WHAT'S UP IN NEW DEVELOPMENT
I may be a little biased, calling the South home, but I've
increasingly found that this region has played a key role in the
evolution of the conscious within the family of architecture-
related disciplines. The South has also been one of the most
self-aware regions when it comes to celebrating and drawing
inspiration from its own vernacular architectural language,
an important factor which certainly informs the less ethno
centric aspects of the coalescing genre of "social justice"
architecture.
Some of the first and biggest mistakes of this conscientious
architecture played out here, and in some ways anticipated
the kinds of humanitarian questions that today's designers
and planners confront in the developing world. The region
was primarily a rural one for much of its history, with signifi
cant migration to the cities only occurring during and after
Reconstruction. This resulted in many shantytowns, which
in some ways are a precursor to today's favelas and slums in
places like South America,
Africa and Southeast A;ia.
The urban renewal
strategies of slum clear
ance and public housing
were Modernist responses
to that problem, proposing
an abstract and universal
solution that hit Southern
communities especially
hard, both when initially
constructed and as the fail
ures of that model became
apparent. Atlanta was the
site of Techwood Homes, the
nation's first public hous
ing project. It was also the
first city in the country to
demolish all of its major
projects via the federal HOPE
VI program. While controver
sial at both ends, the vast
scale of the transformations
can't be argued, continually
disrupting any sense of com
munity among the primarily
poor and black residents who
have inhabited these sites.
In some ways, the
South's lack of an urban
history has opened the
door to much of this heavy-
handed experimentation.
Walt Disney's dream of EPCOT
(Experimental Prototype
Community of Tomorrow)
carved out of the Florida
swamps is no less ambitious or grandiose than the Modernist
urban renewal of places like Atlanta. Florida's use of tourism
(with a little help from the air conditioner) to transform itself
from poor Southern backwater to the fourth most populous
state in the country is impressive. Although heavily subur
ban in execution, the idea of natural resources, in this case
beaches, being used to foster a tourism based economy is in
some ways a precursor to the eco-tourism based approach to
economic development employed by countries like Costa Rica.
Even New Urbanism got its start in the Sunshine State, with
the town of Seaside as the original and oft-cited New Urbanist
project. While the new ideas it showcased about town plan
ning would transform that field—even informing the HOPE
VI revitalizations—the other significant point is that Seaside
was also a fairly diligent exploration of the region's ver
nacular architecture. Architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk traveled the region documenting the "Florida
Cracker" style of architecture, and ultimately developed a pat-
ternbook that informed the work of the architects who built
Seaside's individual houses. Among the architects who con
tributed to the community’s unique blend of old and new was
Samuel Mockbee, who later founded the Rural Studio at Auburn
University.
While driven to some degree by nostalgia, and often used as
a real estate marketing tool, what New Urbanism is, at its most
idealistic, is the idea that the historical urban fabric can pro
vide lessons that will inform solutions to today's problems,
suburbanization in particular. Its more democratic approach to
moving oneself around is one of its most important contribu
tions to the social agenda of architecture and planning. The
other is the notion that observation and reinterpretation of
vernacular architecture and urban form can produce successful
solutions that most seriously rebuke the a priori Modernist idea
of a universal architecture for all people.
The return to contextual design that Seaside represents, in
a way, is the first step on the road to the more humble and
socially aware agenda of a growing faction of the design field
today, represented by groups like Architecture for Humanity,
The 1% and the growing network of university and community
design centers and design-build programs. The programs that
comprise that network are most numerous in the South.
Many of these programs focus on service learning and utiliz
ing student labor to provide
affordable housing or other
needed community facilities.
However, Mockbee is the
figure who most consciously
and fully integrated the
observational and social
aspects of this line of think
ing into a unified approach
with his Rural Studio, and
with his notion of the
"citizen architect" being
the ideal to which a socially
aware designer might aspire.
Beyond the ethical prin
ciples he laid out, Mockbee
was also highly successful
in celebrating the potential
that the vernacular land
scape presented as a basis
for new and innovative (but
regionally grounded) work.
Dogtrots, shed roofs, shot
guns and the like: would
these be living ideas without
folks like Mockbee, or would
they be relegated to a dead
visual language understood
only by preservationists?
Mockbee's use and reinter
pretation of these forms were
intuitive and emotional,
but still self-consciously
Southern. The forms he
chose, both in his guiding
of Rural Studio students and
in his private practice for
well-to-do clients, were those that sheltered the most humble
and destitute of the region, and his elevation of those symbols
to iconic works of art is part of what makes the emotional nar
rative of the Rural Studio and its founder resonate so much.
That exuberant mix of art and emotional response that Mockbee
articulated has only gotten stronger in the wake of other, more
recent events, with the Make It Right Foundation's efforts in
the Ninth Ward of New Orleans representing another take.
The rural and laissez-faire attitudes of the South, while fre
quently abused by profit-driven developers, also leave room for
the experimental and practical approaches that many of these
socially driven design projects require. Big cities with strict
codes have in some ways stifled these grassroots architectural
innovations, so perhaps the South was the only place they
could have happened. Could the burgeoning social current of
the architecture field have become as successful without the
South as a proving ground? Without first attempting to heal
the tensely interwoven history of racial politics and urban
planning in the South, would architects have ever climbed
aboard plane* and flown to Haiti, Indonesia and other disaster-
stricken countries, to stop drawing and start building? Without
the emotional and earnest narrative running under it all, the
South might never have changed architecture.
Kevan Williams athensrismg@flagpole com
The Chapel at Seaside. Florida The architecture and planning of that
community are a deliberate and intentional reinterpretation of Southern
architecture.
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