BIRMIGHAM, ALABAMA.- The Birmingham Museum of Art presents today “Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture,” on view through January 4, 2004. Samuel Mockbee (1944-2001), founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio, was an idealist who put into practice one of the boldest programs in contemporary architecture. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture is the first comprehensive traveling exhibition to survey Mockbee’s work at the Rural Studio. The exhibition, organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA), will open in Birmingham on October 5, 2003 and will be on view through January 4, 2004. The exhibition will travel to the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. (May 22 - September 6, 2004) and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ (September 25, 2004 - January 2, 2005).

Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio will include three built structures which viewers may enter, and thus experience for themselves the novel impact of Mockbee’s architectural vision. Also featured in the exhibition are a selection of his personal notebooks, a dozen models, and more than 100 photographs of completed projects, as well as several large-scale paintings by Mockbee, inspired by his work at the Rural Studio.

Fifth-year Rural Studio students from the 2003 Fall Quarter will create the built structures on-site in the exhibition. Under the direction of Andrew Freear, Co-Director of the Rural Studio, the group of 13 students will create three pre-structures that will ultimately be predecessors to projects they will build in Hale County later in the year. Mr. Freear notes:

"This exhibition will give them a chance to revisit traditional Rural Studio materials and to experience the Rural Studio ethic of getting out of the classroom in order to design and build something real."

The students’ work at the Museum is part of their curriculum and will count toward their final credit for the quarter.

The students will take approximately ten days to create 3 structures: a temple, a "kissing pavilion", and a video-viewing theatre. The building materials involved are all trademarks of the Rural Studio. The temple will be assembled from discarded carpet yarn that has been baled into rectangular building blocks. The intimate pavilion will be built from hay bales with an interior love seat assembled from carpet. Wax-impregnated cardboard bales weighing between 750 - 1200 pounds each will make up the surprisingly effective, sound-absorbing walls of the theatre. A video viewing screen will be inside the structure.

The Rural Studio - Beginning in 1993, Mockbee’s intention with the Rural Studio was to give architecture students practical building experience and to encourage them to use architecture as a means of improving the lives of others. The Studio focused on the community of Hale County - in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, and one of the nation’s poorest counties - where students were led in the design and construction of homes, community centers, and other essential structures. The region, made famous by Walker Evans and James Agee through their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1942), with its legacy of disenfranchisement, vitally informed the character of the Rural Studio.

Mockbee believed that architecture could play a determining role in combating the brutalities of poverty. He inspired students to create vanguard designs and utilize an array of innovative, cost-effective building materials that included tires, recycled license plates, shredded cardboard, and scraps of carpet baled into building blocks. Aware that architecture had become a discipline increasingly dominated by iconic personalities, Mockbee’s method supplanted ego with cooperation and collaboration, encouraging small teams of students to address the tasks of architecture through dialogue and interaction with members of the community.

In an interview shortly before his death, Mockbee spoke of the profound insights that had been gained through his work:

"These small projects designed by students of the Rural Studio remind us of what it means to have an American architecture without pretense. They remind us that we can be awed by the simple as much as by the complex, and if we pay attention, they will offer us a glimpse into what is essential to the future of American architecture... its honesty."

The Bryant (Hay Bale) House became the first house completed by the Rural Studio in 1994. Alberta and Shepard Bryant, an elderly couple in their seventies, were raising three grandchildren in a dilapidated shack in Hale County when they were approached by Sam Mockbee and his students. Their needs were as basic as indoor plumbing, a septic tank, and comfortable places to sleep. What the students created for them was nothing short of remarkable. The house, which ultimately cost only $16,500 to build, was constructed from hay bales covered with stucco.

The ingenious use of cheap and plentiful hay displayed the Studio’s knack for the radical, but practical, in that the hay would provide natural insulation and once covered with stucco, give the appearance of a "normal" home. Although the Bryants’ living space was a compact 850 square feet, Ken Johnson of The New York Times noted:

"…its generous, slightly funky vernacular look is far from what one has come to expect from institutionally cranked out, low income housing."
 
The Bryant home also established the working method of the Studio. The fall quarter students established first contact with the clients and started the design phase. Subsequent students determined materials and other details, including additional design elements, always responding to the needs of the clients. However, the standard rule applied that anything built by prior students must remain intact. Up to three groups of usually 15 students worked on a project during the course of a year--which was generally the time each project took to complete. The students were encouraged to be inventive and resourceful, but in the end, it was Mockbee who had final say.

Samuel Mockbee 1944 – 2001 - The robust and personable Samuel Mockbee, a sixth-generation Mississippian, was born on December 23, 1944, in Meridian, MS. He graduated from Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction in 1974. After practicing on his own, he formed a partnership with Coleman Coker in 1984. The firm of Mockbee Coker acquired a reputation for designs that fused traditional Southern architecture with the language of high modernism. However, once Mockbee founded the Rural Studio in 1993, he spent most of his professional life in Alabama.

After completing an impressive array of structures with the Studio, including private homes, a chapel, playgrounds, and a boys and girls club, among other projects, Samuel Mockbee unexpectedly died of leukemia in 2001 at the age of 57. His untimely death occurred just as the Rural Studio was beginning to receive significant recognition. Not only was Mockbee awarded a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2000, but a monograph, Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency, published by Princeton Architectural Press, was nearing completion. Mockbee had recently mounted exhibitions of the Rural Studio’s work at the Max Protech Gallery, New York, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and posthumously participated in the Whitney Biennial, 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In addition to his innovative work as an architect, Mockbee was also an accomplished painter. His vibrant works have a mythological dimension that relate to the landscape of Hale County and also pay homage to the clients for whom he and the Rural Studio built homes.

This is especially visible in Alberta’s Ascension (1999), a reference to Alberta Bryant, one of the Studio’s first clients. In stunningly vivid colors, Mockbee depicts a stately woman in a wheelchair balanced on the back of a giant turtle (the Bryants raised them for food). As Lawrence Chua observes in his essay published in The Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency:

"The brightness of Mockbee’s paintings [are] misleading. To spend time with them is to see those rich blues and yellows are built up layers of darkness, the product of a darkness in which life is lived….If one cannot live a dignified life in history, these paintings seem to ask, can one have dignity in mythology?"

A 124-page, full-color catalogue reflecting on the life and career of Samuel Mockbee, with contributions from various architects [Frank Gehry], critics, writers, students, artists [William Christenberry] and the clients of the Studio, will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue, designed by VRJ Design of Birmingham, AL, is edited by Dr. David Moos, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the BMA and Gail Andrews Trechsel, Director of the BMA. It will retail for $24.95 at the BMA Museum Store and is available to the trade by Distributed Art Publishers, New York.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Altria. Additional support has been provided from The Comer Foundation, the Rich’s Fund of the Federated Department Stores Foundation and the Graham Foundation.