Marlon Blackwell Talk to Explore 'Figures and Types'

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 3, 2017) — The University of Kentucky College of Design will welcome architect Marlon Blackwell, whose firm won the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, to campus for a talk as part of their Spring 2017 Lecture Series. Blackwell will give his presentation titled "Figures and Types," at 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 6, in Memorial Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Marlon Blackwell is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design at the University of Arkansas. Working outside the architectural mainstream, his architecture is based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars, typologies and the contradictions of place: strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. His design work has received recognition with numerous national and international design awards and significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines.

The significance of Blackwell’s contributions to design is evidenced by being named a 2014 United States Artists Ford Fellow and his selection for the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A monograph of his early work titled “An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell” was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005. Blackwell was selected by The International Design Magazine in 2006 as one of the "ID Forty: Undersung Heroes" and as an “Emerging Voice” in 1998 by the Architectural League of New York.

In addition to the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, the office of Marlon Blackwell Architects was recognized as the Firm of the Year by Residential Architect magazine in 2011. In 2015, the firm was selected as part the "Achitect 50," ranking seven in design and 36 overall in the national survey of architecture firms. Other recent honors include an American Architecture Award (with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects) for the renovation of Vol Walker Hall and the new addition, the Steven L. Anderson Design Center, at University of Arkansas.