Marlon Blackwell will present the lecture "Abstract Unions" at 4 p.m., Monday, Sept. 13, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus, as part of the fall lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. The lecture will also be available to watch live via Zoom.

Blackwell, FAIA, is a Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A, and he's the founding principal of Marlon Blackwell Architects in Fayetteville. Blackwell is the recipient of the 2020 AIA Gold Medal, the institute's highest honor, which recognizes those whose work has had an enduring impact on the theory and practice of architecture. He also was named the 2020 Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year, the SEC's highest honor for faculty.

Blackwell's lecture is the 75th Anniversary Year Keynote Lecture for the school.

Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School, said that the work of Blackwell's practice is also clearly personal.

"Engaging with the work of Marlon Blackwell Architects invariably also becomes a set of encounters with the architect Marlon Blackwell - and these meetings themselves are multi-faceted; one meets, in turn, an educator, a builder, a philosopher, a storyteller, an optimist," MacKeith said.

The Fay Jones School's fall lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism, and the U of A Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Registration for the online version of the lecture is available on Zoom.

In his lecture, Blackwell, working outside the architectural mainstream, will discuss his architecture and design process as being based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars, building typologies and the contradictions of place - strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture.

Rather than a removal from reality, abstraction is the process of connecting to place, looking for possibilities of maximum meaning with minimal means. He will demonstrate how these ideas of reinterpreting the familiar are generated from careful observations of intersections of nature-made and culture-made conditions particular to an architectural situation.

Using examples of selected design works from his firm, he will speak to a resilient architecture that can be achieved as interplay between details, form and place. In particular, he will illustrate the necessity of being responsive to environmental factors, the specificities of site and sustainable design principles that ultimately provide an architecture that can be felt as much as it is understood, as immediate and tactile as it is legible, contributing to the fundamental civic dignity of communities.

Blackwell is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a 2019 William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome, was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2018, and was selected as a United States Artists Ford Fellow in 2014. He received the E. Fay Jones Gold Medal from AIA Arkansas in 2017 and the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Work produced in his professional office has received national and international recognition with significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines and more than 160 design awards. The firm received the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and was ranked No. 1 in Design as part of the 2016 Architect 50 by Architect Magazine.

A monograph of Blackwell's early work, An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell, was published in 2005 by Princeton Architectural Press, which will also publish a new monograph, Radical Practice, which is scheduled to be released in fall 2022.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is open to the public. Admission is free, with limited seating. For details on watching the lecture online, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.