Architect Marlon Blackwell to Present 'Transmutations' Lecture on Aug. 31

Timothy Hursley

The Fayetteville Montessori Elementary School was completed in 2012. As the first building construction in accordance with the Fayetteville Streamside Protection Act, significant site restrictions helped form the school, which sits on a small triangular piece of land. The design won a 2014 AIA Gulf States Honor Citation Award.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Marlon Blackwell will present a lecture titled "Transmutations" at 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 31, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

Blackwell is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, and serves as Distinguished Professor and E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. He served as head of the Department of Architecture from 2009-2015.

Working outside the architectural mainstream, his architecture is based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and typologies, and the contradictions of place — strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. Work produced in his professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architects, has received recognition with numerous national and international design awards and significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines.

Recent honors for the renovation of Vol Walker Hall and the addition of the Steven L. Anderson Design Center (with associate architects Polk Stanley Wilcox) on the University of Arkansas Campus include a 2014 American Architecture Award, the 2014 AZ Award for Best Commercial/Institutional Architecture, the 2014 Architect's Newspaper Building of the Year, and the 2014 Lumen Award for Excellence.

National awards include a 2014 AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design (with the University of Arkansas Community Design Center) for the Little Rock Creative Corridor in Little Rock, a 2013 AIA Honor Award for Architecture for the St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church in Springdale and a 2012 AIA Honor Award for Architecture for the Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The church was also named the best Civic and Community Building at the 2011 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain. The office of Marlon Blackwell Architects was recognized as the Firm of the Year by Residential Architect magazine in 2011.

The significance of Blackwell's contributions to design is evidenced by being named a United States Artists Ford Fellow in 2014 and being selected for the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A monograph of his early work, An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005. Blackwell was selected by The International Design Magazine, in 2006, as one of the ID Forty: Undersung Heroes and as an "Emerging Voice" in 1998 by the Architectural League of New York.

At the University of Arkansas, Marlon was named as one of DesignIntelligence magazine's "30 Most Admired Educators" for 2015. He has co-taught visiting design studios with Peter Eisenman (1997, 1998), Christopher Risher (2000) and Julie Snow (2003) and was most recently the George Baird Professor at Cornell University (fall 2012). Other visiting academic appointments include the Thomas Jefferson Professor at the University of Virginia (spring 2011), the Elliel Saarinen Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (fall 2009), the Ivan Smith Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida (spring 2009), the Paul Rudolph Visiting Professor at Auburn University (spring 2008), the Cameron Visiting Professor at Middlebury College (fall 2007), the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (spring 2003) and visiting graduate professor at MIT in spring 2001 and 2002.

In 1994, he co-founded the University of Arkansas Mexico Summer Urban Studio, and he has coordinated and taught in the program at the Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City since 1996. He received his undergraduate degree from Auburn University in 1980 and a Master of Architecture II from Syracuse University in Florence in 1991.

In his lecture, he will discuss his architecture and design process as being based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and building typologies and the contradictions of place — strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. He will demonstrate how ideas and actions are generated from careful observations of intersections of nature-made and culture-made conditions particular to an architectural situation. Using examples of selected design works from his firm, he will demonstrate that a resilient architecture can be achieved as interplay between details, form and place. In particular, he will illustrate the necessity of being responsive to environmental factors, the specificities of site, and sustainable design principles that ultimately provide an architecture that can be felt as much as it is understood, as immediate and tactile as it is legible, contributing to the fundamental civic dignity of communities.

This is the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture Lecture.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.