Marlon Blackwell, FAIA
Distinguished Professor & Department Head
School of Architecture,
University of Arkansas
Lecture Title: the Transmutations of Place
Monday, August 29, 2011
5:30 P.M. - Lawrence J. Plym Auditorium
Temple Hoyne Buell Hall
Max Abramovitz Endowed lecture
“For Blackwell, buildings are generators of and
frames for experience.
Profound and touching architectural experiences arise from the tectonic
realities of construction, truthful materiality, and the existential
charge of the imagery, not from fictitious pictorial fabrications.”
- Juhani Pallasmaa
Marlon Blackwell, FAIA practices
architecture in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as Distinguished
Professor and Department Head in the School of Architecture at the
University of Arkansas. Working outside the architectural mainstream,
his architecture is based in design strategies that celebrate
vernaculars, that draw upon them, and that seek to transgress
conventional boundaries for architecture. Work produced in his
professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architect, has received
national and international recognition, numerous AIA design awards and
significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines
including Architectural Record (with the honor of having the Keenan
TowerHouse featured on the cover of the February 2001 issue), Architect,
Arquine, A+U, Detail, Dwell, Metropolitan Home, Contract, Residential
Architect, the Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary Architecture (2004 & 2008)
and Architectural Review (2002 ar + d prize winner for the Moore
HoneyHouse and a 2010 Housing Citation for the PorchDog House).
The significance of his contributions to design is evidenced by the
publication of a monograph of his work entitled
“An Architecture of the Ozarks:
The Works of Marlon Blackwell” published by Princeton Architectural
Press in 2005. Marlon was selected by
The International Design Magazine,
in 2006, as one of the ID Forty: Undersung Heroes and as an “Emerging Voice” in 1998 by the
Architectural League of New York.
At the University of Arkansas he has co-taught design studios with Peter
Eisenman (1997 & 1998), Christopher Risher (2000) and Julie Snow (2003).
He has been a visiting professor teaching graduate design at MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in Spring 2001 and 2002.
Most recently, he was the 2011 Thomas Jefferson Visiting
Professor at the University of Virginia. He has served as the Elliel
Saarinen Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (Fall 2009),
the Ivan Smith Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida
(Spring 2009), the Paul Rudolph Visiting Professor at Auburn University
(Spring 2008), and the Cameron Visiting Professor at Middlebury College
(Fall 2007). In the Spring of 2003, he was the Ruth and Norman Moore
Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and has also
been a visiting professor at Syracuse University (1991-92).
In 1994, he co-founded the University of Arkansas
Mexico Summer Urban Studio, and has coordinated and taught in the
program at the Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City since 1996.
He received his undergraduate degree from Auburn University in 1980 and
a M. Arch II degree from Syracuse University in Florence in 1991.
Marlon
Blackwell, FAIA