Apprentice To The Founder
The Cotton District
Starkville, Mississippi
Neighborhood planning apprentice to a man who has made a couple of hundred thousand square feet of construction mean something. From the heart of the late 1960s graph-paper Urban Renewal mindset in America, he instead envisioned something different. He built incremental infill, block by block, making a virtue of necessity. And he built something piecemeal, adaptable, and lovely, that pays its own way and gets better with age. He has spent fifty years training others to build it, many of them walk-ons, and then mastering new challenges as he comes up with what's next. It's what I decided to study.