Speaker

Marlon Blackwell

FAIA

Founder and Principal, Marlon Blackwell Architects

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas. Blackwell is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021), a 2019 Resident Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a 2014 United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award recipient in Architecture. In 2020, Marlon was honored with the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The Gold Medal is the AIA’s highest annual honor, recognizing individuals whose work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. Work produced in his professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architects (MBA), has received significant recognition with the firm winning over 180 design awards. A monograph of Marlon’s early work, “An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell”, was published in 2005 and a new monograph, titled “Radical Practice,” was released in 2022.

Marlon Blackwell will discuss his architecture and design process and will introduce ‘Radical Practice: The Work of Marlon Blackwell Architects’ a new monograph released in June 2022 by Princeton Architectural Press. The iconic and award-winning designs span across typologies, scales, and budgets by merging the universal language of architecture and the particulars of place. The lecture discusses the richness of the work, its methods, and its consequences - suggesting an open-endedness, at once generous and provocative, to the practice’s trajectory and interest in what a “radical practice” can be. A core principle at the heart of the practice, radical in its fundamental simplicity, is how the making of buildings and places is a constant, authentic focus.