Newbern, Alabama, lies off a stretch of Route 61 that runs up the middle of the state, with Tuscaloosa to the north and Montgomery to the east. Marked only by a yellow traffic light dangling above the sun-scorched pavement, the town’s exit is Newbern’s best hope that drivers will stop off for a cold drink or a tank of gas on their way somewhere else. This sweltering Tuesday in August, though, on a gravel driveway just off the main drag, three dozen college kids are piling out of Volkswagens and dusty pickups outside a row of slant-roofed cottages cobbled together from wood pallets, steel plating, and corrugated cardboard, and nestled beneath a span of old railroad trestles. The students are from the School of Architecture at Auburn University, 140 miles to the east, and they’ve come to attend Rural Studio, an innovative program that has placed Newbern at the center of the built world. 

In flip-flops and khaki shorts, wearing easy smiles on their sunburned faces, the students, who range in age from 19 to 23, look ready for another semester of study groups and late-night beer runs. But over the next five months, they’ll spend most of their waking hours in Alabama’s impoverished backcountry, a lush and overgrown setting of tumbledown shacks that hug the Black Warrior River. Tool boxes and blueprints in tow, they’ll head out to neighboring towns in Hale County to erect houses, churches, community centers—whatever’s needed—from old tires, baled cardboard, car windows, road signs, and carpet tiles salvaged or donated by local industry.These are no ordinary-looking buildings. But somehow, with their butterfly tin roofs and broad, open-air porches, they fit right in. 

Yet, one thing is different this semester: The students are the first to pass through Rural Studio without the stewardship of Samuel Mockbee, the architect and fifth-generation Southerner who founded the program a decade ago. Mockbee died last December, at 57, of leukemia. To former students, Sambo, as he is universally known, embodied the spirit of the program. “So much of everything that went on was Sambo,” says Amy Green, an Auburn junior who spent last fall in Newbern building a house for a single mother and her two sons.“I mean,we loved all the other teachers, but we didn’t worry so much about what they’d think of our designs. It was always, ‘What’s Sambo going to say?’” 

Since Mockbee’s death, cofounder D. K. Ruth has scaled back involvement in the Studio, leaving two men to share the helm: Andrew Freear, 35, a professor from Yorkshire, England, and Bruce Lindsey, 49, who arrived last year from Carnegie Mellon to head up Auburn’s architecture program. 

“Sambo used to say this was like going off to war,” Freear says in his emotional address to students outside the steel and cardboard sheds, Mockbee’s version of a college dorm. “We’re all going to be under a great deal of stress out here this year, and it’s important that you love and respect one another. Do not lose sight of the fact that it’s about the people—the clients and the other students.The projects are great,the projects will be fine. But in the end, it’s not about bricks and mortar.” 

What it is about is finding Hale County residents in serious need of a new building. Students design and construct the projects themselves, usually in less than a year. So far, Rural Studio has completed more than two dozen buildings, a baseball field, and an open-air market. But the Studio also has a larger goal: to reclaim architecture from wealth and privilege— what Mockbee called the world of “gluttonous affluence.” Knowing students will want to pursue more lavish or commercial projects after graduating, the Studio urges them to pursue what Mockbee called “an architecture of decency.” 

Sambo Mockbee practiced architecture at the highest level, but he thought of himself as simply, in the words of former student Adrienne Brady, “somebody who liked to draw and build stuff.” He was a man who one minute was on the phone with curators at the Whitney Museum and the next playing football with students, lifting up his shirt to diagram plays on his belly. 

“Architecture should express some moral,” Mockbee told Architectural Record in 2000. “For me, the professional challenge, whether I am an architect in the rural American South or the American West, is how to avoid becoming so stunned by the power of modern technology and economic affluence that I lose focus on the fact that people and place matter.” 

Mockbee set up Rural Studio in the same county James Agee and Walker Evans documented in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their 1941 classic. According to the 2000 census, the median household income in Hale County is $20,704 per year; one in four of its 17,000 residents, and one in three of its children, lives below the poverty line. On assignment for Fortune magazine, Agee called the project he and Evans undertook “curious, not to mention obscene and terrifying.” Agee worried that, as a privileged product of Harvard, his work in Hale County would amount to little more than an awkward, even patronizing, anthropology.