Good Deeds, Good Design is a collection of essays by some of today’s most forward-thinking and influential architects, designers and educators. The book’s editor, Bryan Bell, titles his foreword “Designing for the 98% without Architects,” a reference to the statistic that only 2 percent of new homebuyers have the privilege of working directly with an architect. Good Deeds, Good Design, he says, is meant to advance “the best new thoughts and practices” in the move toward a more humane and democratic architecture.

Robert Gutman, in his introduction, poses the question underlying this revolution in the architectural world: “What can the architectural community do to increase the supply of housing for low-income groups?” The contributions that follow are all site-specific attempts to answer or at least to comment upon this crucial question. They include a story of community empowerment in Bayview, Va.; an adapted interview with Robert Young, on his work with chronically underserved Native American reservations and founding of the Red Feather Development Group; and an article by the late Samuel Mockbee on “The Role of the Citizen Architect.”

The essays in this collection, while readable and certainly important, are not always exceedingly eloquent; their authors are, after all, architects and designers by trade, not writers. The article by Mockbee, a MacArthur Fellow and founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio, is an exception. His essay is the manifesto of the ground-breaking program on low income housing he pioneered at Auburn. His visionary greatness bursts through in every sentence. It is at once a defense of the arts in a time dominated by science and technology, and a hopeful way forward for a profession at a crossroads.

Mockbee, perhaps more than any other contributor to this volume, is able to express the crux of the contemporary movement towards a more socially conscious architecture and, likewise, the core message of Good Deeds, Good Design: “All architects expect and hope that their work will serve humanity and make a better world.”

This review originally appeared in the September/October 2006 issue of World Ark, the magazine of Heifer International. Reviewed by Jaman Matthews, Heifer Staff WriterUsed with permission.