Rural Studio

topics

Publishers

Architecture

ISBN: 9781568982922
English edition
Princeton Architectural Press
Softcover, 192 pages
20,3 x 25,4 cm
colour/black & white
January 2002
€23,00 (excl. VAT)

Rural Studio

Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency

Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, Timothy Hursley

"I tell my students, it's got to be warm, dry, and noble" – Samuel Mockbee

For almost ten years, Samuel Mockbee and his architecture students at Auburn University designed and built striking houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama's Hale County. Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles and old license plates, they created inexpensive buildings that bear the trademark of Mockbee's work, which he described as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture." In a time of unexampled prosperity, when architectural attention focuses on big, glossy urban projects, the Rural Studio provides an alternative of substance.

These buildings, along with the incredible story of the Rural Studio, the people who live there, and Mockbee and his student architects, are detailed in this colorful book, the first on the subject.