Marlon Blackwell Reflects on Long Teaching and Design Career in Arkansas

In the early 1990s, Marlon Blackwell left the frigid winters of New York state for warmer climes in the South, specifically Fayetteville, Arkansas. He was aware of Fay Jones, who'd just received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects in 1990. And he was intrigued by the prospect of teaching at a university while nurturing a professional design practice, as Jones had done for 30-plus years before retiring from the University of Arkansas in 1988. (Jones retired from professional practice in 1997.)  

Blackwell has remained in Fayetteville since 1992, teaching hundreds of students and serving in leadership roles in the Fay Jones School, while developing and expanding a body of design work and receiving many accolades and honors, including the AIA Gold Medal in 2020. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA).

Last summer, Blackwell decided to retire from teaching at the U of A, where he was Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture. He recently reflected on his path here and the journey since. In some ways, he has traveled a similar path to Jones, and he considers the late architect and fellow AIA Gold Medal recipient a significant mentor and friend. 

Teaching and Learning in Arkansas

When considering coming to the U of A, the dean at the time, Dan Bennett, assured Blackwell that there would be professional commissions to support a practice alongside his teaching role. Blackwell wanted to be a liaison between the academy and the profession. During his own design education, he had been most drawn to his professors who both taught and practiced. "Through having actually built things, they could talk about it in very concrete ways," Blackwell said.

Blackwell arrived at the U of A after practicing in Boston for five years, then teaching at Syracuse University. "I was at the point where I thought I might have something to say and certainly a lot to learn by creating this feedback loop between teaching and practicing. One would inform the other. Teaching forces you to be very clear and concise with your own positions and beliefs, and at the same time to understand that there are myriad ways to solve problems, and you learn that from the students, as well."

Blackwell encouraged students to slow down and to examine nature through "exquisitely slow drawings, to begin to find the patterns between the world and the things that they're making," and tried to instill in them a desire for lifelong learning.

When it was time for graduating architecture students to find jobs, he enjoyed helping them prepare their portfolios and themselves for the professional world, and making connections so they could get into their dream firms. And, he has proudly watched alumni evolve as practitioners and academics over the last three decades.

When coordinating the school's lecture series for many years, Blackwell invited some of the best architects of the time to Arkansas — bringing a range of professional practitioners to campus, while also building advocacy for the school through those interactions. An important moment was teaching alongside Peter Eisenman, the noted theorist and architect. Blackwell is grateful for exceptional colleagues, both within the school and those that have visited the school to lecture and to teach.

"It's that kind of stimulation that has kept not only me but the faculty in love with the beauty of questions and inquiry, and not ever becoming complacent," he said. 

In Service to Design Education

Blackwell co-founded the University of Arkansas Mexico Summer Urban Studio in 1994 and taught in the program for many years. From 2009 to 2015, he served as head of the architecture department, which provided a platform for directing how the school could evolve and working through different kinds of pedagogical strategies.

"I think we were able to reinforce what Arkansas is about, in particular, an authentic focus on the making of buildings and places," he said. "It was somewhat radical in a time where many schools were moving away from things like drawing by hand, making, really looking at how buildings come together, and talking about beauty again."

As the school and architecture program developed, the focus on digital fabrication and design-build expanded, the U of A Community Design Center was established in 1995, and studio travel and the study abroad program became essential parts of the design education experience.

As a professor, Blackwell met students where they were, helping them mine their own life experiences and understand how those can inform their work. They learned how to draw from their experiences and combine that with disciplinary knowledge.

"I think it's important to be able to intermingle those things to develop one's own personal voice as a designer," he said. "I like to put students in a variety of places that are not too familiar, projects that are not necessarily typical, with ways of thinking about those projects that ask one to interpret, to translate, and hopefully even to transform, and always with a sense that architecture is made of something. It has weight. The material aspect of architecture is important. And not to be afraid of form either, but to be intelligent with how you use that."

Parallel to his teaching career at the U of A, Blackwell continued to build and expand his professional practice, which he leads with his partner and wife, Meryati Johari Blackwell, also FAIA. He has received numerous accolades over the years, including 19 American Institute of Architects awards and various other honors and recognitions for their firm's design work. He was named a recipient of an Arts & Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2012, the first Arkansan ever so honored. He was named a Ford Fellow by United States Artists in 2014.

The firm's body of work was recognized with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2016, and he was selected as the William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2018. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2018 and received the E. Fay Jones Gold Medal from AIA Arkansas in 2017. In 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2023, he was elected as a member to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Looking Toward the Future

Blackwell had been impressed not only by the work of Fay Jones, but by the fact that Jones could operate a renowned practice in a then-small town in middle-America, yet still have a significant impact at regional and national levels. He came to personally know Jones as "a person of great humility, but also very deep knowledge and a generosity."

"Some lessons I took away from him are to be available, to be accessible, to be generous, even when it may not be a clear benefit or anything, just to genuinely share what you know," Blackwell said. "He would tell me, 'I have principles that I live by and those that I build by, and they're not that different.' He taught me a way to think about how to teach, but also how to practice, so he was a true mentor in that regard."

As Blackwell steps away from full-time teaching, he wants to expand his focus on his practice while still taking visiting professor roles. In fall 2025, he served as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University.

The firm has grown over the past three decades — to a current staff of 22, of which 12 are Fay Jones School alumni. Over the years, Blackwell's firm has designed regional projects that include the renovation of Vol Walker Hall and the Steven L. Anderson Design Center addition for the Fay Jones School, working with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects. Others include St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in Springdale, the Fulbright Building in Fayetteville, the Gentry Public Library, Blessings Golf Clubhouse in Johnson, Crystal Bridges Museum Store in Bentonville, Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center in Fayetteville, Fayetteville High School, and Fayetteville Montessori Elementary School in Fayetteville. These projects received an array of regional and national awards.

"The practice has evolved to the point where we are doing larger and more complex projects, and yet at the same time working very diligently to maintain our roots, with the idea that architecture can happen anywhere, at any scale, at any budget and for anyone," he said. "We're still adhering to that here in the state and the region, but also with the desire to do more national work, too."

Recent design projects include several in Bentonville, such as Ledger and COOP Ramen, which received a 2021 AIA Interior Architecture Award. Another is Heartland Whole Health Institute, which won a 2025 Architectural Record Award: Healthcare, was selected as a 2025 Architect's Newspaper Best of Design Healthcare + Architectural Lighting, and as a 2025 World Architecture Festival Finalist in the categories of Completed Building: Office and Best Use of Stone. Another important project, Thaden School, was planned and designed by EskewDumezRipple, Marlon Blackwell Architects and Andropogon Associates. It received several awards, including a 2023 AIA Honor Award in Regional and Urban Design, and was the 2025 Dedalo Minosse Premio Andrea Palladio Prize Winner and the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize Cycle 5 Winner.

As he departs campus, Blackwell said he'll miss working with and seeing his school colleagues on such a regular basis, though he'll still see them around town. And he'll miss "the earnestness and the tenacity of so many of our students and their desire to learn." He will remain connected to and supporting the school through his firm's sponsored lecture in honor of Ernie Jacks, an Advance Arkansas scholarship, and the NOMAS internship at his firm.

Ultimately, Blackwell is grateful for his years spent teaching at the U of A and for the support by U of A and school leadership for the opportunities to teach here and as a frequent visiting professor at other universities, while developing a professional practice to the level it's achieved.

"One of the best decisions I made in my life was to come here. And to be able to teach, be able to have a career with practice, be able to raise a family, be able to do all the things you'd hoped and dreamed to do, and then have an institution that fundamentally supported that," he said.

For more details on Blackwell's retirement, see the press release.