Five Design Award-Winners Tied to Fay Jones Architecture School

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The L-Stack House, designed by Marlon Blackwell in collaboration with his partner, Ati Blackwell, recently won a Grand Award in the Residential Architect Design Awards in the category for custom homes of 3,000 square feet or less.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Fay Jones School of Architecture and its associates made quite an impression on judges of the recent Residential Architect Design Awards. Five of the 26 award-winners have a connection to the school at the University of Arkansas.

The 11^th annual awards contest garnered 978 entries in 16 categories, making it the country’s most competitive residential architecture awards program, according to the magazine’s Web site. The jury selected 26 projects for honors, including 19 Merit awards, six Grand awards and one Project of the Year award. Winning projects will appear in the May/June issue of Residential Architect magazine and on its Web site.

The Grand Award winner in the bunch was professor Marlon Blackwell for his design of the L-Stack House, his Fayetteville residence. Done in collaboration with his partner, Ati Blackwell, this design won in the category for custom homes of 3,000 square feet or less. The urban grid and the modest scale of existing houses in the neighborhood are enhanced through a strategy of bridging and stacking of forms spanning the seasonal creek that diagonally traverses the site. The resulting scheme is an ‘L’ configuration that subdivides the interior program and the site into private and public spaces. A carefully positioned glass-enclosed stairway hinges together the two 18-foot-wide boxes, clad in a Brazilian redwood rain-screen, that form the house structure.

“It’s a stubbornly urban response,” Blackwell said. “The house as bridge becomes vital through its negotiation between the city and what nature provided us.”

In the On the Boards category, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center won a Merit Award for the Porchscapes design, a 43-unit affordable housing neighborhood intended to show low-impact development technologies in water management. This makes the eighth national design award this project has won for the Community Design Center, an outreach program of the architecture school.

“We are pleased that our neighborhood design for low-income populations might be seen as a model for all market grades of residential development, and appreciate the recognition from the design community,” said Steve Luoni, director of the center.

Larry Scarpa of Pugh and Scarpa Architects in Santa Monica, Calif., along with Angela Brooks, won a Merit Award in the Affordable category. This winning project, Step Up on Fifth in downtown Santa Monica, Calif., provides housing, support services and rehabilitation for the homeless and mentally disabled. Scarpa was the school’s visiting Fay Jones Chair in Architecture last year.

Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle garnered two Merit Awards. His single-room Salt Spring Island Cabin in Salt Spring, British Columbia, won in the Architectural Design Detail category, and his steel and concrete Montecito Residence, located in the fire-prone Toro Canyon area near Santa Barbara, Calif., won in the category for custom homes of more than 3,000 square feet. Kundig, who is the fall 2010 John G. Williams Distinguished Professor, will also speak March 29 at Vol Walker Hall’s Ken Shollmier Lecture Hall as part of the school’s lecture series.

“With accolades going to projects and firms across the country, it’s remarkable that roughly one-fifth of the contest’s award-winners have ties to this school,” said Jeff Shannon, dean of the architecture school. “It’s indicative of the high quality of work being produced here, and of the company we keep.”

The awards jury included six distinguished architects: Ed Binkley, AIA, Ed Binkley Design, Oviedo, Fla.; Louise Harpman, Assoc. AIA, Specht Harpman, Austin, Texas; Jennifer Luce, AIA, Luce et Studio, San Diego; John V. Mutlow, FAIA, RIBA, University of Southern California School of Architecture, Los Angeles; Julie Snow, FAIA, Julie Snow Architects, Minneapolis; and Richard Williams, FAIA, Richard Williams Architects, Washington, D.C.