PorchDog House Prototype Gets International Nod in London Exhibit

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The PorchDog house, in Biloxi, Miss., sits 11 feet above the ground to meet federal regulations established after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Tim Hursley, courtesy Marlon Blackwell Architect.)

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A house designed to protect families against hurricanes exemplifies innovative design being created worldwide.

The PorchDog House Prototype, designed by Marlon Blackwell and his firm, Marlon Blackwell Architect, was recently named to the short list of projects for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year. This third annual international exhibition and awards event showcases about 100 projects from seven design disciplines: architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. Blackwell’s design is one of 14 in the architecture category.

The exhibition opens Wednesday, Feb. 17, at the Design Museum in London. A winner in each of the seven categories and one overall winner will be announced at the March 16 awards ceremony. Antony Gormley, a British sculptor, will chair the jury.

This event is the museum’s “annual exploration of the most innovative, interesting and forward-looking new work in design of all kinds, from around the world,” according to the Brit Insurance Web site. Projects were selected from those nominated “by a group of internationally respected design experts, curators, critics, practitioners and enthusiasts,” the Web site states.

Blackwell, chair of the architecture department and professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture, described the PorchDog house as a “tough structure responding to a Darwinian moment.” It was one of seven storm-proof prototypes selected by families in East Biloxi, Miss., where Hurricane Katrina wiped out about 3,500 homes in 2005. It was built as part of Architecture for Humanity’s Biloxi Model Homes program, a project partially funded by Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network.

Though elevated 11 feet above the ground, the PorchDog house, in Biloxi, Miss., incorporates a stoop to serve the social function of a porch.  Photograph by Tim Hursley, courtesy Marlon Blackwell Architect.

Completed in August 2009, the PorchDog house is home to Richard Tyler, a single father and commercial and residential painter, and his children. The 1,500-square-foot home sits 11 feet above the street to meet the new Federal Emergency Management Agency flood regulations in Biloxi. It features steel beam construction, low-maintenance ribbed metal siding and interior bamboo flooring. A shaded porch wraps around the base of the three-story house. The design maximizes sun control and security with a shutter system in front and three 7-by-12-foot operable shutters in back that roll up to expand living space onto the balcony. The three-bedroom, two-bath interior includes an office/study area that could be rented out to generate family income.

The PorchDog house is meant to be a prototype for sustainable, storm-proof design housing in areas affected by hurricanes. To assist in such replication, renderings, elevations and CAD files for Blackwell’s design are available online at Open Architecture Network.

The PorchDog name comes from the idea of the benign character of a dog that is also protector of its domain. Though this house is built to withstand the tremendous destruction of a hurricane, its design is also conscious about what happens the rest of the time: everyday life in the city.

The Biloxi Model Homes program was intended to show alternative models for building in these types of areas that are adaptable to new federal regulations requiring that homes be elevated. But, these regulations “essentially destroy the street life, social life of neighborhoods by elevating things,” Blackwell said, treating the ground level as simply utilitarian. He wanted to find a way to maintain cultural traditions while bracing against inevitable natural conditions.

“The model that we came up with rejects simply taking the shotgun house and lifting it up on stilts. Rather, we made a more compact, vertical organization of spaces with a plan that was more concise on and above the street,” Blackwell said.

The shotgun house, a narrow home with several rooms in a row and no hallways, was a popular housing style in the South from the Civil War through the early 1920s.

“But, ultimately, this couldn’t be another shotgun on stilts,” he said.

The housing type had to evolve — thus, the Darwinian moment. The challenge of the design was how to retain the important social space of a porch at street level when the house is elevated. The solution incorporates a stoop that serves as a street-level porch.

“We used the porch as something that is essential to the civic dignity of a place and to maintain the culture and social fabric of the street,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell said the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year program seems focused on designs rather than designers, meaning that an architectural firm in Arkansas doing a project in Mississippi will be part of an exhibit in London. The High Line Park in New York joins the PorchDog house as the only other American project among the 14 in the architecture category, which includes world-renowned architects and firms.

“It’s a very modest project, and it’s being featured in a star-studded place,” he said.

Other projects by Blackwell, who was inducted as a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects in 2009, have also been recognized recently:

• Blackwell’s renovation of the Gentry Public Library, which already garnered a 2009 American Institute of Architects/American Library Association Library Design Award, recently won a Grand Award for Commercial Remodeling over $500,000 from Remodeling magazine.

• His design of the L-Stack House, his home in Fayetteville, already won an AIA Housing Award in 2008. Last year, that design won his Fayetteville firm, Marlon Blackwell Architects, a spot alongside 37 other North American architects and firms at a special exhibition in Moscow, held in conjunction with Zodchestvo, the annual Russian national architecture fair sponsored by the Union of Architects in Russia. The architects, from 15 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, were selected for their “continued commitment to contemporary design as a basic premise of their practice,” according to news release. After being displayed in Moscow, the exhibition is expected to travel to other locales in Russia.