Of the many things that impressed me about Samuel Mockbee, two in particular stood out. The first was that his work truly made a difference.

An architect and professor of architecture at Auburn University, Mockbee, who died of leukemia-related complications on December 30 at the age of 57, disregarded the traditional, theoretical means of teaching architecture and charged his students with the task of creating real buildings. Better yet, he arranged for students to build those structures -- often houses but also community centers, such as a playground or a farmer's market -- for people who badly needed them.

In 1993, Mockbee, known to nearly everyone as "Sambo," established the Rural Studio, a workshop-plus-dorm-plus-classroom two and a half hours west of the Auburn campus, in famously impoverished Hale County, Alabama (the same region chronicled in James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [Houghton Mifflin, 1941]). There, he and his students, who stayed for at least a semester at a time, immersed themselves in the community in order to find out what the residents needed. Then -- using natural or recycled materials, proceeding one building at a time, paying as much attention to artistry as to function -- the students gave it to them.

In the summer of 2000, I visited the Rural Studio to interview Mockbee for a Fast Company profile. It was close to 100 degrees during the afternoon and subsequent morning when Mockbee drove me around, over dirt roads and past kudzu-covered trees, to visit the Rural Studio project sites. I initially had trouble figuring out how to open the passenger-side door of Mockbee's pickup, and he explained that the truck could tell I was a northerner and was suspicious of me. Later on, when I was able to open the door successfully, Mockbee said it was because the truck had decided I was all right. At the sites, Mockbee chatted with the students working there or the families living there, and at one house, he actually took a nap in the living room while I interviewed a resident. In between, we ran errands at the courthouse and the convenience store and ate, variously, ribs, grits, and biscuits. It quickly became clear that, without regard to race, age, or gender, everyone in Hale County was crazy about Mockbee.

As I learned more about the Rural Studio -- both about the serious work of building houses and about the canoe trips the students took on the Black Warrior River, or the annual all-night pig roast they hosted -- I had a feeling that I sometimes get when watching ER or The West Wing but rarely experience in real life: I wanted to climb inside the Rural Studio and live there. (As it turned out, perhaps not surprisingly, I did not move to Hale County and become one of Mockbee's students, but I did the next best thing: I have convinced my sister Josephine, now a college senior, to apply to the Studio's program for non-Auburn students.)

In creating the Rural Studio, Mockbee accomplished something great. But it wasn't just his professional achievements that distinguished him; he was also, on a personal level, remarkable. He had a quiet, self-aware intelligence. He was realistic about the challenges of Hale County -- especially about its extreme poverty and racial prejudice -- but he did not, as others might have, see such problems as insurmountable. He was well read and well spoken, and he was not especially pleased by some earlier articles about the Rural Studio that had depicted him as a kind of hillbilly genius when, he said, he was neither.