Marlon Blackwell of Marlon Blackwell Architects will present his work in a public lecture to be followed by a conversation with Walter Chatham.

Marlon Blackwell will discuss recent projects, such as the Steven L. Anderson Design Center, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and the St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church, Springdale, Arkansas. Both of these works expand the range and scale of his design philosophy, which is based, as he describes it, on “strategies that draw upon vernacular and the contradictions of place.”

Blackwell established his Fayetteville practice in 1990. His early residential commissions—including the Moore HoneyHouse, Cashiers, North Carolina, and the Keenan TowerHouse, Fayetteville—first garnered attention for their expressive structures and reinterpretation of vernacular form. This approach remains evident in recent projects including the Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as well as the Montessori Elementary School, the L-Stack House, and the Gentry Public Library, all in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Marlon Blackwell is a distinguished professor and department head of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. Blackwell wrote his first monograph, An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell, in 2005.

Blackwell is the recipient of the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and AIA National Honor Awards in 2012 and 2013. Marlon Blackwell Architects was also recognized as Firm of the Year by Residential Architect Magazine in 2011.

Moderated by Walter Chatham, who serves on The Architectural League’s board of directors and is principal of Walter Chatham Architect.

This lecture is co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

Support

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.