High Profile: Marlon Matthew Blackwell

FAYETTEVILLE -- A stuffed and mounted bear stares down from the mezzanine of Marlon Blackwell's architecture firm. Blackwell didn't shoot it, but he did wrestle one similar to it in high school. As Blackwell tells the story, at the moment the animal pinned him, it also threw up on him, having been given too much Orange Crush by its trainer.

"The bear," Blackwell says dryly, "represents the existential moment, the challenges we grapple with."

It's a good line, and there's truth in it, too. Blackwell, 59, has designed some of the most celebrated buildings in Northwest Arkansas during this century, winning national and international recognition in a field dominated by big-city practitioners. Earlier this year, he received the National Design Award in architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, a part of the Smithsonian Institution.

And he has done it following his namesake firm's motto, which is that good architecture can happen "anywhere, at any scale, at any budget."

Consider St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church in Springdale, whose members asked Blackwell to design them a church along Interstate 49. Rather than build a traditional place of worship, which the congregation couldn't afford anyway, he fulfilled their request to transform a metal shop building into a church. The result is a simple exterior with a few eye-catching touches and quietly beautiful interior, where light pours through a skylight and transom onto congregants and religious icons. To satisfy desires for a dome, a traditional feature of such churches, an old satellite dish was painted and hoisted onto the ceiling.

"Some people call us the MacGyvers of architecture," Blackwell says. "We like to see things get built. We don't fit the stereotype of the architect who doesn't care about budget."

The design won the award for civic and community buildings at the 2011 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain.

The idea of the "gentleman architect" designing for clients of his own class is mostly an anachronism, but in any case it never fit Blackwell. The son of a serviceman, Blackwell was born in Germany and lived with his family in Alabama, the Philippines and elsewhere. The one sport he was good at was wrestling as a 105-pounder, even if the bear wasn't impressed.

To put himself through Auburn University, he sold Bibles for five summers, an experience he says taught him the art of storytelling and exposed him to parts of Southern culture he'd never seen.

Blackwell chose architecture as his major without really knowing much about it. In his spare time he drew a comic strip for the school paper called Gladiola -- a gladiator who didn't really want to fight. He got his degree, after a somewhat slow start, and landed jobs in Boston and Lafayette, La. A decade later, he felt stymied -- and hungry.

"I never got to work for the firms I really wanted to work for," he says. "That's when I started doing work after hours -- first freelance, then it became more about pursuing ideas and developing my own ideas. I just wasn't 'associate' material. I knew the only way I was going to thrive was to have my own firm."

Blackwell wanted to teach architecture, too, for which he'd need a master's degree, and he knew he needed to spend time in Europe to better understand his field. He accomplished both with a program at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy.

"What I wanted to be was somebody who could be a liaison between the academy and the profession," he says. "I remembered as a student I was most impressed by those professors who practiced as well as taught."

HE FOUND A MENTOR

Blackwell came to teach at the University of Arkansas School of Architecture (now the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design) in 1992 partly based on an offer of commissions, however small. He found a mentor in Jones, the school's former dean and celebrated designer of Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs.

Blackwell established connections across the country, lecturing and serving as a visiting professor at many of the top architecture programs, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, Middlebury College in Vermont and the universities of Virginia, Michigan and Florida. In 1994 he co-founded UA's summer urban studio in Mexico City. He served as the school's architecture department head from 2009-2015 and is currently a distinguished professor.

Peter MacKeith, dean of the UA architecture school, first encountered Blackwell while recruiting graduate students to Washington University, where MacKeith previously taught.

"What I noticed very quickly was that some of the best students we were receiving were coming from the University of Arkansas, and their letters of recommendation were being written by Marlon Blackwell," MacKeith says. "Marlon's letters were never perfunctory. They were always thorough, supportive, knowledgeable and even to a certain extent constructively critical in advocating for these students."

After Blackwell guest-taught at Washington University, MacKeith tried to recruit him to join its faculty. To the school's surprise, he said no. "Obviously he made the right decision," MacKeith says.

Blackwell says some students probably think he's a tough teacher.

"I do like to push the students to get more out of them," he says. "I'm not interested in their love or in their liking me."

But, he adds, "I don't give up on anybody. Some people get it sooner than others, but if they're really committed, they'll get it and they'll will themselves the talent that they don't have."

About half of the dozen architects in his firm are former students.

SPACE OF HIS OWN

It can't escape current students' notice that they're studying in buildings that carry Blackwell's imprint. His firm was lead architect on the renovation of Vol Walker Hall, the school's longtime headquarters, along with the new 37,000-square-foot Steven L. Anderson Design Center, both completed in 2013 at about $33 million.

"It's kind of weird," he says. "You're going to work in something you did. It was a labor of love, and we just feel real fortunate and honored to have the opportunity."

Then again, Blackwell also designed the Fayetteville house in which he lives, and served as associate architect for the improvements to Fayetteville High School, which both his children attend. All three buildings have won awards from the American Institute of Architects.

Contrasts define Blackwell's life and work. He quotes William Carlos Williams and Keith Richards with equal enthusiasm. When people see one of his buildings, he wants them to sense its "strangeness" while also feeling it's exactly the right structure for that location. What Blackwell calls "placeness" is the first and foremost consideration of design. The good, bad and ugly all belong, whether it's the region's trees and rolling hills or its long chicken houses and metal office parks. Indeed, he appreciates the utility of those chicken houses more than all of your faux chateaus, Cape Cods and Tudor knockoffs put together.

Blackwell has a few "tropes" or design motifs that he's known for, including vividly geometric profiles and the stacking of boxlike building elements. To people whose experience with architecture is limited to buildings that look like other buildings, Blackwell undoubtedly achieves his goal of at least temporarily causing them some tension.

"I want my architecture to be about more than architecture" is a favorite saying.

Of course, it has to work for clients. The Rev. John Atchison, archpriest of St. Nicholas, says he thinks the exterior of that church -- stark except for a red cross and blue picture window -- "looks so beautiful" from the interstate. But inside is where it really shines.

"Behind the altar, he put in a frosted light source. When the sun shines on it, it looks like a pretty fog light that's shining. God being light, it's conducive to putting our minds on God."

80-FOOT 'TREEHOUSE'

Blackwell had won recognition for a couple of houses and office buildings before 2000, but the the building that brought him national attention was completed that year: the Keenan TowerHouse, an 80-foot-high "treehouse" in Fayetteville that has been featured in magazines, books and TV shows. Since then he has produced a stream of award-winning designs for commercial, residential and institutional clients.

Most come with a story. The porous appearance of a visitors pavilion for the Indianapolis Museum of Art was inspired by leaves eaten away by insects. The modularity of the clubhouse at Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville was suggested by clients who didn't want it to look like "another plantation home or hunting lodge," Blackwell says. "When you get clients like that, you listen." For the Montessori School in Fayetteville, Blackwell had to contend with strict environmental regulations due its location in a flood zone, a limited budget and urgent deadline.

For the Gentry (Ark.) Public Library, townspeople hired him to transform a dilapidated 100-year-old building. After first recommending that they tear it down and start over, Blackwell eventually came up with a design that won the 2009 National Library Design Award, the first Arkansas library to win the award. He's even happier about the fact that library membership increased tenfold.

Architects often walk a fine line in striving to conceptualize their vision for a project amid competing concerns from builders, engineers, the client and other parties.

"I'm fairly tenacious about things," Blackwell says. "I like to call it being persistent. It's just my nature."

WINNING TEAMWORK

Blackwell's wife and fellow architect, Meryati, says the term workaholic doesn't do her husband justice. "His one hobby is architecture," she says. After more than three days of vacation, "he is having withdrawal. He's a mess away from work. He doesn't ever want to retire."

The two met after a lecture early in Blackwell's academic career. "The thing that struck me was the potential," Meryati, a native of Malaysia, says. "He had so much passion. He didn't have any of this success."

The couple appreciate artful design in everything from their clothes and books and furnishings to their home, called the L-Stack House, which they designed to span a creek in a quiet, older neighborhood. During that process, they rented the house next door and watched the property, not wanting to interfere with the rising and falling of the water or crawfish that live in it.

Marlon Blackwell credits his wife for much of his firm's success. "I think I kind of help to push him," she says.

Meryati says her husband is not motivated much by money. The firm regularly does discounted and pro bono work for nonprofits such as the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center in Fayetteville.

Their relationship is, both agree, a sometimes contentious partnership.

"We're very opinionated and willful people, and we openly argue sometimes," Marlon says. "We agree on about 90 percent of everything."

The couple have two children: Zain, 17, and Iman, 15, who's working at the firm as a receptionist this summer. Asked if she plans to become an architect, she shakes her head no and says: "Too much arguing."

Blackwell shows no signs of slowing down; if anything, he appears to be ramping up for bigger work.

His firm is working on a major project for Shelby Farms Park, a 4,500-acre green space in Memphis that includes a visitor center, event center, pavilion, boat kiosks and more. It's also competing for a large multifamily residential development in Washington. Models of several houses intended for prominent Arkansans dot his office. Another depicts The Lumiere, a three-story movie theater he's designing on Dickson Street.

"We're just getting rolling," Blackwell says. "It's a good time. I feel like I can see better. I think I'm feeling a little bit more free."

Still, architecture is a tough business, filled with competition and disappointment. The vast majority of work Blackwell seeks goes to someone else.

So the bear still gets Marlon Blackwell. But sometimes, he gets the bear.

High Profile on 07/10/2016