Mock🐝's Subversive Leadership 🙌 💯💯💯

I'm glad the course gave us a primer on Critical Regionalism through Frampton's Six Points - before we studied the works of Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio through Auburn University. I'll try to pull some quotes and points from Mockbee's work, to serve as a  proven application of Frampton's tenets. 

Just from my short experience of working in architecture based out of the US Southeast, I had heard of Mockbee's work from employers who had gone through his program, and reading this week's articles have helped me connect the dots between those practitioners intentions and the impact Mockbee has on a regional community as well as a regional form of architectural practice. 

Mockbee writes to provide his background and ethics for his work with the Rural Studio, and links his decisions in developing a practice to great architectural thinkers before him.

"[Mockbee] found himself thinking about the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti's injunction that an architect must 'choose between fortune and virtue' " - Oppenheimer Dean on Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency

"... I believe that architects are given a gift of second sight and when we see something that others can't we should act, and we shouldn't wait for decisions to be made by politicians or multinational corporations..."

 He recognizes that these moments of decision making speak to the architect's responsibility (to be developed into the citizen architect stuff) in developing culture and civilization. To go further, he insists that architects get out of their comfort zone and really push for these actions to decide ahead of/against/in place of politicians and larger corps/

"The political and environmental needs of our day require taking subversive leadership and well as an awareness that where you are, how you got there, and why you are still there, are more important than you think they are..." Mockbee as quoted in Constructing a New Agenda - Architectural Theory 1993-2009 

"Architecture, more than any other art form, is a social art and must rest on the social and cultural base of its time and place. " 

These two quotes connect back to Frampton's points on critical regionalism, world culture, and I'll say some to the tactile notes, where Mockbee is prioriting the experience of the user and the connection to the existing. 

Just to quickly end on the impact on pedagogy that Mockbee's studios had - its valuable to learn the above lessons early in our education and practice, so as to be prepared to have the tools in hand when the opportunities arise for us to design towards a critical regionalism.