This is the eighth year that Samuel Mockbee and his architecture students at Auburn University have been designing and building striking houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama’s Hale County. In some ways, the place has changed little since James Agee and Walker Evans went there in 1936 to document the lives of poor white sharecroppers. The 1990 Census shows per capita income still averaging no more than $8,164, and 1,700 families still living in substandard houses. Most of the Rural Studio’s clients are African-Americans, “left behind by Reconstruction,” as Mockbee says. Many live in unheated, leaky shacks without plumbing in Masons Bend, a little settlement of about 150 people tucked into a bend of the Black Warrior River at the end of a winding dirt road about 10 miles from Greensboro, the county seat.
In addition to being a social welfare venture, the Rural Studio—Taliesin South, it’s been called—is also an educational experiment and a prod to the architectural profession to act on its finest instincts. In June, Mockbee learned he had been awarded a MacArthur “genius grant.” Not long afterward, speaking in the deep drawl of his region, the burly, bearded sixth-generation Mississippian had the following conversation with contributing editor Andrea Oppenheimer Dean.
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