Marlon Blackwell Architects

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, whose distinct and original voice has produced iconic and award-winning designs across typologies, scales and budgets. His criticallyresolute merging of the universal language of architecture and the particulars of place have resulted in a distinguished body of work found outside the centers of fashion. This ‘glocal’ approach is reflected in his education, graduating from Auburn University in 1980 and from Syracuse University in Florence in 1991. Marlon is the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas and the Spring 2024 John Portman Chair at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Despite working where architecture is unexpected and often unappreciated, his firm, Marlon Blackwell Architects has created beloved buildings deliberately focused to foster the public good, most notable in education, healthcare, and parks. Since its inception in 1992, the firm has earned over 180 domestic, national, and international design awards including the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.

Blackwell is the recipient of the 2020 AIA Gold Medal, the Institute’s highest honor recognizing those whose work has had an enduring impact on the theory and practice of architecture. He is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2023 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Science and a 2019 Resident Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Marlon was named the 2020 SEC Professor of The Year and as one of DesignIntelligence magazine’s “30 Most Admired Educators”. A monograph of his early work entitled, An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell was published in 2005 and a new monograph of his recent work titled, Radical Practice was published in 2022.

In his presentation, Marlon will discuss his architecture and design process through the lens of “radical practice.” The richness of the work, its methods, and its consequences suggest an open-endedness, at once generous and provocative, to the practice’s trajectory and interest in what a “radical practice” can be in the contemporary moment. A core principle at the heart of the practice, radical in its fundamental simplicity, is the assertion of the making of buildings and places as a constant, authentic focus…an architecture in the place, of the place and for the place for anywhere and for anyone with dignity, wonder and joy…