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Mobile Home
By Cory Dugan
JANUARY 12, 1998:
Joe Harris lives in a bus.
Harris is not a traveling man. His old school bus is simply his
home, stationary, permanently (more or less) parked on a tract of
land in rural Mississippi, rigged with the few rudimentary
amenities he can afford.
Next spring, Harris unconventional home will be fitted with
a new addition. His future annex is presently housed in a
downtown Memphis loft studio. Next week, it will be disassembled,
packed into a truck and driven to Columbus, Ohio, where it will
spend a few months before making its way to its final destination
at Harris Mississippi home.
It somehow seems appropriate that a supplement to a school bus
should have a few miles put on it before being adjoined.
It also seems fitting that so many schools should be involved in
its odyssey. The initial design and construction took place here
at the Memphis Center for Architecture, a cooperative studio
venture between the University of Tennessee and the University of
Arkansas; the time spent in Columbus will be in an exhibition at
the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University; and the
additions final incarnation will be installed by students
from Auburn University.
I think of this as the projects first life,
Coleman Coker says of the structure that consumes a large portion
of the available space in the Memphis Center for
Architectures downtown studio. Coker is the Centers
director; he is also a sculptor and a partner with Samuel Mockbee
in Mockbee Coker, a loose-knit gypsy band of non-officed
architects and designers and students that has garnered
international acclaim and awards for its designs and progressive
social agenda.
Samuel Mockbee teaches at Auburn University, where he spearheads
the Rural Studio, an acclaimed and experimental program
headquartered in Greensboro, wherein students are thrown into the
trenches, designing and physically building projects to benefit
low-income families in rural Mississippi and Alabama. The idea
for the Harris project germinated within Mockbees Rural
Studio and will return there for its final resolution its
actual incorporation into Joe Harris school-bus home.
The Harris projects first life is an
extraordinary sculptural presence, a narrow sprawl of lumber and
steel and corrugated sheet metal and wire screen, stretching more
than 50 feet in an ordered and logical approximation of the
ramshackle. Designed and constructed by Coker and Auburn students
Jon Tate, Chris Robinson, Brad Smith, and Dan Osborne, the Harris
addition is an architectural abstraction, a conceptual
construction that fits nicely into the oft-experimental ouevre of
Mockbee Coker. The firms trademark reference to the
architectural vernacular of this region is manifest in the
materials and the forms of the Harris project: Its most obvious
architectural reference is the rural front porch, reinforced by
its elongated scale and its use of pyramidal concrete supports,
plank steps, and screens.
From one end, the structure reads as a long corridor, enclosed on
one side by an arrangement of screened panels and nearly
enveloped on the other by a folded birds wing of wooden
lath. This skeletal wing form composed as a jagged, latent
grid (a recurring element in Mockbee Coker designs and
Cokers sculpture) recalls the collapsing eaves of
rundown wood-frame housing. Above it, a matching section of
roof angles down in the measured sag of an imaginary
broken rafter. These structures, for all their adapted accidental
fluidity, are hardly precipitous; they are rigidly supported by a
framework of steel bracketing.

Photo by Coleman Coker
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Likewise, for all
the appearance of construction-site haphazardness, there is a
certain beauty to the unfinished mien of the Harris project. In
direct opposition to the calculated untidiness along the edges is
a foundation of strict order, an almost Japanese modularity.
The other end of the structure is to be capped by a small,
trapezoidal room. Enclosed in corrugated metal (painted to a
crusty finish with mobile-home paint) and translucent fiberglass,
the nearly claustrophobic space will be accessible from either
the porch or the ground level. Inside, it will be a sculptural
spirit tree designed by Mockbee. Spirit trees (or bottle trees,
as they are sometimes called I call mine
kissing trees, Mockbee says) are usually small
trees, dead or defoliated, with their limbs cut back and various
empty glass bottles fitted over the ends. According to Delta
folklore, evil spirits become trapped inside the bottles and the
inhabitants of the home are thereby protected. Mockbees
kissing tree will be constructed of beaver sticks,
bottles, and gourds. The small interior will also be decorated
with a clock, constructed from matchsticks by a member of Joe
Harris family.
This could be used as a kitchen, says Coker of the
trapezoidal space. (Mockbee refers to it as the living
room.) The flooring of the tiny room is a thin,
pressed-cedar sheathing, rather fragrant and surprisingly soft.
It could be trouble at the opening, Coker chuckles,
digging the toe of his shoe into the surface. Not advisable
for women in stiletto heels.
The opening Coker speaks of will be the reception at the Wexner
Center for the Arts for Fabrications, a collaborative
exhibition between the Wexner, the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Fabrications is an ambitious project, involving 12
architects or architectural teams four at each museum
in an exploration of architecture as actual, constructed
projects rather than drawings, plans, or models. The projects are
expected to address not only their own purposes, but also the
process of construction and being exhibited as structures
within structures a relationship to the museums own
particular architectures.
Which means the addition to Joe Harris home must relate not
only to a school bus, but also to one of the most widely
acknowledged architectural masterpieces of the past decade
architect Peter Eisenmans quirky but definitive Wexner
Center. And sure enough, lest we forget were dealing with
architects here, Coker and his students have constructed a model
of the pertinent wing of the Wexner; inside the model, of course,
is a model of the actual Harris project.
Looking at the small model, it becomes a bit disorienting, almost
Escher-esque, all of these buildings within buildings, nesting
and melding. If the Harris project relates to the Wexner
and it does, rather poetically, its narrow framework of common
lumber following the subtle angles and lines of Eisenmans
off-kilter grid it also relates to the rough loft space of
the Memphis Center for Architecture, with its heavy timber beams
and exposed brick and unfinished Sheetrock.
Almost everything you see here was purchased at Home
Depot, Coker explains, pointing out the screws and bolts
and aluminum fenceposts and 2x4s that constitute the Harris
addition. The idea is that this could be constructed off
the shelf of a hardware store, with only the most rudimentary
skills and tools. It exhibits a minimum of craftsmanship.
Its been a teaching tool, Coker continues.
In this first life, its been about pushing the
abstraction, about architecture without parameters. After it
leaves the Wexner, when it goes to Mockbee and his students, it
will enter its second life. It could become something totally
different down there. What weve done here is a stage set;
were sending them a kit. They will take what weve
done and make it practical, turn it into what Joe needs.
I didnt want us to make something that was just
another disposable piece of the art world, Mockbee says.
The Wexner exhibit is great, dont get me wrong. But
Im more interested in Joes bus than the Wexner
Center.
Standing back from the Harris project in its current form, the
eye following its gracefully jagged lines and contours, it
isnt difficult to imagine. The cheddar-yellow school bus
alongside it; a few brightly painted tulip chairs, maybe a
lounging dog or two, scattered along the redwood decking. A
clematis or morning-glory vine tangled into the grid of the
low-hanging roof, providing a little dappled shade.
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