JON KALEV

Anderson and Ora Lee Harris' home in Hale County, Alabama

People and Place Matter

“ The professional challenge, whether one is an architect in the rural American South or elsewhere in the world, is how to avoid being so stunned by the power of modern technology and economic affluence that one does not lose sight of the fact that people and place matter.”

“ For me, drawing and painting are the initial influences for the making of architecture. The sketch is always out front. It sees ahead and deeper into what is already on the paper.”

“ The initial sketch is always an emotion, not a concept. In the beginning, it is important to allow the imagination to move freely without any influence from a preconceived form. It’s a mark that suggests the possibility of an idea. For me, it’s the act of drawing that allows the hand to come into accord with the heart. When that happens, there comes a moment when the marks of the sketch — it can be a pen mark or a computer mark — utter the first deeper knowledge of what will come later. “ – Sambo Mockbee

Professor Mockbee spent hours with me formulating my graduate thesis and long conversations about DuBois the Souls of Black Folks and convinced me to study the landscapes that freed slaves built in rural Alabama after emancipation. He and I were from this place and knew what was hidden. I got to spend a week working with Professor Sambo Mockbee at Auburn’s Rural Studio. Made in part from scrap materials, the Butterfly House, as it came to be known, shows what is possible when it comes to affordable housing. Rooted in place, not commodity-driven, beyond codes: home. I have not continued what Mockbee showed us, nor have others. Truth be told, none of us under his influence have equaled his level of work. Nor have the professors who followed him. Good work has certainly been done at Auburn. But Sambo reached deeply into the spirit of the people and the place—rural Alabama—and somehow those dreams, myths, and layered history expressed themselves in form.

But I remember a candid conversation with Sambo that still haunts me. He could not actually design and build the things he wanted to and still make a living. This is why he started teaching. Poor people and communities that need what architecture cannot afford it. My response was to move to Aspen, Colorado, and work for one of the more noted design firms, where clients often did not have a budget. I had shared some of that work with him and was proud of it. In a phone call shortly before he died, he told me to come back and finish my graduate thesis while he and Jack Williams were at Auburn. “ What you’re doing is…being a housepet for the rich. ” He was right. I gave two weeks’ notice the next day.

The thing I will remember most about Sambo Mockbee is his dreams were bigger than our shared reality. What made him different was that he made them reality. Three decades later I still hear Sambo’s words in my head:

” Everyone, rich or poor, deserves shelter for the soul. “

I will dream and follow Mockbee’s process.

To learn more about Sambo Mockbee visit his family’s web site. View the documentary Citizen Architect

All images courtesy of the Mockbee family.

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Wheatland, Wyoming

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Wills Cross Roads, Alabama

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Fred Herzog, Man with Bandage, 1968 Courtesy Equinox Gallery and Estate of Fred Herzog. Modified to remove bandage on face and mailbox changed from red to blue. Link to original

Thoughts on the color red. In Aperture No. 260 there is an interesting article on the color red by Steven Shore (Shore, 2025). Using a modified version of Fred Herzog’s photograph, Shore describes how a painter can choose the shade of red they want. They can choose not to use color at all. They can place it where they want on the canvas in relation to the other colors they have chosen. Shore references William Eggleston discussing the color red but does not share all of what he said, so I looked it up. Below Eggleston discusses red while talking about his famous 1973 photograph Greenwood, Mississippi (usually called The Red Ceiling):

* Eggleston, W. (1973) Greenwood, Mississippi [dye transfer print]. Commonly known as The Red Ceiling.*

“The photograph was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge. It was hard to do. I don’t know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising. The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every time.” (Eggleston, 1992, p. 28)

Shore is interested in what red does to the picture as an object—how it clips on film, goes flat, refuses to sit in space. Looking at his two Herzogs, I noticed something else. Red changes how we read an object it does not touch. The man’s face looks more focused when the mailbox is red than when it is navy blue. The two faces have the same exposure. Once you know that, they still do not look the same. The red seems to pull the eye and, with it, to change how we read the face: sharper, more present, more “correctly” exposed. Red stands out, and everything near it is judged in its light.

Then I looked closely in photoshop. See below.

We already know that shape can trick perception. Müller-Lyer lines of equal length do not look equal; a classic illusion is enough to prove the point.

The first diagram our eye is tricked into perceiving the middle line as being longest when in fact the second diagram proves it is not

What I have not seen discussed as often is how a color can alter our sense of an unrelated object in the same frame—not by touching its pixels, but by focusing attention. Josef Albers comes close in his theory of the Interaction of Color – simultaneous contrast, spreading, color constancy, and the way a strong hue steals attention and recalibrates everything next to it (Albers, 1963). Color is not what it appears to be. The mailbox is not red. The metal absorbs most wavelengths of light and reflects others; those reflected wavelengths reach the retina, where three types of cones register them, and the brain names the result “red.” We photograph surfaces. We see light (photons) that never entered them.

In architecture school, Cheryl E. Morgan, FAIA, taught color as a tool for creating a feeling and orienting focus. She shared an evolutionary story: we notice red first because it was the color of the open mouths of the animals that hunted us, and the people who did not see it in time did not survive. Whether or not that particular origin is accurate, the design lesson is. Color can aim the eye. The stop sign is the everyday proof. It is not merely painted; it is placed so that red interrupts whatever else you were looking at and tells you where to look next. That is what happens in Herzog’s picture. But the mailbox is not the subject. The man is. But red behaves like a stop sign inside the frame. It claims the first look, then sends the second look to the face—and the face, receiving that second look, seems better seen than the identical face beside a blue box. I’ll repeat my hypothesis – color can alter our sense of an unrelated object in the same frame.

Painters can decide whether red will do that work. Photographers only decide whether to include the red that is already there. But Herzog’s photo asks another question. Are we using color in other areas of a composition and not even knowing it. This idea is worth exploring further. As it is my understanding of how we perceive color and why certain colors change our thoughts. Shore is right about the painter and photographer difference. What I don't know and now question is are photographers unknowingly using color to alter perceptions of unrelated objects in our compositions. To be continued.

Notes:

Albers, J. (1963) Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shore, S. (2025) ‘Stephen Shore on the Color Red’, Aperture, no. 260 (Fall). Available at: https://aperture.org/editorial/stephen-shore-on-the-color-red/ (Accessed: 18 September 2026).

Eggleston, W. (1992) Ancient and Modern. New York: Random House, p. 28.

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We all dream of America

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The Only fans discussion at the nursing home Never will forget this moment I tried to explain to my mother two young women wanting to live at the trailer park that had a Only fans page. She kept saying explain this to me again , “they cook and exercise in the nude and people pay to watch this?” Yep. Mom they don't do porn they just exercise and cook food and watch tv naked – on camera. And they teach men that are into bass fishing how to tie lures with knots and such. “They do this nude. And people pay for this?” Yep. “Nope you do not need that going on” she said. “Imagine when you were 12 and all your playmates. Thats exactly where you boys would be.” I said, but they are really nice young ladies. “Nope, they need to find somewhere else.”

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Notes after Torah study- the Patriarch If you are a believer—whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim—the beginning of our faith starts with Abraham, where the covenant was made. There are layers to this though that are strange. For reference I'm going to use the acronym “NHI” to represent Non-human intelligence. This could be angels, watchers or beings referred to in the heavenly court reference in Genesis or something else we do not know of. The story (as taught in Judaism) is this: Abraham’s father, Terakh, owned an idol shop. One day, while his father was away and Abraham was left in charge of the store, he took an axe and smashed all the idols except the biggest one. He then placed the axe in the idol’s hands. When his father returned, he was angry and asked what happened. Abraham explained that the large idol had become upset with the other idols and destroyed them. “You know these idols can’t move,” his father shouted. Abraham cleverly answered, “If they can’t save themselves, then we are superior to them. So why should we worship them?” [^1] It is Abraham’s intellectual and spiritual perception — his ability to see through what everyone else around him accepted without question that caught the attention of the Creator of the universe—whom we call HaShem—thereby becoming the father of the Jewish people.

However much the faith has splintered over the thousands of years that followed, what can be agreed upon is that Abraham gives us ethical monotheism: the belief that there is one G-d over mankind and earth, and that His primary concern is that people act ethically. The stories of Abraham’s life that follow are epic. G-d tests him in many ways, even to the extreme of commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Abraham also confronts G-d in one of the most famous lines in history: “Shall not the judge of all the earth act with justice?” [Genesis 18:25]. I do not know what to make of these stories. Beyond the text, they contain mathematical patterns. For example, the ages of the patriarchs: * Abraham — 175 years * Isaac — 180 years * Jacob — 147 years

⠀Look closely at the math: * 175 = 7 × 5² * 180 = 5 × 6² * 147 = 3 × 7²

This is deliberate not coincidence in my opinion. The coefficients decrease (7 → 5 → 3) while the bases increase (5 → 6 → 7). I have no thoughts as to what it means but it certainly hints to encoding something through mathematics that goes beyond the surface story. Archeologically this puts us in the Middle Bronze Age. At that time: * Widespread literacy was rare. * Advanced mathematics (especially the kind of elegant, intentional patterning you’re seeing in the ages) was mostly the domain of specialized scribal or priestly elites in places like Mesopotamia or Egypt. * A semi-nomadic family/clan wandering between Mesopotamia and Canaan would not have been the most likely setting for this kind of numerical sophistication. Source: Grok 7/11/226

Abraham’s stories describe G-d’s role in the world. In the Midrash it says: “So, because Abraham our patriarch was saying: ‘Is it possible that this world is without someone in charge?’ The Holy One, blessed be He, looked at him and said to him: ‘I am the owner of the world.’” — Genesis Rabbah (Sefaria) But I am left with so many questions. If the story of the Patriarchs is true, then we have a population of humans created in the story of Genesis—specifically created by a heavenly council in the image of their maker(s): “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.’” [Genesis 1:26] Rashi comments on this verse: “The meekness of the Holy One, blessed be He, the Rabbis learned from here: because man is in the likeness of the angels and they might envy him, therefore He took counsel with them. And when He judges the kings, He likewise consults His heavenly council… He consulted His heavenly council and asked permission of them, saying to them: ‘There are in the heavens beings after My likeness; if there will not be on earth also beings after My likeness, there will be envy among the beings that I have created.’” — Rashi on Genesis 1:26 (Rosenbaum & Silbermann translation) The core of this faith is established by how the world came to be and by whom or what. Then Judaism forms with the story of a child smashing idols in a clever and insightful moment—an observation of what society worships. His words are as powerful as his axe.

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My dog “Autiemae” a blue healer. I got her when I had cows but she was Healer blue

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ברוך השם My little place in the world.

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