FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — University of Arkansas School of Architecture faculty won national and regional honors at the recent annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in San Antonio. In addition to a national Education Honor Award for the school’s Community Design Center, announced earlier this year, professors pocketed several awards from the Gulf States Regional division of the AIA. Marlon Blackwell received an Honor Award (new construction) for Blessings Golf Clubhouse and Guardhouse in Johnson, Ark., and Michael Hughes and Selma Catovic-Hughes won Merit Awards (new construction) for the Moreland residence in Baton Rouge, La. and the Home, a residence for Hughes’ parents in Eastanollee, Ga.

The clean lines of Marlon Blackwell’s Blessings Golf Club challenges the antebellum home/hunting lodge typologies commonly found in golf facilities.

“These awards speak to the high caliber of our faculty. Our students benefit enormously from faculty who practice, teach and win national and regional recognition for their efforts,” said Jeff Shannon, dean of the School of Architecture.

At client John Tyson’s request, Marlon Blackwell designed Blessings Golf Clubhouse as a completely new, contemporary setting for the game that departs from the more typical antebellum home or hunting lodge typology. The bar-shaped building spans an Osage Indian archaeological zone, creating an entry portal and event space that frames the eighteenth green. Dry stacked stone, glass and weathered copper create a richly textured exterior, while cherry, walnut, leather and blue stone bring understated luxury to the interior. The golf club aligns with Blackwell’s Fred and Mary Smith Razorback Golf Center some 200 feet away, a practice facility for club members and the UA Razorback golf team that won a Gulf States Regional Honor Award in 2005.

Michael Hughes designed and built this retirement home for his parents. The subtle curves of the roof were produced on site using conventional wood framing techniques.

“They are both a place to celebrate and enjoy the game,” Blackwell said. Though initially apprehensive about designing golf facilities — he is not a golfer — Blackwell enjoyed the challenge. “They’re as much social places as places to play golf. There’s a culture of golf, and these buildings support that,” he said. In addition to the Gulf States Honor Award, Blackwell recently received Renovation Merit Awards from Residential Architect and Custom Home magazines, both for Arkansas House in Johnson, Ark. The project is published in the May 2007 print and online issues of both magazines.

It took 10 years for Michael Hughes to fully realize the Home, a retreat for his retired parents that he built with his father and uncle. In anticipation of changing needs, the home features a fully accessible first floor with ramp access and two master bedrooms. One is dug into the hillside and features a spa-like bath with roll-in shower and 12-foot ceilings; a second suite on the second floor cantilevers out toward a view of the lake.

“We tried to make the bedrooms equal but opposite, so that as you age and don’t want to climb stairs, you’re not sent into Siberia,” Hughes said with a smile, adding that his parents have already moved into the downstairs suite.

Hughes described the Home’s twisting curved forms — think Jetsons lake house — as both a response to the hilly, wooded site and a meditation on the nature of retirement.

“Does the home represent reliquary or freedom?” he asked. “Here the allegory of aging is expressed through an ambiguous relationship between architecture and ground. Is the building rising from or sinking into the ground?”

Hughes and his wife and partner Selma Catovic-Hughes also won a Gulf State merit award for the Moreland residence, which earlier won the 2006-07 Faculty Design Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and a 2006 Design Award from the Colorado chapter of the American Institute of Architects.