cover image PROCEED AND BE BOLD: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee

PROCEED AND BE BOLD: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee

Timothy Hursley, Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, Timothy Hurs, . . Princeton Architectural Press, $30 (176pp) ISBN 978-1-56898-500-8

The first title documenting Samuel Mockbee's architectural practice, Rural Studio (2002), has been through five printings; it is beginning to have an impact similar to that of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language 30 years ago on the ways architects and designers conceive of what they do, how they might go about doing it—and for whom. Mockbee, who died in 2001, believed that great architecture could be made from simple materials (as well as unorthodox and recycled: tires, windshields, hay), for people who were often living in far from ideal conditions; he put his ideas into practice via his studio in out-of-the-way southwestern Alabama. This book documents the studio's work under Andrew Freear in the years since Mockbee's death, including the gorgeously simple Antioch Baptist Church in Perry Co., Ala., which rose like a phoenix from within its century-old predecessor, and a totally heterodox, perfectly calibrated house for a man called Music Man. (Apr. 21)