Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(01:06) Seventy-five Works of Livable Art
Since its founding in 1993, the Rural Studio has completed the design and construction of over 75 structures ((view interactive map), including houses, community buildings, and public spaces in western Alabama. The Rural Studio headquarters is based in Newbern, a small town of a few hundred residents in Hale County. Its projects extend into the surrounding counties of Perry, Marengo, and Dallas. Most of the designs tend to be modernist in their approach — clean lines and inventive uses of concrete, wood, and metal — but build on vernacular forms and materials commonly used in the region.

(02:07–04:06) Music Element
"The Multiples of One"
from Awakening,
performed by Joseph Curiale

(02:18) Samuel Mockbee, Known as "Sambo"
Rural Studio co-founder Samuel Mockbee was an architect, teacher, artist, and a social entrepreneur. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the American Institute of Architects' highest honor, and a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2000. The Studio's staff and students fondly remember him as much for his human approach — his compassion and humor — as for his architectural genius and egalitarian spirit. Many clients, including Lucy Harris and Tracy Shiles, referred to him as "being like a father to me." Though he died in 2001, Mockbee's pervasive influence is still felt in the philosophy and work of today's Rural Studio.

Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Mockbee knew he wanted to be an architect at the age of nine. Early on in his career, he said "I'm drawn to anything that has a quirkiness to it, a mystery to it." In private practice, he won awards for designs that he described as "contemporary Modernism grounded in Southern culture." The social ethic that would later permeate the Rural Studio surfaced early in his career. Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, author of two books about the Rural Studio, writes that in 1982 Mockbee "helped a Catholic nun move and renovate condemned houses in Madison County, Mississippi, and then built his first 'charity house' there using donated and salvaged materials."

The Rural Studio became "the vehicle through which Sambo Mockbee would be able to realize his personal aspiration that architecture become for him a work which was true to the heart." He communicated his aspirations for virtuous architecture, practical education, and social responsibility in a 1998 article for Architectural Design Everyday and Architecture:

"Even though my career has been developing successfully, I did not feel that I was maturing as a responsible architectural citizen. I believe what the poet William Carlos Williams prescribed about the best architect being the person 'with the most profound insights into the lives of the community.'"

"The professional challenge, whether one is an architect in the rural American South or elsewhere in the world, is how to avoid being so stunned by the power of modern technology and economic affluence that one does not lose sight of the fact that people and place matter."

Affectionately known as "Sambo," Mockbee explained his improbable nickname in an interview for the PBS arts show Egg:

"My name is Samuel Mockbee, but I have grown up, and typical for a Southerner, we all had nicknames. And since I was a boy, a baby, I have been called Sambo. So, my friends in the politically correct world have a difficult time often, particularly in the politically correct world of the North, when I go above the Mason Dixon, they have a hard time calling me Sambo and very few people do up there. But you come down here and nobody's gonna call me anything but Sambo. But my sister named me that when I was a baby, so it's a spin off from Samuel. 'Course it has a bad connotation … Uncle Tom's Cabin, usually Sambo is acquainted not favorably in the African-American community. But I'm a white Sambo, so I get away with it I guess."

(03:20) Audio Clip of Samuel Mockbee
The audio clip of Samuel Mockbee is excerpted from a 2002 documentary film, The Rural Studio, which celebrates the work of Auburn University's design-build educational program:

"Architecture is broad-based, but at the heart of architecture is a social order that has to exist that architecture works with. And, so, in order to expose students to that social order that exists, it becomes — at some point in their education it becomes necessary for them to leave the classroom, as I like to say, of the university and enter the classroom of a community, and to leave an abstract world to a world of reality."

(04:19) Black Belt of the South
There are different definitions and geographical explanations for the southern region of the United States known as the Black Belt. Geographically, it is referred to both as a broad region of 11 southern states from Texas to Virginia, and as a crescent-shaped region of south-central Alabama stretching from its eastern to western borders.

"I have often been asked to define the term 'Black Belt," wrote Booker T. Washington in his 1901 autobiography Up From Slavery. "So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense — that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white."

Alabama's cotton-growing soil made its Black Belt one of the richest plantation areas of the antebellum South. The cotton fields are mostly gone, and the area is now dominated by catfish farms, which face increasing competition from Southeast Asia. The states in the broader Black Belt region have a higher poverty rate than the national average — Alabama ranks in the bottom three for average per capita income. The University of Alabama Community Affairs office lists the major characteristics of the state's Black Belt counties, which mirror the common traits of poorer populations: high unemployment, low rates of educational attainment, and substandard housing stock.

The University of Western Alabama's Center for the Study of the Black Belt is pushing for the region to be designated as a National Heritage Area. If approved by Congress, it would be the 38th National Heritage Area in the U.S. where conservation, interpretation, and other activities are managed by partnerships among federal, state, and local governments and the private sector. The National Park Service provides technical assistance as well as financial assistance for a limited number of years following designation.

(05:50) Rural Studio's First Client
Andrew Freear mentions Rural Studio client Alberta Bryant, who has lost both her legs to diabetes, as an example of extraordinary optimism at work in an impoverished region. Alberta and Shepard Bryant, along with their grandchildren, were the first clients of the Rural Studio. Their home — referred to as the Hay Bale House — was completed in 1994 and built right next to the old, leaky shack they used to live in. Students used eighty-pound hay bales, stacked like bricks and secured with wires, and coated them with stucco to create inexpensive, well-insulated walls. A smokehouse built for Shepard, a fisherman, cost $40 using broken concrete provided by the Hale County Highway Department, beams from a local barn, and salvaged road signs.

(07:38) Interview with Lucy Harris and Ben Cannard
Ben Cannard, one of the student architects who built the home of client Lucy Harris in 2002, was visiting her and her family during our trip to the Rural Studio. Their connection is an example of human impact of the projects. "This house was built out of love, compassion, and caring for one another," says Lucy. "They became a part of my family, and we always stay in contact with each other."

(10:20) Funding for Rural Studio Projects
Andrew Freear mentions a new strategy of the Rural Studio — the $20k house initiative that is inspired by rural development loans for welfare recipients. Samuel Mockbee started the Rural Studio with a $215,000 grant from the Alabama Power Company.

Its first project, the Hay Bale House, cost $16,500. The recent Rural Heritage Center was rehabilitated with a $190,000 grant from HUD. Rural Studio projects hinge on successful fundraising, and its financial situation has improved in recent years. According to an article in Architect magazine, Auburn University now gives the Rural Studio $400,000 per year for overhead and maintenance. "Now Freear and his students have to fundraise only for materials. In-kind donations are still quite common, and the studio has also received substantial annual gifts from a pair of family foundations, which have kept new projects moving ahead."

(15:05–16:53) Music Element
"I've Got a Home for You"
from The Great Gospel Men: 27 Classic Performances by The Greatest Gospel Men,
performed by Norsalus Mckissick

(16:02) Increased Focus on Public Spaces
Under Freear's direction, the scale of the Rural Studio's work has shifted in the past six years. It's taking on larger, community-based projects that involve multiple phases over several years to touch more people, increase civic engagement, and complete the work of under-funded public projects with free student labor. Lions Park, a 40-acre public park and a three-phase project spanning two years, helped students learn to work with public agencies and community members. We spoke with community members Robbie Hoggle and Don Ballard, and student Dan Splaingard, who were all involved in the building of Lions Park.

(21:00) Baseball Tomorrow Fund
The Lions Park project received $100,000 from the Baseball Tomorrow Fund, a joint initiative between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association. Its mission is to support the growth of youth participation in baseball and softball throughout the world, in both urban and rural communities, by funding programs, fields, equipment and other activities.

(23:40–26:20) Music Element
"Gimme Shelter"
from Hot Rocks 1964-1971,
performed by The Rolling Stones

(27:07) "Haunted by the Unfinished Business of Reconstruction of the South"
In his 1998 essay "The Rural Studio" Mockbee wrote:

"As Southerners, our heritage is part of our character. My great grandfather rode with the Mississippi Partisan Rangers under Colonel WC Falkner and later General Forrest. These were my heroes growing up in the segregated South of the 1950s and the early 1960s. I grew up recreating the great battles of Brices Crossroads and visiting the battlefields of Vicksburg and Shiloh.

Later I came to realize the contradictions that existed in my world. That I came from an isolated area where lies were being confronted with the truth. That I came from the American South which was attached to fiction and false values and a willingness to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values….

…I'm interested in what might prompt and make possible a process of entering a taboo landscape, in my case, the economic poverty of the Deep South; also in developing a discourse beyond merely looking at the effects of poverty, but also at how architects can step over the threshold of injustice and address the true needs of a neglected American family…

(30:45) Rebuilt a Church
St. Luke's Episcopal Church is an 150-year-old structure that has been disassembled and catalogued, and is in the process of being rebuilt and restored by the second-year students of Rural Studio. Originally built near the waters of a river in the first capital of Alabama: Cahawba. The church was erected in 1854 and abandoned within 20 years because of Cahawba losing its status as the state capital. By 1876 St. Luke's had been moved 15 miles to Martin Station, Alabama. The church is now being relocated to Old Cahawba, several hundred feet from its original foundations.

(49:05–52:17) Music Element
"Red Dirt Girl"
from Red Dirt Girl,
performed by Emmylou Harris