Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee dedicated his life, as a teacher and as an architect, to the goal of providing "shelter for the soul". His inspirational and authentic architecture served to improve the lives of the most impoverished residents of rural Alabama through his work at Auburn University's Rural Studio. Mockbee was so committed to this pure act of service that, in 1991, he abandoned a full time architectural practice with Coleman Coker and the firm Mockbee Coker Architects to accept a position at Auburn's School of Architecture. It was there that he and long time friend and Auburn professor D.K. Ruth conceived of and founded the Rural Studio concept.

A fifth-generation Mississippian, Mockbee was born on December 23, 1944 in Meridian. Because of his love for drawing, he knew by the time of his ninth birthday that he wanted to become an architect. However, upon graduating from high school and before beginning the formal study of architecture, Sambo served two years in the U.S. Army as an artillery officer at Fort Benning, Georgia. At the conclusion of his armed service commitment, he enrolled at Auburn and graduated from the School of Architecture in 1974. After an initial internship in Columbus, Georgia, he returned to his native Mississippi in 1977 to form a partnership with classmate and friend Thomas Goodman. The firm quickly established a regional reputation for outstanding design through the utilization of local materials to create a work based upon derivations of vernacular imagery. Mockbee Goodman Architects won more than twenty-five state and regional design awards during their short affiliation. However, it was his partnership with Coleman Coker in 1983 that established Mockbee's reputation as one of the nation's premier regionalists, and as a strong and important new voice coming from the South. In 1990, Mockbee Coker Architects was selected by the Architectural League of New York to participate in their prestigious Emerging Voices Series.