the now legendary Auburn University program located 160 miles west of the campus in Hale County, Ala. Mockbee approached architecture as a high-stakes process of passionate engagement, whether for the richest or poorest of clients. After designing his first "charity houses" in Mississippi in the early 1980s, Mockbee became increasingly frustrated with the elitism and disconnectedness of American architectural training. In 1991, he set aside his private partnership in Memphis and moved to Alabama to join the Auburn faculty. By securing a $100,000 grant from the Alabama Power Foundation, he launched the Rural Studio in 1993 with Dennis K. Ruth, chair of the department of architecture at Auburn, as a sort of design-and-build boot camp that annually sends several dozen second and fifth-year students to live and work in one of the nation's poorest regions, a flat, verdant landscape dotted with catfish ponds, tin barns and one-store towns. The program's success validates Mockbee's confidence that students would be invigorated by the struggle to create inspirational and functional buildings in such unfamiliar territory, and that community members would eagerly participate in the experiment.

Since Mockbee's premature death from leukemia in December 2001--he was 57--several institutions have acted to solidify his legacy. The American Institute of Architects honored Mockbee in December 2003 with its prestigious Gold Medal, only its fifth posthumous award, perhaps to compensate for its controversial decision to bypass him in 2002. Auburn's School of Architecture significantly upped its commitment to $400,000 a year for the administrative costs of the Rural Studio and began to raise funds for an endowed chair in Mockbee's name. And last October, the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) opened the most comprehensive showing of Mockbee and the Rural Studio to date, taking home-state pride in surpassing the scope of a 2001 Mockbee exhibition at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center.

The BMA was already planning a big show before Mockbee died. One of its features was to have been a structure built by Mockbee and the Rural Studio in the museum's sculpture garden that would baffle the noise of tractor-trailers rumbling along the nearby interstate overpass. Mockbee was also invited to design a museum expansion. Neither of these plans came to fruition. Instead, the exhibition became both retrospective and memorial. Organized by David Moos, then the Birmingham Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art (he's now a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario), "Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture" exposed the many layers of the profound interchange between Mockbee, his students and Alabama residents. It documented Rural Studio projects with photographs, sketches and models, and portrayed Mockbee himself through his paintings, assemblages, drawings and journals.

The accompanying catalogue also functions as a memorial to Mockbee, containing nearly 30 tributes by admirers like William Christenberry, Paula Deitz, Frank Gehry, Lucy Lippard and Lawrence Rinder, as well as more personal impressions by former students and clients. It remains to be seen whether the Rural Studio model can be propagated outside Alabama. Rut the vitality of the program and the lionization of its garrulous founder ensure that the Rural Studio will continue to pro mote Mockbee's missionary zeal for joyous and redemptive architecture.

"Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio" appeared in Birmingham in conjunction with "Eye to I," a tripartite exhibition of photography exploring the city's history during the civil rights era and since. For this show, Moos selected amateur snapshots by residents, examples of photojournalist work from 1963 and photographs of Birmingham commissioned by a local newspaper. The latter category featured some of Christenberry's serene color pictures, including Blue Building, Birmingham, Alabama (1987), which recalls his pioneering work from the 1960s documenting dilapidated or abandoned buildings in his native Hale County. Like Christenberry, Mockbee tilled Alabama's surplus of images of deprivation and bitter irony, fertile ground for social experimentation.

Both Christenberry and Mockbee follow in the footsteps of Walker Evans, whose intimate photographs of three white Hale County sharecropper families and their Depression-era environment were published, along with James Agee's reporting, in the landmark book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Mockbee's esthetic and educational style borrowed the confident clarity of Evans's photography and the baroque self-consciousness of Agee's Writing. In the Mockbee exhibition, a single black-and-white Evans photograph, Roadside Store, Vicinity Greensboro, Alabama (1936), of a battered wooden structure covered in metal signs for products like Grove's Bromo Quinine, reminded the viewer that Hale County is a hallowed cultural landscape. A page on view in one of Mockbee's spiral notebooks contained his call for a new pedagogy in the 21st century, to update the social realism of the 1930s: "the need to provide a setting for education that is democratic, the need for subversive leadership, and the understanding that people and place matter." Famous Men was the one book Mockbee religiously assigned to his students each year.