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Tuesday, 24 October 2006 16:43 |
 | | Mark West |
Hale County, Ala., isnët where youëd expect a radical experiment in social engineering to be taking place.
Just to the south and west of the Birmingham industrial area, Hale County is one of the poorer places in the United States. Flat as a pancake, the county is one of those places where cotton was king, and when cotton left, nothing came in to take its place.
Poverty, now, is king here. Walker Evans and James Ageeës "Let us now praise famous men" was photographed here, and those pictures of poverty-ridden whites and blacks pricked the conscience of a nation, back in the days when our nation still believed that rich had at least some responsibility to the poor.
Now,
with the triumph of the "me generation" in its supreme avatars of
George Bush and Dick Cheney, men who were unwilling to go to war
themselves, but who are now all too happy to send others to their
death, Hale County and other places of its sort are ignored by most.
But not by all.
A man named Samuel Mockbee, a professor of architecture at Auburn
University, decided to take his courses into the field. Second- and
fifth-year students in architecture at Auburn have the option of living
in Hale County for those years, working under Mockbeeës tutelage to
construct buildings that are not just beautiful. Theyëre cutting-edge,
state-of-the-art, knock-your-socks-off modern. Theyëre designed with
full input from the people who will use them. And theyëre cheap, built
with found materials and donated effort from a nearby prison and from
the students.
And then Mockbee gives the buildings to local residents.
Mockbee is a man
of immense talents, a man whose skills could make him the darling of
the glitterati in New York, designing art galleries and salons.
Instead, he gives his art away to the poorest of the poor.
An example of
Mockbeeës genius is the Masonës Bend Community Center. Build with
rammed earth walls and glass from junkyard cars, the center cost about
$20,000 to build, and is an architectural treasure, comparable to
Matisseës chapel in Vence, France.
Mockbee, who
could be rich, isnët; heës giving his talent to the less fortunate. And
isnët that what universities are supposed to be about? Isnët that what
a democracy is about?
The current idea
of "every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost," so
beautifully exemplified in the Bush tax cuts for the rich, isnët an
idea that is fundamentally democratic. Democracy is the idea of a
society that works together for the common good, even if it means that
individual wealth is sometimes diminished.
And thatës the
experiment that Samuel Mockbee and his "Rural Studio" group are engaged
in out there in Hale County, Ala. A kinder and gentler age would have
called it democracy.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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