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The
Architecture of Decency
by
Andrea Dean
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Andrea
Oppenheimer Dean
(with photographer Timothy Hursley) is the author of the May/June Book
Sense 76 pick, Rural
Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency.
Rural
Studio is one of those few truly engossing books, that once opened,
draws the reader in to a different world: Hale County, Alabama, where
Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio has completed more than a dozen projects,
including a community center, houses, chapels, and a playground -- mostly
from scrap and donated goods. Mockbee's buildings are not depressing,
soul-less public housing, they are light, inspiring buildings that open
up the possibilities of public architecture.Andrea
Dean is former Executive Editor of Architecture Magazine. She lives
in Washington, DC.
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My attraction to
the deep South and its residents' fierce loyalty to home and region is recent
and led -- by accident, as with so many things -- to Samuel Mockbee and his
Rural Studio in Hale County, Alabama. Go there today and you'll find it eerily
unchanged from the Depression-era 1930s when Walker Evans and James Agee visited
and memorialized the county's poor white sharecroppers in Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men. While most of today's high-profile architects
have focused on eye-popping designs for wealthy clients around the world, Mockbee,
a big-hearted, fifth-generation Mississippian, and his students at the Rural
Studio have been designing and building strikingly beautiful buildings for poor,
mostly black people in Hale County. They use recycled, salvaged, and curious
materials -- haybales, concrete rubble, colored glass, outdated license plates,
old road signs, cast-off automobile tires, waste cardboard -- to create "shelters
for the soul as well as homes for the bodies," in Mockbee's words.
The idea
of being anchored in a place attracts me, in part, because it still feels foreign.
I came to this country during World War II from Germany via Holland and France.
Our family's U.S. identity cards -- pink cards, they were called -- described
us as "stateless enemy aliens," former Germans. We settled in a faceless New
York suburb where my parents, despite having been expelled from their homeland,
clung not only to the German language but to a conviction of German cultural
superiority. In hindsight, that seems more than ludicrous, but the notion was
bred in their bones and bits have been passed into mine. Until my second husband
remarked how odd it was that nearly every visitor to my Mother's house spoke
German, it didn't strike me as unusual. Until my closest high school friend
-- she is Chinese -- recently  suggested
that maybe we'd been drawn to each other because we were both outsiders, that
hadn't occurred to me either. I was, it seems, an unconscious child and not
a terribly self-aware adolescent. But in an effort to make sense of my beginnings,
I soon read nearly everything written by Elie
Wiesel and Primo
Levi and, most recently, Ruth Kluger's remarkable Still
Alive and Andy Marino's A
Quiet American, a book about Varian Fry, the American Schindler. My
father worked with Fry in Marseilles helping European intellectuals and artists,
blacklisted by Hitler, escape to America.
 As
the very young wife of a professor, and very soon the mother of three little
children, I became an academic roamer. We went from Boston to New Haven to Taiwan
to London to New York to Ann Arbor to Amherst to Wellesley. Thirty years ago,
I landed in Washington, D.C. As a northerner with unexamined northern prejudices,
I was horrified
to think that the South -- Virginia -- was just across the river. Nevertheless,
I slowly and unwittingly, planted fragile roots and increasingly oriented myself
southward.
 My
first (and still closest) Washington friend is a Southerner from Alabama and
Atlanta. But it was Mary Osman who made me see the South in a new way. She was
a South Carolinian, 20-or-so years older than I, aristocratic, and tiny. What
you noticed first were her luminous blue eyes and her Southern charm, which
I dismissed as Scarlett O'Hara and all that jazz. But like Scarlet, Mary was
feisty as hell and, unlike Scarlett, she was a wise and unbending advocate of
underdogs and liberal politics. The more I saw her kind and tender side, the
more I treasured her friendship. When she was emotionally felled by her husband's
sudden death, I felt helpless, though she insisted -- Southern charm? -- that
I had helped her.
 My
world of Southern friends and acquaintances expanded: two or three more co-workers,
two or three of their friends. I began to associate Southern accents with warmth
and caring instead of ignorance. I became irate and embarrassed remembering
how we teased a college friend for her Louisiana drawl. I read Tony
Horowitz, Ellen
Gilchrist, Eudora
Welty, Willie
Morris, Carson
McCullers, Walker
Percy, Peter
Taylor. I wrote an article about the photographer and artist William Christenberry,
a Tuscaloosa native, and accompanied him on one of his annual trips to shoot
falling-down buildings in Hale County, where he had spent childhood summers
on his grandparents' farm. I did an article about the Jewish diaspora in the
American South and read about people variously displaced: Rohinton Mistry's
A
Fine Balance, Chang-rae Lee's A
Gesture Life, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter
of Maladies.
 Two
years ago, when Samuel Mockbee won a MacArthur "genius" grant, I interviewed
him for an architecture magazine. He was outgoing, funny, and outrageous. He
told stories and asked me, in the deep drawl of his region, "What big project
are you working on?" None right now, I told him, but I'd love to write a book
about you and the Rural Studio. And so started the book on which I collaborated
with the wonderful photographer Tim Hursley. To our great sorrow, Sambo, as
everyone called him, died last December of complications from leukemia. Mary
is gone now, too. Neither was a believer in the traditional sense, or a causist.
But both believed in the value of brave deeds, a good heart, persistence, and
in not taking yourself too seriously -- traits marking not only exceptional
Southerners, but special people everywhere.
Rural
Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency
A May/June Book
Sense 76 pick:
 "The
late Mockbee put his architecture students to work in rural Alabama, building
houses, chapels, and meeting places. Using found materials like tires, license
plates, and hay bales, they have created useful and inventive structures. In
this book you'll find the great breadth of this experiment in education and
sustainable design."
- Jeanie Teare, Politics and Prose, Washington, DC
 Further
Reading
Browse
Archived Interviews
Browse
Archived Excerpts
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