Architecture with heart
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The studio has also hired a former outreach student, Pamela Dorr, to help residents apply for federal funding to build or refurbish homes. Ms. Dorr, who worked as a senior production manager for the Gap, has identified close to $1 million for which residents qualify.
The maximum award is $20,000, she found, which led her to issue a challenge to Freear: Can you design a house that can be built for $20,000?
Freear is trying to do just that, which means spending $10,000 to $12,000 on materials and the rest on construction costs. If he succeeds, the low-cost houses could benefit many. But one worry is they may also sacrifice beauty for practicality.
Such changes have led some observers to wonder if Mockbee's legacy is fading. Among them is Carol Mockbee, one of the architect's four children, who is now a Rural Studio outreach student.
Carol fondly recalls her father's admonitions: "Make sure you are being socially responsible"; "Don't do anything that is normal, be different"; and "Go out there and be yourself." (She also recalls, as a young child, being allowed to draw on the walls.) "I can see my father in the early projects," she says. Many of them are close cousins to buildings he'd designed while in private practice. But she thinks that more recent projects show less of his influence.
Yet, Carol Mockbee's future, like that of everyone at the Rural Studio, is being shaped by her father's example.
An interior designer by training, she plans to study architecture next year. For now, though, her mission is to complete an underground memorial space her father began shortly before his death.
The subrosa pantheon, as he called it, was meant to offer silence and solace for people connected with the studio. "He felt this was the most important project of his career," she says.
The architecture world may or may not agree with that assertion, once the space is completed. What Mockbee's peers do agree on, however, is that his "architecture of decency" has impacted people far beyond Hale County and Alabama.
"What the Rural Studio does is give people a greater understanding that architecture is not always a high and refined art. It's very much art of and for the people," says Chase Rynd, executive director of the National Building Museum in Washington.
"[Mockbee] helped people understand that there are possibilities beyond their wildest imagination, including how one's living condition can be improved in many ways," Mr. Rynd says. "He proved over and over again that architecture is as much about addressing real needs as it is about design."
Jimmy Lee Williams, a Hale County resident known as Music Man, uses simpler words to say much the same thing. Music Man, so called because of his huge collection of stereo equipment and because he has worked as a DJ, became homeless after a tree fell on his mobile home several years ago.
The Rural Studio built him a house that features bathroom walls made from bed liners of pickup trucks.
The collage on the front door of his house contains pieces of old highway signs, as does the gate to his property. The students designed the gate - which also features quirky metal pieces - so that Music Man doesn't need to get off his motor scooter to enter.
"This house is a blessing," says Music Man, who is unable to hold a full-time job. "God and Jesus got people they work through."
