Of all the arts.

Of all the arts, architecture most numerous directly impacts human well-being. not many contemporary architects understood this better than the late Samuel Mockbee, co-founder of the Rural Studio, the now legendary Auburn University program located 160 miles west of the campus in Hale shire Ala. Mockbee approached architecture as a high-stakes proces of passionate engagement, whether for the richest or poorest of clients. After designing his first "charity houses" in Mississippi in the early 1980 Mockbee became increasingly frustrated with the elitism and disconnectedness of American architectural training. In 1991 he stake aside his private partnership in Memphis and mov to Alabama to join the Auburn faculty. by way of securing a $100,000 grant from the Alabama Power Foundation, he launched the Rural Studio in 1993 with Dennis K tenderness chair of the department of architecture at Auburn, as a sort of design-and-build advantage camp that annually sends several dozen inferior and fifth-year students to live and work in single of the nation's poorest regions, a flat, verdant landscape dotted with catfish pond tin barns and one-store towns. The program's succes validates Mockbee's confidence that scholars would be invigorated by the contend to create inspirational and functional buildings in in the same state [i]or[/i] condition unfamiliar territory, and that community members would eagerly participate in the experiment.

Since Mockbee's premature death from leukemia in December 2001--he was 57--several institutions have acted to solidify his legacy. The American Institute of Architects honored Mockbee in December 2003 with its prestigious Gold Medal, sole its fifth posthumous award, perhaps to compensate for its controversial decision to bypass him in 2002 Auburn's sect of Architecture significantly upped its commitment to $400000 a year for the administrative expenses of the Rural Studio and began to raise supplys for an endowed chair in Mockbee's name. And last October, the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) lay opened the most comprehensive showing of Mockbee and the Rural Studio to date, taking home-state pride in surpassing the aim of a 2001 Mockbee exhibition at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center

The BMA was already planning a big indicate before Mockbee died. One of its features was to have been a manner of making built by Mockbee and the Rural Studio in the museum's carved work garden that would baffle the noise of tractor-trailers rumbling along the nearby interstate overpass. Mockbee was also invited to design a museum expansion. Neither of these plans came to fruition. Instead, the exhibition became the two retrospective and memorial. Organized by the agency of David Moos, then the Birmingham Museum's curator of recent and contemporary art (he's now a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario), "Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture" expos the many layers of the vivid interchange between Mockbee, his pupils and Alabama residents. It documented Rural Studio casts with photographs, sketches and archetypes and portrayed Mockbee himself between the sides of his paintings, assemblages, drawings and journals.

The accompanying catalogue also functions as a memorial to Mockbee, containing nearly 30 tributes from admirers like William Christenberry, Paula Deitz, Frank Gehry Lucy Lippard and Lawrence Rinder, as well as more personal impressions by means of former students and clients. It remains to be seen whether the Rural Studio example can be propagated outside Alabama. rote the vitality of the program and the lionization of its garrulous planter ensure that the Rural Studio will continue to pro atom Mockbee's missionary zeal for joyous and redemptive architecture.

"Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio" appeared in Birmingham in conjunction with "Eye to I," a tripartite exhibition of photography exploring the city's history during the civil rights era and since. For this display Moos selected amateur snapshots through residents, examples of photojournalist work from 1963 and photographs of Birmingham commissioned by the agency of a local newspaper. The latter category featured a certain quantity of of Christenberry's serene color pictures, including sky-colored Building, Birmingham, Alabama (1987), which recalls his pioneering work from the 1960 documenting dilapidated or abandoned buildings in his native Hale shire Like Christenberry, Mockbee tilled Alabama's surplus of images of deprivation and bitter irony, fertile estate for social experimentation.

as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but Christenberry and Mockbee follow in the footfalls of Walker Evans, whose intimate photographs of three white Hale shire sharecropper families and their Depression-era environment were published, along with James Agee's reporting, in the landmark work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Mockbee's esthetic and educational mode of address borrowed the confident clarity of Evans's photography and the baroque self-consciousness of Agee's Writing. In the Mockbee exhibition, a single black-and-white Evans photograph, Roadside Store, Vicinity Greensboro, Alabama (1936) of a battered awkward structure covered in metal signs for proceedss like Grove's Bromo Quinine, reminded the viewer that Hale shire is a hallowed cultural landscape. A page forward view in one of Mockbee's spiral notebooks contained his call for a recent pedagogy in the 21st hundred to update the social realism of the 1930s: "the ne to provide a setting for education that is democratic, the ne for subversive leadership, and the understanding that commonalty and place matter." Famous Men was the the same book Mockbee religiously assigned to his scholars each year.