A FINE AMERICAN YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF
Sam Mockbee
FOUR PLANKS OF GOOD ARCHITECTURE
A fine American you have never heard of is Sam Mockbee.
Every other semester, I assign my EN 102 classes a research paper on architects. I assign each cadet to an architect, and task him or her with explaining to the entire class why this is the greatest of all modern architects.
They always like Sam Mockbee.
It is hard not to. Sam Mockbee was a gifted architect who turned down a lucrative partnership in an architectural firm in order to build beautiful houses for his neighbors. For free. Everyone, he felt, deserves architecture. In one interview, Mockbee (who looks more like a lumberjack than an architect) says that when you walk into “houses where you wouldn’t spend the night, much less let your child spend a single night,” you just know the right thing to do.
A second Mockbee plank in the Mockbee platform is this: You can have virtue in this life, or you can have fortune. You cannot have both. He had disdain for graduate schools in architecture which churn out talented designers of pricey new office buildings and condos for the upper classes while so many of our families live in shanties.
A third plank is to build smart. Use local materials – if possible re-use materials, like the time he built one entire wall of a community center in Mason Bend, Alabama, out of junked car windshields.
You can have virtue in this life, or you can have fortune. You cannot have both.
A fourth plank is to learn by doing. His Auburn students did not study architecture inside a classroom but out in the field, digging the plumbing trenches, wiring the electric, installing the roofing, everything – no subcontractors allowed on a Mockbee build.
He died in 2001, at age 57. If you watch several of his video interviews you may conclude (as I have) that the campaign to bring architecture to those poorest among us took its toll on him. A wonderful man.
He called his campaign the Rural Studio, and this dedicated gaggle of grad-student architects is thriving today. As I understand it, their financial model has changed slightly, from fund-raising on their own for each new home, one at a time, to inviting towns across the South to assemble their own projects and financing as collaborators. This expanded format makes total sense to me.
I believe Mockbee was a little bit before his time. We were not listening to his “build small” tune in the 90’s, when easy money and rising prices made McMansions look like a sure thing. Well, we are listening now – at least my cadets certainly are, whenever we study architecture.
Check out just how cool a structure can be:
http://architecture.myninjaplease.com/?p=322
http://samuelmockbee.net/work/architecture/shiloh-falls-house/
http://samuelmockbee.net/rural-studio/projects/bryant-hay-bale-house/
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