Fay Jones School Alumni and Faculty Celebrated at American Institute of Architects Conference

Garvan Woodland Gardens

The Bob and Sunny Evans Tree House at Garvan Woodland Gardens.

The Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design will celebrate alumni and faculty at an evening reception Thursday, June 6, during the American Institute of Architects Conference on Architecture 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The recognition from the institute includes an Honor Award for a project by Marlon Blackwell Architects, an AIA Small Project Award for a project by Modus Studio, and the selection of two alumni for AIA Young Architects Awards.

"The annual AIA Convention offers the opportunity to recognize the national impact our alumni and faculty are making in their professional practices and creative work," said Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School. "The school's reception is a well-attended, high-energy event for all our architecture alumni from across the nation, and a great promotional moment for the University of Arkansas."

The Shelby Farms Park project in Memphis, Tennessee, a collaboration between Marlon Blackwell Architects and James Corner Field Operations, will receive a 2019 AIA Honor Award - the highest national award given for architecture and design. This was one of four projects honored in the Regional and Urban Design category, which recognizes the best in urban design, regional and city planning and community development.

Blackwell, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, is the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture and a Distinguished Professor in the Fay Jones School.

Shelby Farms Park is a 4,500-acre park on the west side of Memphis - an area more than five times the size of Central Park in New York City. Marlon Blackwell Architects, based in Fayetteville, worked closely with James Corner Field Operations, a renowned New York City-based landscape architect firm, to develop seven structures within the 195-acre Heart of the Park at Shelby Farms Park.

Modus Studio will receive an AIA Small Project Award for its recent project, the Bob and Sunny Evans Tree House. The tree house opened last summer within the Evans Children's Adventure Garden at Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs. The garden is the botanical garden of the U of A and part of the Fay Jones School.

The Evans Tree House was one of 12 small projects selected for this award, which aims "to recognize small project practitioners for the high quality of their work and to promote excellence in small project design," according to the AIA website.

Modus Studio, a design firm based in Fayetteville and founded in 2008, is led by partners and Fay Jones School alumni Chris Baribeau (B.Arch. '03), Josh Siebert (B.Arch. '02) and Jason Wright (B.Arch. '04). Baribeau, Siebert and Wright also were named 2018 Emerging Voices by the Architectural League of New York.

Fay Jones School alumni Patty Opitz and Jason Jackson are among 22 architects from across the country who will be recognized in the 2019 AIA Young Architects Award program. Opitz (B.Arch. '04) is a senior associate architect at Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects in Little Rock. Jackson (B.Arch. '06) is lead design architect and partner at brg3s architects in Memphis, Tennessee.

The AIA Young Architects Award program, which started in 1993, recognizes emerging talent among professional architects. Specifically, it "honors individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and made significant contributions to the architecture profession early in their careers," according to the AIA website.

In addition to the AIA honors, Dean Peter MacKeith will introduce John Folan, the newly appointed head of the Department of Architecture in the Fay Jones School. Folan is currently the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture and founder and director of the Urban Design Build Studio at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has done extensive work in design-build, housing design and community engagement. He will begin his tenure at the U of A July 1.