Community Works: Sambo Mockbee and the Rural Studio

This essay, essentially a eulogy, was written in 2006 by Bruce Lindsey about legendary architect Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, co-founder of the Rural Studio at Auburn University, who died on December 30, 2001, of leukemia. Lindsey was then co-director of Rural Studio and head of Auburn's School of Architecture. Rural Studio is an experiential, community-based architecture program in rural Alabama, in which student teams plan, design and build community projects “to allow students to put their educational values to work as citizens of a community … within the community's own context, not from outside it.” The essay was commissioned by Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for "Craft and Community: Sustaining Place," a 2006 symposium on Haystack’s beautiful campus on Deer Isle, Maine. Lindsey’s essay, along with other presentations from the symposium, appears in Monograph #20 of Haystack's Monograph Series, available for puchase online.

Sambo Mockbee (Photo courtesy of Rural Studio)

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. —John Cage

On January 8, 2002, in the kitchen of the Spencer house in Newbern, Alabama, the Rural Studio — Andrew Freear, Jay Sanders, Dick Hudgens, Ann Langford, Brenda Wilkerson, Melissa Denney, Johnny Parker and Dufess (Johnny’s dog) — 14 thesis students, eight outreach students and myself met for the first time since Sambo Mockbee's death a month earlier. Among many words of commiseration and remembrance, I offered the following:

Sambo was a husband, a father, a teacher and a citizen architect. He knew that buildings had the capacity to connect people to people, and people to places, so that they know where they are. Knowing where you are is important. It is easy to forget you are somewhere and not anywhere. Sambo knew that architecture was a way for non-pilots to elevate themselves so that they could see where they are, and hence know a little better who they are. They say that a good teacher will take you to another place — a great teacher will show you a new place, right where you stand.

Music Man House, Greensboro, Ala., 2002-2003 Rural Studio 2nd Year Student Project. A menagerie of donated and discarded materials built for/with Music Man, a.k.a. Jimmy Lee Matthews. Features include shelves that can slide on skateboard wheels from one wall to another, and a floor “tiled” with pieces of colorful glass bottles sunk in cement. (Photo ©Timothy Hursley, courtesy of Rural Studio)

While it was a somber morning in Hale County, there was a quiet determination behind the tears that reflected work to be finished, citizen architects to be educated and the need to proceed boldly. This need felt like gravity and oncoming weather: familiar and scary in the inertia of things set in motion.

Hale County, Alabama — 100 miles west of Auburn, 100 miles south of Birmingham, 40 miles north of Selma — is in the center of the state, and home to the Black Warrior River and the photographs of Walker Evans in James Agee’s 1939 book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Agee writes:

…the question, who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?

Sambo Mockbee, a fifth-generation Mississippian along with D. K. Ruth, both professors in Auburn University’s School of Architecture, answered the call in 1991; they knew what to do. They planted a seed, the “redneck Taliesin” Rural Studio, in the Black Belt of Hale County, Alabama, that has brought forth a tree, the branches of which have literally reached around the world.

Shiles House, Newbern, Ala., 2001-2002 Rural Studio 2nd Year Student Project. Built for Tracy Shiles, a nurse and the guardian of two young boys. An elevated structure incorporating tire construction techniques and telephone pole stilts to lift the building out of a wet landscape. Tires penetrate the interior of the building creating a winding staircase that wraps around the family room. Exterior is clad in oak shingles cut from wooden shipping palettes. (Photo ©Timothy Hursley, courtesy of Rural Studio)

The Rural Studio, a design/build program within the School of Architecture at Auburn University, is approaching its fifteenth year. The premise remains a simple one: the education of citizen architects. The method is direct: build what you design and build community as well as buildings. Over the last 14 years, the Rural Studio has completed over 50 design/build projects educating nearly 500 citizen architects. Several years ago Larry Fabronni, in his capacity as president of the American Institute of Architecture, visited more than half of the 100 schools of architecture in the United States. He asked the students a simple question: “What architect would you like to be like when you complete your education?” The overwhelming answer was Sambo Mockbee. Larry conveyed this to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) during their deliberations related to the award of their Gold Medal, the highest award an individual architect can receive. David Lewis, a celebrated urban designer and Fellow of the AIA, said the decision to award Mockbee the Gold Medal in 2004 was the most significant thing that the AIA had ever done.

Sambo Mockbee (Photo courtesy of Rural Studio)

With recent events debilitating our sense of the rational, a heightened sense of the ethical and the possible feels even more important. In Hale County, Alabama, a place where the possible had nearly been forgotten, the ethical dimension of building builds both shelter and possibility — the beauty and audaciousness of the results reminding us that architecture matters. Joseph Campbell said that we should praise the culture that has heroes, and in the same breath said that we should pity the culture that needs them.

In a 1998 interview Sambo said:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” In so doing, an architect will act on a foundation of decency that can be built upon. Help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so even if nobody is watching!

Bruce Lindsey is dean of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, both part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Lindsey served as head of Auburn University's School of Architecture 2001-06, chaired Auburn's Masters of Landscape Architecture Program and served as co-director of the Rural Studio. Lindsey holds a master's degree in architecture from Yale University.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2007