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Mockbee Southern Genius | |
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A Master Architect of the Pacific Northwest | |
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Big Ideas Behind Not So Big Houses | |
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Mockbee Southern Genius In Mockbee's case, this means forsaking a successful two-man practice with a retinue of wealthy clients for an undergraduate design/build studio serving the poorest of the poor, a program Mockbee jokingly refers to as "Redneck Taliesin South." A professional move few architects would characterize as an act of genius. "He is a very giving and generous person, but he's no rocket scientist," laughs Coleman Coker, his former partner. Coker founded his own practice, Buildingstudio, in Memphis after Mockbee separated himself from Mockbee/Coker Architects, their much-lauded 14-year-old firm, earlier this year. "There are many forms of genius. His is a bit unconventional." It Began with Art When Mockbee and Coker first met in Canton, Mississippi, in the early 1980s, they were drawn to each other as artists (besides an architecture degree, Coker has a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture), not as architects, even though they both had just started their own practices. "The last thing I try to do as an architect is emulate an architect," Mockbee says. "My greatest influences are Goya, Pollock, Picasso, Matisse, Klee. I always begin with an emotion. An emotion that is developed either into a painting or a structure." As they both began to blur the distinctions between art and architecture in their work, Mockbee and Coker became partners. One of their first collaborations, titled "Breaking the Cycle of Poverty," was a proposal for three "charity houses" designed for low-income families in Madison County, Mississippi. The project won a 1987 Progressive Architecture Honor Award but the houses were never built because the architects were unable to secure funding despite a $25 per square foot contract price. In that most important regard, the project was a failure. Mockbee vowed that he would someday turn that failure into a success. But the notoriety did bring commissions, from schools to firehouses, to increasingly elaborate residences for increasingly wealthy clients. Mockbee/Coker Architects began to develop a reputation for designing regionalist forms with a Modernist twist, which echoed the artistic style of the firm's partners, particularly Mockbee's. "His painting is a cultural expression of being in the South, and it comes out in his architecture," says Coker, "whereas my approach tends to be more formal and abstract. He takes a cultural sense of what's going on and turns it into a three-dimensional form, follows the history of the area and relates it to a contemporary building. The Cook House is a perfect example." Mockbee/Coker's Cook House, which won a 1994 National AIA Honor Award, bears Mockbee's unmistakable touch. Built for an anesthesiologist in Oxford, Mississippi, it looks like no other building in town. The corrugated metal roof suggests a barn or an outbuilding, but Mockbee gives the design a contemporary twist by setting the entrance into the middle of an asymmetrical chimney. Work of the Rural Studio If you follow the red dirt-road into Mason's Bend, Alabama, a collection of weather-beaten shacks and bungalows hugging the banks of the Black Warrior River, you're bound to notice Mockbee's Southern vernacular stamp on another residence. The Bryant House was built in 1993 for a 70-year-old fisherman and his wheelchair-reliant wife who had been raising three grandchildren in a leaky shanty without indoor plumbing. With an expansive sun-soaked porch and a steeply pitched roof of see-through corrugated acrylic that's supported by five vaguely antebellum columns, it also looks like no other building in town. Except maybe the Harris House next door, an homage to the two most Southern architectural forms, the screen porch and the tin roof. The Harris House, built in 1997 for another low-income elderly couple, comes with its own contemporary twist: the roof is inverted, like the wings of a bird in flight. Conspicuous among the sharecropper shacks of Hale County, where nearly 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, are numerous other Mockbee-influenced structures, including three more designer houses, a community center, a children's center, an outdoor pavilion, and an outdoor chapel with a tin roof—and an ancient roof beam scavenged from an old barn—that soars over the congregation like open palms outstretched in a blessing. All these structures have one thing in common: they were designed and built not by Mockbee, but by architecture students from Auburn University. The most recent group from the Rural Studio, which often uses found or donated materials, built their own Mockbee-style dormitory in nearby Greensboro. The four cottages sheltered beneath a single 144-foot-long shed that resembles a feed barn forms the hub of Mockbee's "Redneck Taliesin South." Mockbee came up with the concept when he traveled to Genoa, Italy, in 1990 as a visiting critic at Clemson University. He spent two weeks teaching drafting and design to graduate students who were living in a villa for a semester. Three years later at Auburn, he founded the Rural Studio with a $215,000 five-year grant from the state's electric utility. The students populating Mockbee's studio would do more than work problems on paper; they would solve problems with their hands. They would vindicate Mockbee: they would design and actually build "charity houses" for the poorest of the poor. And they wouldn't live in a cloistered villa in Genoa, either, but initially in an old nursing home in Greensboro, three hours west of Auburn, the most impoverished corner of Hale County. The premise of the Rural Studio is spelled out most succinctly in the program's prospectus: "Students are expected to actively participate in all aspects of the program, from cooking to attending school board meetings to hanging sheet rock." A new crop of 15 or 16 students arrives every three months during the school year, beginning in the fall. The first group meets with an official from the Hale County Department of Human Resources, identifies a client, determines needs, and works out a preliminary design. Winter Rural Studio students refine the design, secure materials, and begin construction. The spring students are responsible for solving any remaining design problems and completing the project. "What's wonderful about the Rural Studio is that it takes students out of the theoretical studio of pretend projects and lets them unleash their imaginations on something that is real," says Mockbee. "It's a model that's been tried for over a century, but I don't think anyone has ever done it quite as successfully as this. Taliesin West was all about the master, the superman, Frank Lloyd Wright. The Rural Studio is not about me. It's about the reality of being an architect." Hale County District Court Judge William Ryan, the chairman of HERO, the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization, knows exactly what that means. "The other day I was at a dedication for one of the Rural Studio's projects," he says, "and all the children from town were hugging those college students like they were brothers and sisters. "Mockbee is a man of true convictions. He really cares about his students, and he's interested in making sure they have a sense of purpose in life other than the design of buildings. I call him a real friend." And a genius. Ted Katauskas is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.
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