Marlon Blackwell
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Marlon Blackwell seeks to engage the concrete experiences of everyday life in the designs for his buildings. He sees “the vernacular as a familiar face, reflecting our values and our relationship with a place, its culture, and its environment.” Seeking to intensify this condition, his buildings often involve the playful confluence and unexpected intertwining of the natural and the man-made. In inhabiting his buildings, one can “rediscover” the natural context, experiencing it as if for the first time, realizing Cézanne’s statement, “One must see nature as no one has seen it before.” Blackwell engages the material cultural of his local context in northwest Arkansas, making moving works from the most modest means, including “trash.” His projects often involve extending the life of existing buildings through transformations of program in sensitive yet spatially assertive additions and renovations. This follows from his belief that we need “to reuse what we already have.” Grounded in the particularities of his context, Blackwell’s buildings are invariably transformative of our experience of that place—a fusion of space, material, light, and landscape into a construction of beauty.
