Rural alliance

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2002 by Catherine Slessor

'Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience and help those who aren't likely to help you in return and do so even if nobody is watching.' Sam Mockbee

The death of Sam Mockbee at the end of last year (AR February 2002) robbed American architecture of one of its most radical and visionary practitioners. Based in the deep South, Mockbee's work with Auburn University's Rural Studio probed the unpalatable, neglected margins of American society to engage with the rural poor and dispossessed. Under Mockbee's direction, groups of students from the College of Architecture, Design and Construction lived and worked off campus in western Alabama. In conjunction with the local Department of Human Resources, they designed and built houses and other small-scale projects for the mostly destitute citizens of Hale County who found themselves beyond the reach of conventional agencies (AR March 2001).

Raised in segregated Mississippi, Mockbee was painfully aware of the acute moral, social and political contradictions of Southern life and constantly strove to challenge and change the existing order, through raising grants, initiating architectural and art projects, as well as teaching, writing and proselytizing. For Mockbee, architecture was a humanly sustaining social art, indelibly rooted to place. His loss is deeply felt, but the Rural Studio's evangelizing work continues, with two of its most recent projects, the Akron Girls and Boys Club (p50) and Lucy's House (p54) shown here.

AKRON BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB

Huddled by the edge of the Black Warrior River in western Alabama, the little town of Akron was once quite prosperous, buoyed up by the proceeds of rail transportation. (It used to be the only point between New Orleans and Birmingham where a train could be turned around.) With the growth of road-based transport, the town languished and now consists of a fly-blown downtown and a handful of boxy, single-storey buildings clustered around the railway tracks. Nearly all of its 600 residents are African Americans, living in trailers raised on concrete blocks to resist regular river flooding.

Most people work out of town in either distant Tuscaloosa or Greensboro and as Akron has no market, they often take time to shop on the way home. This means that their children tend to be at a loose end from the end of school until early evening, so some kind of place was needed where they could be supervised and take part in various distractions and activities.

Occupying a former grocery store on a triangular site at the town's busiest intersection, the Boys and Girls Club has helped to revive Akron's social and economic fortunes.

The original red brick shell of the store was retained and cleaned, forming an evocatively weathered envelope for the building's new role. An extension clad in corrugated steel panels and containing a small classroom, computer lab, bathroom and utility room wraps around the edge of the brick box.

A new jumbo monopitch supported by heavy steel trusses caps the building and introduces light through clerestory glazing. A mezzanine level set above the main club room volume provides additional space (the inclusion of a mezzanine was the source of much excitement among the town's children who had up until then only experienced single-storey buildings).

The spirit is robustly and explicitly functional, borne of an inevitable economy of means, but this does not lessen the ennobling effect of the architecture. Within the simple geometry of the facade, the papery eroded brick contrasts with the shiny crinkly steel. The slender sloping roof plane plays off against the mass of the masonry and the muscular latticework of the trusses. A small canopy of translucent polycarbonate sheeting shades an external verandah, connecting with the urban realm. Street furniture made of cardboard bales sprayed with Shotcrete invites passers-by to linger. Inside, planes of colour articulate and enliven the spaces, with yellow and green walls set off against the blue of the trusses. Patched remnants of the raw brick walls are left as evocative reminders of the building's former life.

The club was designed and built by three fifth-year students who resourcefully begged and scavenged materials. The steel roof frame, for instance, was donated by a former Auburn resident, now a steel manufacturer in Birmingham. The steel was reengineered, its ends rewelded, and it was brought to site through the college's truck-driving programme where it was slotted together as a kit of parts. The students also helped to set up a board of directors and secure an administrator for the club, so that its future was viable. As with all Rural Studio endeavours, architectural involvement goes well beyond the abstract niceties of design into the more challenging and uncharted realms of hands-on building, sourcing materials, finance, and administration. Taken together, it makes a huge difference, both to the young architects and their clients.

Architect

Rural Studio, Auburn