Samuel Mockbee: Building a better world

There are architects such as Jean Nouvel and Jacques Herzog who design convention-breaking headline-grabbing cultural icons such as the Guthrie Theater and Walker Art Center. And then there was Samuel Mockbee, the bearded Southerner who founded the Rural Studio to build better houses and civic buildings for people in three of Alabama's poorest counties.

On Thursday, Walker Art Center will screen Samuel Wainwright Douglas' 2010 documentary, "Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio," followed by Twin Cities architects Paul Neseth and Maureen Colburn talking about architecture's humanitarian movement.

"Sam led the way in the idea that we have to take care of the needs of all people, not just the wealthy individuals and corporations who usually use the services of architects," said Tom Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design.

Mockbee grew up in the rural South, observed the ravages of segregation and the civil rights movement as a young man, and was an idealist drawn to architecture. But while many architecture thinkers, including Le Corbusier, aimed to change the world by shaping it to their lofty, abstract ideas, Mockbee immersed himself in the culture of the people around him.

The radical idea behind the Rural Studio, founded in 1993 at Auburn University in Alabama, was that students would live with and get to know the people they were going to design for -- and build the structures themselves, out of locally available materials.

Architecture students are often trained by designing theoretical projects for sometimes nonexistent clients -- for instance, an interfaith temple on a hilltop site. The Rural Studio, in contrast, "wasn't a representation of reality -- it is reality," said Mockbee, who died of leukemia in 2001.

Jay Sanders, one of the studio's instructors featured in the film, led the team that designed and built a house for "Music Man," a cheerful fellow who could imitate any sound he heard and had lived in squalor. He loved his new whimsical, tall house made of wood and corrugated metal. For Debbie Caddell, a member of the Antioch Baptist Church in Alabama's Perry County, the soaring wood and metal church built by the studio "was such a labor of love that it stands up against the Eiffel Tower."

Maureen Colburn, an architect at LHB Inc. in Minneapolis, heard Mockbee speak in the late '90s when she was a graduate student at Iowa State University. In 2004, after the Southeast Asian tsunami, she and landscape architect Rich Koechlein started a Twin Cities chapter of Architecture for Humanity.

Since young British architect Cameron Sinclair founded the international nonprofit group 10 years ago, it has harnessed the volunteer creative powers of 40,000 architects and landscape architects to design projects for the world's needy.

After designing a community center for a Sri Lankan village and a boarding school campus and a village center with housing for the disabled in Uganda, the Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter "decided to do something local," Colburn said. They designed and built a set of lockers for homeless people at two shelters, Simpson Housing and the Family Place.

The project may be modest in scale -- the group raised about $3,000 and another $3,000 in donated materials -- but it meets a crucial need, Colburn said. While people can sleep at Simpson Housing, they can't store their things there, and "you can't take your sleeping bag to work," she said. People go to the Family Place during the day to get showers and meals, so they need to keep their clothes and toiletries there.

Architecture for Humanity founder Sinclair "makes the point that most of the world can't afford basic shelter. These people don't even have shelter," Colburn said.

Once again, Twin Cities designers are following Mockbee's inspiring lead.

Linda Mack, former architecture critic at the Star Tribune, continues to write regularly on the topic.