Rural Studio And The 20K House

The Newbern Volunteer Fire Department was the first new public building in Newbern for 110 years. It houses fire trucks and satisfies the town’s needs for a place to house elections, council meetings, volunteer firefighter classes, fund-raising and community gatherings. The building is supported by a wood and metal truss structure enclosed by translucent polycarbonate panels protected from the sun by cedar louvers.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of Taliesin, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio’s founder, was a larger-than-life figure. Born in Mississippi, Mr. Mockbee established the Rural Studio in dirt-poor Hale County, Ala., a place where trailers teetering on cinderblocks and disintegrating barns were two of the most common building types.

Hale County was where James Agee and Walker Evans lived when they gathered the material for their 1939 book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” And until Mr. Mockbee arrived, visitors remarked that little had changed since Agee and Evans captured its heartbreaking poverty in words and pictures.

Under Mr. Mockbee, who died in 2001, students identified the poorest of the poor, and built them modest dwellings. Materials were rudimentary – whatever they could beg or borrow – and so the students made their mark with quirky details: a window inserted on a 30-degree angle, a concrete wall studded with soda bottles to let bits of light through. One house has walls made of car tires; another is made of hay bales; yet another of stacks of carpet tiles.

It’s an open secret that Mr. Mockbee liked to work in Hale County because there was no building code enforcement – allowing the students to experiment with unconventional materials and forms.

A number of the houses are in Mason’s Bend, a hamlet near Sawyerville occupied by four extended families. At the center of the enclave is a community chapel, its towering glass wall made of surplus Chevrolet Caprice windshields. When I was there, one of the windshields had shattered and others were in need of washing. But the power of the building – rising skyward with ambitions that belie its low budget – shone through.

Update:  The film Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio premiered last week at the South By Southwest festival and is set to air nationally on PBS this summer. Follow the above link for a high resolution trailer for the project.