Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, USA Ford Fellow, is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as Distinguished Professor and Department Head in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.
Working outside the architectural mainstream, Blackwell will discuss his architecture and design process as being based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and building typologies and the contradictions of place; strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. Blackwell will demonstrate how ideas and actions 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, Marlon Blackwell Architects, he will demonstrate that a resilient architecture 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 provides 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.
