About 15 years ago, Sam Mockbee, a Mississippi architect, was driving from Brownsville, Tenn., to Corinth, Miss., when he saw the chimney of a burned-out house on a knoll.
He recalled: “If you’ve ever walked up to one that’s just out in the landscape where everything else is gone, except for that chimney-usually made out of stone, the real old ones-there’s something supernatural about them. They have a drawing power. You like to walk around them. You imagine what was there and what could come back. I could almost start building right there again, around that chimney.
“I guess what we’re doing,” he said softly, “is picking up where the past has left off and trying to move forward. It’s our turn to say something with those chimneys.”
Across the country, the rural vernacular has become a rich source of inspiration for new houses as architects go back to their roots to design for a particular locale.
In the South and west into Texas, where farm buildings are deeply familiar, three architectural firms with national reputations have gone beyond the obvious references to barns and silos to find potent meaning in such surprising forms as house trailers, simple fishing cabins, snapping turtles and the soulful remains of burned-out shacks, the surviving chimney as a symbol of ruin and endurance.
In the house Mockbee and his partner, Coleman Coker, designed for Jim and Rhonda Cook near Oxford, Miss., the entrance cuts right though a massive chimney that stands out from the house with ceremonial significance.
By deconstructing an artifact, the Mockbee-Coker firm is trying to shape a New South from the Old.
“You walk through fire, so to speak,” Coker said. Inside the house, the chimney is embraced by a tiny, high-ceilinged inglenook.
“I’ve come to realize,” Mockbee said, “you have to have those real quiet spaces in a house, a place to get away to, to sit out a storm, to read a book, watch a fire.”
Mockbee and Coker, who are distant cousins, both in their 40s, have forged a partnership that is turning out adventurous work.
Mockbee is based in Canton, Miss., near Jackson, and commutes 300 miles to teach at Auburn University in Alabama. Coker teaches sculpture at the Memphis College of Art and lives just across the Mississippi River on Horseshoe Lake in Arkansas.
“We’re not coat-and-tie guys,” Coker said. “We don’t like going out and meeting clients, giving presentations to boards of directors. We’re more artist types, as corny as that might sound.”
Their houses use materials common to farm buildings-corrugated aluminum siding, concrete block, galvanized roofing-and often are mistaken for warehouses. The architects enjoy playing with just such unconventional associations.
Take the house trailer, for example.
“You have these houses manufactured out of metal, which are built to last only 20 years,” Coker said. “They start falling apart, so people go to a lumberyard and build a roof over them. It’s the hand versus the machine, agrarian practice versus industrialization.”
The house they built for the Cooks about five miles from Oxford, where William Faulkner lived, has a dramatically sloped detached roof that hovers above the two-story, 4,000-square-foot rectangle just like a trailer shed. Under that roof is an expansive loft with open gables on both ends, providing a spectacular view of Faulkner’s legendary Yoknapatawpha County.
Mockbee thinks of that upper space as a chapel.
“The house itself is just a trailer that slides right into it,” he said.
The Cooks retreat to a kind of attic “like in these old houses your grandparents may have had where you’d go up and play,” Mockbee said.
“It’s taking that childhood experience and turning it into something that we as adults can use.”
The architects’ special design consideration was to accommodate the Cooks’ menagerie, which has included two African plains cats called servals, a cougar, assorted domestic cats, a macaw and a family of shar-peis. To form two-story cages for the servals and the cougar, Mockbee-Coker leaned cyclone fences against the front and back of the house, giving it a heavy industrial accent.
Even in their use of the vernacular, Mockbee and Coker try to preserve the modernist influence of their training.
“My teachers at Auburn were all modernists,” Mockbee said, “and we never studied anything about Southern architecture. So when I was in practice I found myself naive about that history. I realized there was a great deal that I didn’t know about my architectural past. I began to play with all that and yet still use the training I’d had. The trick became how to make some sort of marriage between the two.”
In Charlottesville, Va., W.G. Clark and Charles Menefee III are struggling with the same dichotomy. For a site on James Island near Charleston, S.C., they have designed a three-story concrete-and-glass house that eerily evokes a sense of Southern myth and ritual. Once again the chimney serves as a totem.
A steep processional entry stairway merges with the chimney, whose tall silhouette is emphasized by windows that give a view of the riverscape beyond the house, which was built for Pati Croffead, an artist, and her husband, Thomas, an optometrist.
At first, Pati Croffead said she hardly ever used the steep front stairs, preferring instead a more negotiable side staircase:
“Some people, especially older people, are frightened of them. But now I enjoy them so much I prefer to use them, even when I’m carrying groceries. I love the transitions, from one feeling to another, one space to another.”
The house echoes the tall, narrow fronts of townhouses in Charleston, where Clark, 51, and Menefee, 39, used to have their firm. But the Croffead house has a different mission.
“Architecture can be the ameliorative act by which, in thoughtfulness and carefulness, we counter the destructive effect of construction,” Clark wrote in Modulus 20, a University of Virginia journal.
The architect, who teaches at the university, as does Menefee, is a little cautious when discussing their use of the vernacular.
“When people talk about regionalism,” Clark said, “I often worry that what they mean is a cartoon of what used to be. They are often unable to add that critical layer of fusion with modern things. The thing we enjoy doing is focusing on a local place, trying to strengthen it as much as possible and to ruin it as little as possible.”
In San Antonio, David Lake and Ted Flato have drawn their inspiration from a different source while staying within the rural vernacular. The house near Mason, Tex., about 75 miles northwest of San Antonio, that they are just finishing for Dr. Mark Chandler, “is like a big turtle with a shell on top,” Flato said.
Striving to strike a balance between innovation and sensitivity to the site-a stone bluff that overlooks the Llano River, where the hill country of Texas begins-the house is an open pavilion with a sheet-metal roof that hunkers down into the rock and looks out in all directions from windows set between stone buttresses.
“It’s one of those great sites from which you’d want to watch a sunset, and exactly the kind of place I just cringe at the idea of screwing up,” Flato said.
The architects used stone from the site to build mammoth feet to hold the house on the rock cliff.
“The feet are more like buttresses, giving enough mass so you don’t feel like you’re in a big glass room,” Flato said.
A big part of Lake/Flato’s work, even in urban sites, is connecting the homeowners to the land, often through enormous outdoor rooms that are sheltered yet open to a view. Porches are the firm’s trademark, but in the Chandler house they centralized a porch as a main room that would work year-round, with windows between the fat stone columns.
In a house near Austin for Henry and Francine Carraro, clients with a $100,000 budget but a desire for space, the architects treated the whole building as a porch. They bought three steel sheds from an abandoned San Antonio cement plant, built in the 1920s, and converted them into a spare but intriguing house whose design is a teasing interplay of simple sculptural forms and rich native materials.
“The cement plant was just being torn up and sold as steel scrap in Mexico,” Flato said. “Instead of just borrowing the idea from that kind of building, we decided actually to buy one. Then it was a matter of combining it with some great local warm materials, like limestone and Mexican brick.”
The living area and kitchen were devised as a limestone cube inserted into one corner of the large porch shed.
Like Mockbee-Coker, Lake/Flato found inspiration in the supersheds built over house trailers. In the Carraro house they wound up with a roof that looms above the structure within.
“Environmentally, for climate control, it takes the brunt of the sun, plus you have the air circulation all around it,” Flato said. “The agricultural and industrial buildings that are still getting built have this simple direct solution to form.”
