Elevate Something Ordinary to Something Extraordinary.

Samuel Mockbee, 55
Professor of architecture
Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama

Around Greensboro, Alabama, everybody knows Samuel Mockbee. They know him down at the Southern Camera store on Main Street, where he sometimes pops in to use the telephone; they know him over at Crispy Chick, where he likes to go for breakfast; and they know him at Mustang Oil Barbecue, where you can get both gasoline and ribs at reasonable prices. Both the postmaster and the district judge know Mockbee, and so does 9-year-old A.J. Harris, who comes running out to the road when he sees Mockbee's truck approach. Even the local prisoners know Mockbee. "If we need something, he helps us out," says inmate Robert Steele.

An architect and a professor of architecture at Auburn University, Mockbee, 55, is known around town partly because, well, he's Mockbee -- or, as everyone here calls him, "Sambo." He's big and bearded, he's funny and generous, and he appears to be comfortable with just about anyone. But people also know him because he is changing their community. Despite his playful manner, Mockbee has a serious mission: He uses his art to improve lives. "Architecture has to be greater than just architecture," Mockbee says. "It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values."

Mockbee's vehicle for addressing social values is the Rural Studio, a small program with big goals. The studio, which is run through Auburn University, addresses problems of racial inequality and of substandard housing in and around Greensboro -- and takes a radical approach to undergraduate education at Auburn. Its boldness has attracted some well-known supporters, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and, most recently, the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Mockbee one of its "genius" fellowships in June. Mockbee has been invited to teach at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Yale, among other schools.

Every fall since 1993, when he and an Auburn colleague named D.K. Ruth founded the studio, Mockbee and two-dozen architecture students from Auburn have uprooted from the university's eastern-Alabama campus and headed west to the studio. A farmhouse located two and a half hours from Auburn, the studio is a few miles outside Greensboro in Hale County, in the middle of the fertile Black Belt region. Hale County proudly identifies itself as the catfish capital of Alabama, but it is perhaps better known as the setting for James Agee and Walker Evans's eye-opening chronicle of 1930s sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Houghton Mifflin, 1941) . Today, nearly 60 years after that book was published, Hale County remains one of the poorest areas in the country: Of its 16,870 residents, about 30% live in poverty -- 1,400 of them in houses that are considered substandard.

To some people, such circumstances might represent tragedy. To Mockbee, they represent opportunity -- to help needy families while giving students practical, hands-on architectural experience, and, perhaps even more importantly, to bring together people from drastically different backgrounds. Auburn students are primarily young, white, and affluent; Rural Studio clients are primarily black and poor. But "it's economic poverty, not moral poverty," Mockbee stresses.

"I realized that if I could get students to come and meet these families and help build houses, the students' attitudes about poverty would change," Mockbee says. "This is a community that is black and white, in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. But when students have an educational experience that exposes them to the realities, rather than the abstractness, of social and political and environmental injustices, they can form their own opinions about it. They can see conditions for themselves -- and can try to address them in a positive way."

Each year, second-year architecture students, who spend a semester at the studio, interview several families and then choose one for whom they will build a house. Meanwhile, fifth-year students, who stay at the studio for an entire year while working on their theses, pursue such community-based projects as building a chapel or constructing a playground. Most recently, the Rural Studio created an Outreach Studio program for non-architecture, non-Auburn students.

That entire houses are given away with no strings attached is noteworthy. But those houses, as well as other community facilities, are noteworthy themselves: They are dazzling feats of design. They are made primarily with natural materials, such as hay or rammed earth, or with found materials, such as telephone poles, tires, or windshields. Using such materials keeps the cost of the houses low -- most run between $25,000 and $30,000 -- and gives them a look that is strange, beautiful, and distinctly Mockbee-esque. "My bottom line is, Would I want to live in these houses?" Mockbee says. "And my wife and I would live happily ever after in any of the houses that the students have designed and built."