Elevate Something Ordinary to Something Extraordinary.

Working on the pavilion with Wilson, Hoffman says, "opened up for me the story of this place. And, on a personal level, I look up to him -- his sense of hard work taught me a lot. And to see what he's accomplished with his own two hands is amazing. A person from my background is taught how to use your head, so my approach to things was completely different from his. For example, my thinking about concrete was, Where do we get the money to pay for the concrete that we're going to order and that will come in a truck? His thinking was, I know so-and-so who's got some sand, we can buy the cement at such-and-such amount per bag, we can get some gravel from this guy, and we'll just mix the whole thing ourselves."

Studio 24-7

Along with learning from the locals, students also learn from one another -- and that learning occurs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The turn-of-the-century farmhouse that is the studio's headquarters functions as a dorm, a lecture hall, and a cafeteria. "The kitchen is our classroom," Hoffman says. Behind the main building sit four additional housing structures nicknamed -- in a nod to the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers-- "pods"; the pods are pure Mockbee, with one pod's exterior entirely composed of license plates arranged silver side out, like shingles. The yard is littered with basketballs, soccer balls, bikes, and, for trips on the nearby Black Warrior River, canoes.

"You eat, sleep, and breathe the studio," Hoffman says. "When you get a design critique, it may be over the breakfast table or it may be at 11 o'clock at night when we're teaching class. The schedule is hectic and flexible. We're lucky if we standardize the time for a class and stick to that time every week, because, with the process of construction, when it's not raining, you've got to be building. Or materials might not be available, so you switch things around."

The flexibility of the studio means that many of the best moments occur spontaneously. "If a friend of Sambo's visits, everybody pitches in to help cook dinner," Hoffman says. "We'll go outside, hang a sheet, and the visitor will give a slide show. Then we all will sit around the table, talk architecture, and have a nice meal. That's a social gathering, but it's also a classroom right there."

That such events occur on the fly does not mean Mockbee hasn't laid the groundwork for them. "The closer you can get students together, the healthier I think that is -- knowing, of course, there are moments when you have to pull them apart and deal with each individual student," Mockbee says. "In academic settings in America today, you've got a classroom where you go in three times a week and teach for an hour. Then the students are gone, and most of them don't see each other again until they come back to class. That distance doesn't lend itself to discussions and feedback among them. Plus, the students' social development is important. It's important for them to live and eat with a professor so they can see what kind of disposition the professor has and how he handles situations, not just in the classroom but in a social environment as well. In the past, when we've been dealing with a bigot, for example, how to deal with that has become a discussion that everybody wants to participate in and wants to see how it resolves itself. We could talk about something like that in the classroom all day long, but when it really happens, it's a whole different experience."

The same line of thinking is at the heart of Mockbee's approach to teaching architecture. The academic treatment of architecture is notoriously theoretical -- so much so that a student can earn a degree yet hardly know how to nail two boards together. To Mockbee, that method of study is absurdly impractical. "Out here, the students have to make decisions and have to live with them," Mockbee says. "It takes a few weeks before they realize that if it's going to happen, they've got to get up and make it happen."

The task of deciding which families to build for -- and of building the actual houses -- belongs to the students, Mockbee says. "If they dig a foundation ditch for a wall, they do a detail showing how much steel will go in there. Then they have to decide what kind of steel they're going to throw in there, what size steel rebars. They look at us, and we look back at them. I'm not going to tell them; they've got to figure it out for themselves. You put them into responsible positions, and all of a sudden they realize that they have the authority to make those decisions. That's what the program is about. Once they start dealing with practical issues, they take ownership of the project." Though Mockbee always intervenes when he believes that students are doing something truly wrong, he acknowledges that they will make mistakes nonetheless -- and he isn't worried. "Every architect makes mistakes," he says. "Frank Lloyd Wright made them. Michelangelo made them. Rural Studio students are going to make them, and they will be in good company."