An Architecture for Everyone
Marlon Blackwell: Thank you! Great to be here, Michelle.
MP: For the sake of brevity and to give you more time to talk, I did not mention many other awards that you and your firm have received just over the past ten years. But I did mention the AIA Gold Medal – your professional organization’s highest honor. You were awarded the Gold Medal in 2020 and finally received it in person at the 2022 national conference. Fay Jones, the late architect and U of A professor, also was a gold medal recipient. Describe what that honor means to you and its significance to the university.
MB: First of all, it’s quite humbling. You know, it’s not something that you think about and then you’re nominated, and then ultimately you’re shortlisted, and then it actually happens. And it’s just, you know, it’s been kind of hard to fathom. I think I still haven’t processed at all – even over the last two years that I’ve been actually celebrating it. So, but it’s really fantastic to follow in the footsteps of Fay, who was a good friend and mentor. I think, for me, it confirms the validity of what we’ve been trying to do here for the last 30 years, which is to demonstrate that architecture…the highest aspirations can happen anywhere at any scale at any budget and for anyone – that architecture is for everyone not just for a few. What it means to me is that folks are looking at the middle again. Usually, this level of recognition happens from folks from the East Coast to the West Coast or maybe Chicago or something like that. In fact, there are only three Gold Medal winners from the Midwest and the South over the 100 plus years that the AIA has been awarding a Gold Medal, so it’s quite significant. And it’s quite an honor because the way I see it is, in some form, helps put a spotlight on all of us working in the Midwest and South and the good work that’s being done, and it allows me to be even more of an advocate for all of my colleagues, as well as other practitioners that are fighting the good fight every day. We are together in the cause of architecture and an architecture of dignity and joy, and then that can be celebrated. And, in fact, it brings the East Coast and West Coast together, and basically the country is one around design. It doesn’t just happen over there or over there – it happens here as well, and I think that’s what it means to me. So, it’s a win for everyone.
MP: So, one thing architecture does and can do well is reflect its region – the people, the environment, and the culture. You’ve practiced in Northwest Arkansas now for 30 years. How would you say the vernacular, the landscape, and the culture of this place has inspired your architecture?
MB: Well, it’s certainly a critical component of it. What we’re trying to do is develop a really productive tension between the local and the regional and the more global and the universal. So, it isn’t just enough to know about the vernacular or the culture of a place – and I think that’s very important – but you also have to know the language of your own discipline, which is the language of architecture and how to employ that in, I think, intelligent and responsive, reflective ways in the place that you live. So you can make an architecture that is essentially in its place, of the place and for the place…but at times will feel slightly out of place, and that’s okay. So, I can’t say that every project we do is…you could draw a direct line to something in the vernacular in the culture. The sensibility, I think, of our work does come from being here for 30 years and being able to get below the surface of things and really discover the underbelly of a place that thinks it really, you know, provides a sort of visceral and charged dynamic of day-to-day life and what it’s like to be in Northwest Arkansas, the Ozarks, or the Delta even. I love this sort of pragmatism of the culture. I love the resourcefulness and frugality at some level – those traditions and the independence of that. I’ve told folks if you want to understand the Ozarks, read Emerson’s Self-Reliance. It’s a great read – 45-minute read – that will help you understand the sort of resiliency of the folks here. And so that is, in many ways, what we’re asked to do, is to make architecture that is resilient and is common-sensical at one level, but not to be afraid to be bold and innovative. And, you know, that’s where we use abstractions. So, we’re looking at the familiar in our everyday here, but we’re also using abstracture to kind of connect it to a larger discourse on architecture that moves us beyond just the region. And we do that, again, through abstraction – through a way of being reductive and really get into the essential core of the work and the essential core values of the work. So I think it’s in there – it’s like DNA, right? You may not always see it, but you can certainly feel it and that’s really, I think, important to us.
MP: So, you mentioned how important it is for architecture to be – and design – to be accessible for all, that design is for anyone anywhere on any budget. Tell me a little more about how that is infused in your approach to architecture.
MB: We are not afraid to improvise. We find ways to work directly with the makers in our region: the metalworkers, the stonemasons, the woodworkers. So, you know, we get involved with them very early. We try to learn from them if we have an idea, try to share that idea, help them help us figure out how to execute it in the most resourceful way and a way that can be done. Right? So, it has to be able to be done. It can’t be so technologically complex that, you know, you have to import work to do it. We try to do what folks can do here. We think about…just the fundamentals of architecture: scale, proportion. They don’t cost anything, you know? But those are the things that, you know, we need to do and do well. The Greeks and the Romans understood that – that proportion and scale have a way of making architecture graceful and harmonious and feeling right…you know, feeling like there’s a good relationship between the human body and the space that the body is in. We like to joke around that we’re the masters of the dumb box, but, you know, we can do amazing things with just boxes. And, you know, we learn from that, from barns and from chicken sheds and all kinds of whatever we can find around…you know, even semi-truck containers. You know, they’re sources of inspiration. So, we’re very inclusive in the way we approach our work, which I think in turn helps people feel more included. We try to listen to their stories, not just to the laundry list of what they need – that’s important – but I’m very interested in their stories. You know, why are they here? Why people decided to stay or even to come, right? I think it’s really important to understand their aspirations. They tend to be mostly optimistic and hopeful. We like to try to channel that into the work, and I think people feel that. That maybe that’s where some of the joy comes from. But it also is taking programs like, for example, the free health clinic that we did, that, you know, was really for an underserved community, and you walked into the space previously and it felt that way too. It was really a kind of soulless, unhappy place. We redid this small clinic for about $65 a square foot and created plenty of natural light, nice materials that we will repurpose that were leftovers, but we rearranged it in a proper way. And it’s interesting that people feel important. They feel like they’ve been respected. Even if they’ve come from a variety of, you know, socioeconomic backgrounds, and I think that has a real impact. So, the idea is to raise our experience of the everyday – not just when I go to a courthouse or when I go to church, but the everyday as something that is deserving to be architecture. And I think that’s where we really infuse that. And then sometimes we have to operate off the cuff. And, you know, it’s the kind of well-known story of the Saint Nicholas Orthodox Christian Church, where they could not afford a dome that was required in their sanctuary, and our contractor couldn’t, wasn’t comfortable building one. So, we literally, you know, traded beer for a satellite dish from a metal worker out in… down near Chester and converted that into a dome, you know? So, I mean, that kind of resourcefulness and willingness to repurpose something to achieve what was…turned out to be the least expensive building ever in the country to win a national AIA Honor Award. That’s the kind of thinking that we have adopted, and part of that comes from being here and seeing folks who improvise, you know, basically for a living sometimes. So, yeah, it’s just part of who we’ve become.
MP: So, you recently published your second monograph, called “Radical Practice,” and, in there, a host of practitioners wrote essays about your body of design work. What does this book reveal about you and how you work as a designer?
MB: Yeah. The work is in this is highly curated… we didn’t show everything we’ve ever done; we wanted to curate primarily public work. There’s no private houses in it. It’s all work that deals with the public realm and institutions – schools, healthcare, recreation, like the Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, the Gentry Public Library, things of that nature. Blessings golf clubhouse is another one. So, we felt that it was important to talk about roots. “Radical,” really, is about roots. And we try – always try – to get to the roots of things, to the origins of things, to the essence – the essential aspects of things. So, we wanted to demonstrate that in the work and really reveal our connection to place, because that’s the source of abstraction for us – is our place and how we connect to it. And, so, having a variety of folks write about it in short essays… these aren’t just architects, they’re clients like Clayton Marsh, the director of the Thaden School that we’ve just completed. There are artists that we’ve worked with, landscape architects, the city planner of Chicago, Maurice Cox. All of these folks have weighed in, who are somewhat familiar with the work and gave their own perspective. We thought that was important. We thought it was also important to take the work of Tim Hursley, who I think is a such a treasure of a photographer from Little Rock, who we’ve been working with for years. He’s an architectural photographer – world-renowned in that field – but also does his own essays, his own work. And he has been doing an incredible documentation of these elegiac conditions in the Ozarks and the Delta that are at once melancholy and somewhat hopeful as well – small towns, crossroads communities and their architecture and places, and how time and neglect — and the sort of economic forces – have had an effect. But, at the same time, a kind of open question, as beautiful ruins that can become something else, you know, and they have a grace and beauty to them. And so, we featured those in the book too, because they’re part of our place. We featured quotes. If the images are more about the local, the quotes are more universal. I think one thing it reveals is the importance of travel. I try to communicate that to students and my colleagues as well, that travel really opens up your capacity to be empathetic with the world and with other folks, with other cultures, and that mixing in those worlds can really inform your own work. And so many of my travel photos were mixed in with photos of place that Timothy was doing, so that also kind of reveals the sources of inspiration. The idea is that, through abstraction, we keep things open and in question, as opposed to trying to, you know, be stylistic and close the loop. We’re trying to keep that discourse, that conversation that we’re having with place – that we’re having with the discipline of architecture somewhat open. And I think that’s what the book is really about. And we decided, you know, we want to make it not look like a textbook. It’s one of the good things that came out of the pandemic. You know, we had the whole team right here in Fayetteville, so we could get together, even in spite of the pandemic, and work through the design issues that go along with making and crafting a book. And I think that’s what I’d like to say, we didn’t just make a book, we crafted one.
MP: So, as a professor, you teach students about the powerful role that architecture and design can have in peoples’ lives and in their communities. Can you tell us how you’ve modeled that service aspect by the projects you’ve taken on professionally?
MB: If you say everything deserves to be architecture, you have to be very careful ’cause right now, you know, we’re getting to do embassies — you know, we’re just doing one in Africa, a consulate in South Africa. We’re fixing to start work in South America. And those are very honorific and a great way to demonstrate American values around transparency and democracy and that sort of thing. We’re working on the new orthopedic sports medicine, you know, facility for the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences here in Springdale. I mean, just great programs. But, at the same time, we are working with a series of pavilions – working with Civitas at the Jones Center – a series of pavilions that resonate with the Marshallese community and the Latino community. We’re working in Hermann Park in Houston literally doing a restroom pavilion, along with some shade pavilions and a carousel. You know, little things that help, you know, bring delight and joy. We’re working in Clarksdale, Mississippi right now on a Yaupon Holly — a Yaupon tea — processing plant that, you know, this holly plant is the only caffeinated plant in America — been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years. And its market was killed in colonial times — by the English, I might add — for 300 years. It’s now come back. They figured out how to domesticate the plant in the South and are making tea and skin products from it. So, we’re involved and we’re using a workforce grant from Mississippi with very little money in a T-shirt factory — an old metal building — but we’re doing a series of interventions for that to make this factory come alive and bring jobs to Clarksdale, Mississippi and help revitalize that community. We’re working in Bismarck, Arkansas — unincorporated town of 2,500 — has no public space, has no — really — no grocery store, has no library, any of those things. So, we’re working on a small library there, so they have public space. They have the library — very small — 2,500 square feet. But these things are important to us, because we know they make a huge difference in the community. We saw that happen with Gentry Public Library and the impact it’s been able to make in that community. When we started with that…300 library card holders, they were about 2,500 population at the time. When the project finished, they were up to about 2,300 library card holders, and they’ve far exceeded now that as they’ve grown. Those are important projects — that’s what architecture could do. It may not be 100% transformative, but it strengthens institutions, and it does strengthen communities, if it’s done well. It isn’t just enough to have a library in a metal building off on the edge of town — it’s something that should strengthen, you know, the life of the city in the downtown. And so we’re very interested in those sorts of projects. We’re not going to let this go, even though we’re, you know, having opportunity to work at another scale and complexity. And free health — working on the free health clinic was important. We helped them start a project pro bono. We do pro bono projects each year. We also follow up with projects anyway that we can help, like the Saint Nicholas Church or, you know, we’re constantly finding ways to contribute either time, or, you know, money — whatever we could do to help them as they grow. And, I mean, the other aspect of what we’re doing is, you know, Ati and I…with the scholarship program that we’re starting at the university to give more opportunity — especially more economic opportunity — to folks that are underserved and may not have the financial capacity. Neither Ati or I had that opportunity when we were growing up as well — we can relate to that. So, we’d like the scholarship organized for the Delta to give students opportunities who, you know, have the desire to go into architecture, design…to come here and not have to worry so much about the financial burden that college could be. So, and just worry about, you know, being who you really want to be and having economic opportunities wherever you may decide to go. You might want to go to New York; you might want to stay here in Arkansas. You know, that’s the goal.
MP: Marlon Blackwell, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure.
MB: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure just to share some of this with y’all. Appreciate it – thank you.
