Project by Marlon Blackwell Architects Wins North American Copper in Architecture Award

Timothy Hursley

The Lamplighter School Innovation Lab in Dallas, Texas, has received a North American Copper in Architecture Award.

FAYETTEVILLE – A project by Marlon Blackwell Architects recently received a North American Copper in Architecture Award from the Copper Development Association and the Canadian Copper and Brass Development Association.

The project — the Lamplighter School Innovation Lab in Dallas, Texas — is one of 10 in the United States and five in Canada to win awards this year. The awards program highlights outstanding uses of architectural copper and copper alloys in residential, educational and government buildings, with a focus on craftsmanship, attention to detail and architectural vision.

Blackwell, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, is a Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. He is an internationally acclaimed architect with a private practice in Fayetteville.

The Lamplighter School commissioned Blackwell to design its state-of-the-art Innovation Lab, a 10,600-square-foot structure that combines environmental science spaces, a robotics lab, a teaching kitchen and a woodworking shop.

Blackwell also designed the new Lamplighter Barn to house the campus chicken coop. Lamplighter students raise chickens and sell eggs to learn business skills and benefit charities.

The private school serves 450 pre-kindergarten through fourth-grade students in the North Dallas area.

Its campus was designed in the 1960s by O'Neil Ford, the leading Texas proponent of the mid-century modern approach, Blackwell said. The school was interested in a design that both cohered with its history and established a 21st century identity.

"The owners were looking for a timeless architecture, and with that comes a timeless material," Blackwell said. Copper, of course, has been used throughout the ages, and is present on the Lamplighter School campus in several buildings designed in the 1980s and '90s by Frank Welch.

"We also liked the workability of the material," Blackwell said. "There's something about how it ages over time." Copper is a caustic material, reacting with natural elements in incalculable ways. "Wherever a place is, that's the way the material weathers."

The choice of second-growth cypress, a material native to the area, for the plank soffits and interior walls reinforces the sense of a structure rooted in its place.

The building is wrapped in copper, with roof and walls creating an elegant shell. The one-story design is polyhedral, with two overlapping rectangles intersected by a triangular piece. A tilted roof provides natural light and shelters one of three porches.

"The roof creates the expressive character of the building," Blackwell said. "The copper shell ties it all together to make it a singular, abstract structure. This is, after all, the innovation lab. We're planting seeds for innovation in young minds."

Marlon Blackwell Architects worked with contractors Hill & Wilkinson of Richardson, Texas. The sheet metal contractor was Sterling Roofing Systems of Garland, Texas. Talley Associates of Dallas did the landscape design; its founding principal, Coy Talley, is a Fay Jones School alumnus.