Fay Jones School Professors Win Emerging Voices Award from Architectural League of New York

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Marc Manack, left, and Frank Jacobus have won the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Frank Jacobus and Marc Manack, both architecture professors in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, have won the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York. They will present a lecture today, April 5, in New York City as part of the Architectural League's Lecture Series.

Jacobus and Manack are principals of SILO AR+D, an architecture firm based in Fayetteville and Cleveland, Ohio. Both professors have been teaching at the university for four years.

The Emerging Voices Award has featured architects since 1982 in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. This year, Jacobus and Manack were chosen as one of the eight teams or individuals to be honored with the award.

"The Emerging Voices program recognizes a young firm or emerging practice that has both a substantial amount of built work and also something to say about it," said Manack, an assistant professor of architecture. "They are looking for architects that are leaders not only just in the work that they build, but also in how they talk about it and how they think about it, how they write about it and just the potential influence that they can have on the field of architecture."

This award was an honor for the two professors, who submitted a portfolio consisting of work from over the last three years. Those projects included the "Hillside Rock House" "Barn Again" and the "Super Sukkah," which was displayed on the lawn of Vol Walker Hall in fall 2014.

"If you look at the people who have won it, we have to prove that we deserve to win it," said Jacobus, an associate professor of architecture. "I think that's both of our mentalities, we just have to keep going and keep pushing."

SILO AR+D has won several awards including those from Faith & Form magazine, the American Institute of Architects Gulf States, the Arkansas AIA chapter, AIA Ohio and AIA Cleveland. Their projects were selected in the Cleveland Botanical Garden treehouse competition and the Sukkah City competition in St. Louis.

Manack is the co-editor of the book Out of Scale and the co-author of the forthcoming book Postmodern Computation. He received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Master of Architecture from Ohio State University.

Jacobus published the book Archi-Graphic: An Infographic Look at Architecture last fall, and he edited the book Discovering Architecture: Built Form as Cultural Reflection, which included an essay written by Manack. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a Master of Architecture II (Post-Professional) from the University of Texas at Austin.

The pair also created an exhibition that memorialized victims of mass shootings through architecture. Titled Semi-Automatic, it was displayed last fall in Vol Walker Hall.