After the untimely death of Samuel Mockbee in 2001, Andrew Freear became the Director of the Rural Studio, which was created to “simultaneously demystify modern architecture and expose architecture students to extreme poverty in their own backyard.” The studio challenges students in their design–build studios “to take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.” His work at the Rural Studio has been published in numerous periodicals and in two books. Freear has designed, supervised and built Rural Studio exhibits in Chicago, Cincinnati, Vienna Austria, Barcelona Spain, at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, and at the 2005 Bienal de São Paulo of Architecture in Brazil.